Torture Gets a News Icon

When I was but a wee tyke, or, as I was called at the time, "pendejo", the TV station that my mom worked for had this guy as the news anchor:

... think of him as the PR'ican Walter Cronkite.

Around that time (early 80s), the TV station hired some consultant to sell them the slides and the technology to go along with them so that as they were reporting, say, a bombing in Albania, or Gaza, or Tunisia, or a gas explosion in Ponce, they would have a ready non-contextual icon to put over the shoulder of the anchor related to something going "boom".

I was reminded of that multipurpose iconography when tonight on the PBS NewsHour this was the image shown over the shoulder of Jim Lehrer's (as always, dead, soulless) eyes: