Let’s just hope that the justice meted out in Baghdad to those who violated the Geneva Convention governing the treatment of prisoners is clear, public, and unequivocal. (And, yes, the Geneva Convention does apply to Iraqi prisoners, even if not all of the conventional elements [e.g., the rights to have cutlery, a helmet, musical instruments, etc.] apply to al Qaeda members in Guantanamo Bay, who are nonetheless governed by the rules derived from natural law.) The brutal criminality (and, again, yes, not as bad as the mass executions and bodily tortures of Saddam Hussein, which some have disgraced themselves by proposing as the bar against which to judge behavior), the simple sadism, and the petty humiliations recorded in the photos that continue to emerge are disgusting. The architects of those policies and those who carried them out (despite the knowledge that they were illegal and that as soldiers they were obligated to refuse to obey illegal orders and to report them to higher officers) should be severely punished. Their behavior was not only immoral, but has severely damaged the already slim prospects for a decent system of limited, representative government in Iraq.
