Ends and means.

Last March, before the fall of Saddam Hussein's despotic regime, Iraqi military officials paraded five captured U.S. soldiers in front of television cameras. This indignity was immediately denounced by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who correctly observed that "it is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them."

Such a display is indeed prohibited by Article 13 of the convention. But those provisions would also apply to captured Taliban fighters held by the U.S. in Cuba, some of whom were photographed kneeling on the ground, with their hands behind their back, wearing hoods or blacked-out goggles.

U.S. officials also properly condemned Iraqi television and the Arab Al-Jazeera network for displaying gruesome images of American servicemen killed in battle. But the Bush administration broadcast images of the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam's loathsome sons and henchmen, killed by U.S. forces after an intense firefight in Mosul.

According to a July 31st AP report, Secretary of State Colin Powell authorized the payment of a $30 million bounty to the informant who led U.S. forces to the Hussein brothers' hideout. This gesture puts in an odd light U.S. complaints about the more modest rewards--$300 to $5,000--placed on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Iraq by guerrilla leaders.

The July 28th Washington Post described another unorthodox tactic that occupation authorities in Iraq are employing. According to a brigade commander in Iraq, on July 22nd "his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: 'If you want your family released, turn yourself in.' Such tactics are justified [claimed the brigade commander], because, 'It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.' They would have been released in due course, he added later. The tactic worked. On Friday [the brigade commander] said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered."

The tactic worked, that is, only if one ignores the section of the Geneva Convention dealing with occupied territories, which specifies: "The taking of hostages is prohibited."

Granted, there's no reason to believe that the Iraqi general's family was mistreated in any way--apart from being illegally imprisoned and used as blackmail leverage against him.

It bears repeating that the means we employ are the ends in making. It's bad enough that our government went to war against Iraq to enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions without a congressional declaration of war, after clotting the air with alarmist lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenal. But the means being employed in the open-ended occupation of Iraq may have lasting effects on the integrity of our armed forces, as well.