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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (132498)	5/10/2004 6:57:05 PM
From: Sam Citron	Respond to of 281500

The other interesting thing, is the inability of the guilty, to stop themselves from making incriminating documents and photos, and bragging about it...The sadists in uniform in Iraq would have been able to continue torturing with impunity, if they hadn't taken pictures, and then shown those trophy pictures to their buddies, and let their buddies download them, send them home to mom, etc. Is that what in fact these pictures represent -- trophy shots by those same individuals who were doing the torturing? Is that what war had done to these people -- making them incapable of even recognizing the immorality and illegality of their actions? Maybe that will be used as an exculpatory factor in their sentencing - that they were exhausted from their extended tour of duty. Certainly not a complete defense. No such thing as a Nurenberg defense - just following orders will not do. I had assumed that surveillance cameras were probably all over the prison, and so assumed that some of the photos could have come from that source to serve documentation purposes. Or, as I said earlier, the photos could have been taken to threaten other prisoners of what might happen to them. How would you have answered the CNN poll question, Jacob? In the abstract, I can well imagine scenarios of innocent lives hanging by a thread where I might condone psychological coersion, for example, to locate an endangered victim or prevent an imminent attack. It's not such a black and white proposition. There is certainly a slippery slope danger here, and it may be a sterile exercise to form simple rules from our armchairs.