Washington ? It is not surprising that a Middle Eastern television station would air film of three frightened, haggard Italian hostages provided by their captors. What is surprising is that one, the Qatar-based satellite station al-Jazeera, passed up the chance to air the gory details of the assassination on camera of a fourth Italian captive.

Al-Jazeera is noted for showing some of the most gruesome scenes in television history to illustrate reports on American or Israeli military action. But since a videotape of the shooting of Fabrizio Quattrochi came into its possession on April 14, the network has withheld it on the grounds of taste.

Nor would al-Jazeera give a copy of the tape to the Italian officials who were permitted to watch it. The tape reportedly shows two figures with their backs to the camera standing behind Quattrochi. One shoots the Italian after he shouts, “I’ll show you how an Italian dies,” and attempts to tear off his hood.

The sudden squeamishness of al-Jazeera means that the world does not get a chance to see a clear depiction of the Italian’s bravery and defiance, or the appalling cruelty and cowardice of his Arab abductors, whose voices are clearly heard on the tape.

Politics may have played as large a role as taste at a network that has made no pretense of objectivity in reporting on the occupation of Iraq. This was an atrocity staged for television, and al-Jazeera may have assumed that it would give politically inspired hostage-taking a bad name.

The ghouls who hold the three men promise to free them if Italy withdraws its troops from Iraq. But Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi says he will not give in to blackmail and so far, Italy’s opposition parties, the public and media are with him.

The power of images to bolster or undermine public support in wartime has been widely noted at least since Vietnam. It is an increasingly important factor as confusion grows about U.S. intentions on returning sovereignty to Iraqis and on mounting sieges in Fallujah and Najaf.

Film and photographs of the corpses of four American security guards being mutilated by laughing Iraqi mobs in Fallujah helped trigger the siege there and turn that town into a decisive battle for U.S. forces. The picture of charred bodies dangling from a Fallujah bridge may end up being worth 1,000 lives.

Other images create even more sweeping impressions as they are deconstructed and then reassembled into concepts drawn from the history and existing knowledge of each observer. “You hear people talking about the siege of Fallujah as an Iraqi Stalingrad,” an Italian official says disapprovingly. “It is ridiculous. But it is happening.”

The Fallujah atrocity has been chased from television screens and front pages in France and Italy by pictures of Iraqi youths brandishing grenade launchers beside burning U.S. oil tankers outside Baghdad. The Iraqi gunmen are shown in iconic poses associated by the impressionable with Europe’s history of revolution and resistance, fancied and real.

In many mainstream European publications, they are being portrayed not as the Baathist killers or jihadist fanatics described at U.S. military briefings in Baghdad and Washington, but as authentic revolutionaries inspired by a new form of Arab nationalism being born in Iraq. I don’t think that is true. But I fear it will increasingly be accepted abroad if Washington’s intentions remain cloaked in confusion.

Look closely at that film of the March 31 killings in Fallujah and you will see “a turning point in the world’s perception of the conflict in Iraq,” Charles Clover, a war correspondent for The Financial Times, wrote in that respected British newspaper’s Saturday edition.

For him the tape captured “a crowd of people, including boys and old men, cheering from the sidelines as what appeared to be ordinary citizens stepped forward to hack at the corpses with knives, smash them with metal poles, loop them with rope and parade what was left through the streets.” The butchery was not the work “of a small coterie of Baath Party loyalists and foreign Islamic radicals with no popular support,” but of the town itself, Clover wrote in an interpretive article that is full of detail.

I quote him at length not to suggest that he has unlocked the essential truth about Iraq — that is a tall order for anyone — but to suggest how differently the same images of an event can be seen, and explained. U.S. officials cannot afford to take for granted that their actions or intentions will always be able or allowed to speak for themselves.

— Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.