Linda S. Heard on the hypocrisy of US protestations over Iraq's treatment of POWs (Counterpunch, 3/26/03):
There was no talk about the Geneva Conventions when contingents of Arabs and Moslems were flown to Guantanamo Bay, shackled, handcuffed, gagged, hooded and chained to their aircraft seats only to be thrown into chicken coops open to the elements.
There was no mention of any conventions when John Walker Lindt was interviewed while he lay on a stretcher in Afghanistan. Oh, yes. These were 'detainees'.
They are the disappeared whose lives were not dignified with the title 'prisoner of war', except for Lindt, of course, who got special treatment due to his American passport. The others were left to rot without contact with their families and no recourse to legal representation.
Donald Rumsfeld who is the very person, who once said that he doubted that most of them would ever be released, is now bleating in the most hypocritical fashion about the Geneva Conventions. . . .
And has the White House or the Pentagon ever said a world about Israel's breaches of the Geneva Conventions? Even as 10 per cent of Jenin was demolished, Palestinian refugees used as human shields and ambulances prevented from reaching the sick and injured, the Bush administration stayed silent.