Atrocity Pay Back

The Australian has an article titled Al-Qaeda claims kill as payback and goes on to say;

AN American engineer was killed in a drive-by shooting and another US national was believed kidnapped at the weekend in Saudi Arabia in apparent retaliation for US atrocities at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

My dictionary says; Atrocious: adj Extremely, or shockingly wicked or cruel, heinous. Atrocity: n The quality of being attrocious. I’d always used the word Atrocity in connection with events like the Holocaust, the WTC fly-ins, beheading people on video, Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up woman and kids or the IRA blowing up Mountbatten. I must admit that I never though to connect it to sleep deprivation and humiliation interrogation tactics. English is a living language and useage does change but I think it’s been kidnapped by journalists in a game of rising superlatives where the rules only apply to one side.