Quote from welo:
Yes, I do know, and I also know this:
1) I never cried a GC foul then or now; my President did. The fact is, there are no provisions in the GC as to what constitutes the acceptable public display of dead war criminals. There just aren't any.
I don't recall the President or anyone else calling a GC foul over the photos of dead Americans and Brits that showed on some Arab TV stations and the internet. They did call GC fouls on other events. As for "acceptable public display of dead war criminals," as has been pointed out by the DOD and others, there is plenty of precedent for showing the pictures of dead dictators and other leading officials to the populations they used to abuse - as in Italy, Rumania, and Germany, among others.
As Clifford May pointed out today, imagine what people would be saying, in the Arab world and in certain dank dark corners of the Internet if the US refused to release pictures.
2) By the time you shoot someone through the face, blitz the media with their photos and try to compare them from memory or files, the pictures still prove nothing. I know I personally didn't recognize either of those guys even though I've seen all the same file tapes as everyone else.
Give 'em time. The first rush of denial is already abating, and most even in the skeptical Arab world are already accepting the basic reality. Futher documentation, testimony, and exhibition have already followed, and there will be more, probably until long after no one even feels like bringing the subject up anymore.
3) The US neglecting to use a third-party source of forensic identification right off the bat raises more questions than it answers in the minds of many. I have access to fairly extensive international cross-section of people, and I must admit they have a point when saying they find it damned convenient that these two guys should show up dead right when the US and Britain desparately need something to justify why we went in there (e.g. still no WMD).
As for third-party ID, there has already been some - for instance by the Hussein family's plastic surgeon - and there will be more.
As for the other point, anything positive that happens prior to the release of the WMD survey team's report will be interpreted in just the same paranoid manner by just the same people. Is there any point over the last couple of months at which those same people wouldn't have felt justified in saying the exact same thing over the same news? It's part of the typical syndrome of "naive cynicism," the desperation both not to be fooled and not to have one's accustomed worldview shaken.
This syndrome was long ago identified by Marx as typical of a certain petit-bourgeois insecurity, as Euroblogger Nelson Ascher recently explained while discussing the BBC's difficulties: "most intellectuals, belonging as they do to the petit bourgeoisie, are unsure of their place in society and, thus, cannot rely on any of their own instincts except that of distrusting, in principle, anyone else, especially people who are in a position of power and close enough at hand." On this note, I would estimate that approximately 50% of all posts to the chit-chat area of ET embody precisely this syndrome.
No matter what the team reports, it will be found lacking by many of those same people. If it's too good for the Administration, some will claim that whatever is there was fabricated. No matter what it contains, people will find some statement on such and such a date that will prove to them that the Administration "lied" or that the war wasn't necessary or whatever theme they happen to be pushing that day.
