McG - crap. Stop hiding behind verbiage. If the mores of today had been the mores of 19FortyX, we'd be seeing the same sort of pictures. Are you telling me that the various trials of war-criminals weren't in the media in as forward a fashion as the media considered appropriate? Because, if you are, I don't believe you.

What you have said is no sort of answer to the point I made. Modern (western) society expects to see what happens. As Gareth points out, if there were no footage, there would be many querying whether Saddam had actually been captured. We live in a less credulous age than 50 years ago. In this, TV is both cause & effect. Don't shoot (or blame) the messenger for the message.

I see nothing demeaning in the reportage of Saddam's capture, so far. Unlike some of the more emotionally influenced posters here, I am yet to see anything of the 'frightened' or 'humiliated' old man that they've apparently been watching. What does Saddam have to be frightened about? It's not as if anyone is strapping him to a naked bedstead & soaking him with salt water preparatory to attaching the electrodes, is it?

If (&, I stress, *if*) we see repeated & varied videos of an untried Saddam, I would start to give credence to the notion that he was being treated unfairly, & (perhaps) inhumanely. One video, shot at the soonest possible moment to show that he has been captured, does not constitute any sort of humiliation or duress IMHO. The potential benefits of immediate incontrovertible evidence of his capture outweigh any conceivable human rights violation, or any speculative 'precedent' that you might posit.

You speak of rules, but the rules of the UN & the rules of the Geneva Convention, like chivalry in its time, are observed more in their breach than their observance. The US can't win whatever it does, so can you offer one good rational reason why it ought to worry about a fairly minor infraction of 'international law'? It's not as if, in its breach, it's trying to massacre the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs is it? In theory, the US is wrong, but, in practice, can't you find more important issues that the UN ought to be worrying about? Because I'm sure many Mudcatters can think of a few!