Disproportionate Coverage of Geneva Violations
The Belmont Club suggests a differentation in treatment of freedom fighters:
No of course not. As currently interpreted the Geneva Conventions only apply to individuals bent on destroying America. Individuals who blow up elementary schools, kidnap children, attack churches and mosques, kill invalids in wheelchairs, plan attacks on skyscrapers in New York, behead journalists, detonate car bombs with children to camouflage their crime, or board jetliners with explosive shoes — all while wearing mufti or even women’s clothing — these are all considered “freedom fighters” of the most principled kind. They and they alone enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention. As to Americans like Tucker and Menchaca or Israeli Gilad Shalit — or these fifteen British sailors for that matter, it is a case of “what Geneva Convention?” We don’t need no steenkin’ Geneva Convention to try these guys as spies. That’s the way the Human Rights racket works. Don’t go looking for any Geneva Convention in Somalia, Darfur, Basilan or Iran. Try Guantanamo Bay.
Personally, I liked the part where the author reminds us that terrorist comfortable with using children to hide their bombs and then blowing the children up when detonating the bomb enjoy more international outrage and press coverage when arguably their supposed Geneva convention rights are violated. Meanwhile, actual soldiers who most likely find the blatant use and killing of children abhorrent, in fact are denied their Geneva Convention rights and not a peep can be heard from either the MSM or the international community. One might say there is a ‘disproportionate’ response to coverage of actual Geneva Convention violations.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:54 am
Yeah, it’s bigger news when the US breaks the Geneva Conventions than when Iran does it. Here’s some diproportionate coverage: huge coverage of Iran becoming/being a nuclear state, with no coverage at all of the fact that the US has way way more atomic bombs than Iran does. That’s pretty biased.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Again, I will state for the 67 millionth time: its arguable, that is A R G U A B L E, that the US is breaking Geneva convention. That Iran is breaking Geneva Convention is not A R G U A B L E. Therefore, the argument that excessive coverage of Gitmo is a function of the US breaking Geneva convention fails. That argument F A I L S. By the way, when you counter this argument by assuming the US has broken Geneva convention, that argument will F A I L for the same reason.
In order for your argument to work, you have to say that a potential Geneva violation contingent on a loose interpretation of law is bigger news than the actual violation of that law.
Of course one might be inclined to go with a simpler explanation. A press with a slight bias against the administration is more inclined to interpret Gitmo as a violation of Geneva Convention, and therefore cover it with the intensity of an actual US violation.
Meanwhile our stated enemy, indirectly killing our soldiers, using the most conservative interpretation of Geneva Convention, in fact violates said law, with soldiers from our closest ally and we get hardly a peep from the press. And somehow this is less newsworthy than a potential violation of a convention. What fucking crack are you smoking? Seriously. Only in the land of the liberals is a potential US violation more newsworty than the actual violations of a state conducting a clandestine war against the US.