Re: “Kill Team” Photos release
First off, like I mentioned, later reincarnations of the Klan ‘disavowed’ violence and tended to claim that violence was committed by rogue elements and so on. To give an example closer to home, there are many ‘political parties’ in both India and Pakistan who have sizable memberships and smaller ‘rogue’ elements. Like the latter day Klan, a party like MQM or JI or (to throw you a bone) HuT, maybe even RSS (dont know enough about them to be sure) would both disavow violence, and claim that the violence that does happen is the work of bad apples. And if you take a percentage of ‘bad apples’ to their total memberships, the percentage of people who actually commit violence would definitely be below 1%. Yet the way these parties are perceived by non-partisans is not helped by that number.
The purpose however is not to generalize, but to point out the tired nature of this defense. Every time this happens, going back to Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo, these douchebags, the argument that is trotted out is these are bad apples. It is getting old, it doesnt help the people killed that the killers and torturers were called bad apples, jailed for some months, and discharged. It is simply PR, and as PR it is completely ineffective.
They do nevertheless have a reputation for violence, even if its not central.