Bit of a difference between the photos of a common soldier and the photos of the leadership. Even the Italians took pics of Mussolini hanging like a side of beef.
There's this urge to show the old regime is no more, I guess. Showing a common soldier doesn't relate on that level at all. Are they proving they can manage to kill a few US grunts in combat?
But none of this stuff is ever going to stop, leader or soldier. Welcome to the information age.
Waiting them out? Maybe... but with all the tunnels and secret hideaways we've already found and seen on TV, I can also understand a bit of relutance to wait. What would everyone be saying if we surrounde the place for a week and then went in and found out there's a 2 mile tunnel under the place that gave them a clean getaway with "Suckers!" spray painted on the tunnel entrance? The press would love that one, wouldn't they. Always easy to second guess.
I'd rather have seen them taken alive but I dang sure would rather see them dead than escaped.
Of course, alive they present another problem. After you have drained them of all intelligence, how do you kill them?
Because death is most certainly what they deserved. I can imagine the outcry if we had taken them, drained them and hung them.