Donald Rumsfeld is now indicating that the Pentagon may not release the photos and video Congress saw yesterday because lawyers inform him it may violate rights of prisoners under the Genva Conventions.
An interesting article in Slate dated March 2003 looks into this:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2080616/
The article was written in the early days of the war when Iraq had captured 5 Americans: Rumsfeld is a bit two-faced on the Geneva Conventions. One year ago, Byers criticized Rumsfeld in the pages of the Guardian for the U.S. treatment of the hundreds of Afghan prisoners currently held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Guantanamo prisoners have had their beards forcibly shaven off, a violation of their human dignity under the 1966 international covenant on civil and political rights. And they have been photographed by the press in shackles and with hoods over their heads. Subsequently, the United States limited media access to prisoners citing the "insults and public curiosity" passage from the Geneva Conventions. But at the same time, Rumsfeld maintains the prisoners don't have any rights under the Geneva Conventions because they are "unlawful combatants."
Byers notes that the "unlawful combatants" category is one of Rumsfeld's invention and not found in any international treaty. Under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention, military tribunals--not Donald Rumsfeld--should determine which prisoners should be prosecuted as criminal suspects and which should be accorded prisoner of war status. "The record shows that those who negotiated the convention were intent on making it impossible for the determination to be made by any single person," Byers writes.
The important passage is earlier:
The Geneva Conventions must be understood as a human rights treaty, say Byers, created to protect individuals and not the state that signed it.
Indeed.