War Handwavium

Over on Glenn Greenwald’s blog, Daphne Eviatar points out an interesting bit of history: The reason we have the Geneva Convention of 1949 is because after WW2, the US and General Eisenhower insisted on distributing huge volumes of photos to the media showing the attrocities that happened during the war: the death camps, emaciated prisoners, corpses. These photos were so repugnant that nations around the world created a set of laws that described universal humanitarian norms, the Geneva Convention of 1949.

This is the Geneva Convention that gives us the rules on how to treat prisoners of war, rules the United States has recently broken in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, and at various black sites around the world.

And there are photos of Americans violating the Geneva Convention that the US government is trying to supress. These very photos could reinforce with the American public and the world why the Geneva Convention is so important, because they would show what it really looks like when those laws are violated.

We could release these photos and remind the world why the Geneva Convention, why the treatment of human prisoners, is so important. Or we could sit on the photos and reinforce the notion that we are above the law.