Ends and means.(Insider Report)

Last March, before the fall of Saddam Hussein's despotic regime, Iraqi military officials paraded five captured U.S. soldiers in front of television cameras. This indignity was immediately denounced by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who correctly observed that "it is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them."

Such a display is indeed prohibited by Article 13 of the convention. But those provisions would also apply to captured Taliban fighters held by the U.S. in Cuba, some of whom were photographed kneeling on the ground, with their hands behind their back, wearing hoods or blacked-out goggles.

U.S. officials also properly condemned Iraqi television and the Arab Al-Jazeera network for displaying gruesome images of American servicemen killed in battle. But the Bush administration broadcast images of the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam's loathsome sons and henchmen, killed by U.S. forces after an intense firefight in Mosul.

According to a July 31st AP report, Secretary of State Colin Powell authorized the payment of a $30 million bounty to the informant who led U.S. forces to the Hussein brothers' hideout. This gesture puts in an odd light U.S. complaints about the more modest rewards--$300 to $5,000--placed on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Iraq by guerrilla leaders.

The July 28th Washington Post described another ...