From this AP article:

En route to Iraq for a surprise visit Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters traveling with him that administration lawyers oppose releasing the photos on grounds that would violate a Geneva Convention stricture against presenting images of prisoners that could be construed as degrading.

Seems to me like it'd be more important to not actually do degrading things to prisoners in the first place. ('Cause, y'know, that violates the Geneva Conventions too.)

Comments

[tizzie]

That there Geneva corn-vention is something Rummy pulls out whenever it suits his purposes, but the rest of the time it just ain't relevant.

Mudderfuggingbasturd.

[VG]

I haven't heard anybody citing Geneva Convention Guidelines against the actions of Al Quaeda. Certainly, there must be rules against showing the beheading of a Jewish American prisoner in a live internet feed.

As Jon Stuart said last night on The Daily Show in response to the beheading, no matter how crazy or badly you might think the US behaving, we just can't out CRAZY al quaeda.

[Vidiot]

A few points:

--Absolutely no one is condoning the beheading.

--What does the victim's religion have to do with it? (I realize that he may have been a more enticing target for the insurgents because of his religion, as was Daniel Pearl. But in Berg's case, I'm inclined to believe that the insurgents were primarily targeting Americans rather than Jews. The fact that Berg was Jewish was probably just a twisted sort of "bonus" for his kidnappers.)

--Furthermore...what do the Geneva conventions have to do with this? These terrorists' actions were reprehensible and evil, but they certainly aren't governed by the Geneva conventions. My post was reacting to Rumsfeld's disingenuity (is that a word? "Disingenuousness", perhaps?) in standing by the Geneva conventions to fulfill a political end while apparently not addressing the much more flagrant violations of those conventions by troops he's responsible for.

(And this is nitpicking here, but it wasn't live. It was a videotape that was uploaded to the Web.)

[krimur]

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