Remember that brilliant hostage rescue in Colombia a couple of weeks ago? Well, CNN is in a lather that part of the rescue team may have displayed Red Cross emblems, and that would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Well, hell, I guess the Colombian government has to take the hostages back now.
I would call myself only casually informed about the Geneva Conventions, but it does seem clear to me that the signatories are states. Is it at all reasonable to expect said signatories to extend the conventions to bands of lawless, armed goons running around in the jungle?
I blogged recently about “saving the earth.” I made the specific point that we can cheerfully hamstring our economy with reams of environmental regulations and it won’t make a damned bit of difference to dear Gaia, because China and India won’t (and shouldn’t) play. This apparently eager guilt over this rescue operation is similarly retch-inducing, and seems born of the same myopic stupidity.
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Retch all you want, but I feel strongly about this point. More of that Red Cross spoofing practice WILL get innocent people killed in the future. Guaranteed.
On second thought, since our current Administration believes that groups such as the International Red Cross are nothing but a bunch of lefties, mollycoddling pansies, and Islamo-terror-symps anyway, it’s probably a delightful prospect to them.
This is a continuation of the media nonsense we have seen regarding Gitmo and the interrogation of the detainees. If we let these media types and the left wing ACLU types control what we think, God help us all. It’s a good thing we didn’t have this nonsense during WWII or we would all be speaking German.
The Red Cross is a great organization and doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment from the media.
Oh that SO could have been photoshopped just to get a story out of it….
Brina: It seems real. The Colombian president has apologized for it.
Unclaimed: I’ve chewed on your protestation all day, and I concede that we’re not talking about a black and white issue here. I don’t want dead civilian relief workers any more than you do.
The Geneva Conventions were authored and ratified in a time when war was waged between nations–entities with borders, governments, and soldiers with uniforms. In that context, they make sense.
But this group isn’t a nation any more than al-Qaeda is. So do they get them?
Down this road lies madness. Perhaps it’s further down the road than misuse of the Red Cross emblem, but it’s down there. These are not nations, and they are not Geneva signatories. They’re dipshits with guns. All revolutionaries are not created equal. We need to tread lightly–and practically–with this line of thinking.