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Actually, there are plenty of sections in the Geneva Conventions to cover non-combatants, as well as combatants of all types. Just because someone seems to have not been covered doesn't give you an excuse to torture them. After all, your understanding of the law may be deficient.

Then, too, there's American law that governs the behavior of our troops, and the moral standards you learned at your mother's knee, or on the smart end of her switch.

We do not do torture. People who use torture will be penalized through loss of freedom.

Actually the convention(s)(there are two, but they are collectively known as 'the geneva convention'), does not offer any rights whatsoever to illegal combatants. That is fact.

There is military code, however, this applies to individuals and not standing orders from the C-in-C. That is, you cannot take it upon yourself to torture but you can be ordered to from high up.

There is also a Clintonian edict that was put into effect in 1996(?) that basically afforded legal combatant rights to illegal combatants(effectively rendering the Geneva convention useless). However, this edict has never been tested and it is the military code that is being used in the present scandal not the Clintonian one.

Go and fight tooth and nail in a combat zone, against insurgents that blend in with the civilian population and who have the undying support of a civilian population that wants nothing more that to see your civilization wiped from the face of the earth. Then you may have an appreciation for why the Geneva convention affords no rights to illegal-combatants. You may even find yourself extracting information from a raghead in a rather unpleasant way.

You can put your high ideas to the test: get a band of people together and start attacks on police in your area. Get caught and see what the police do to you in order to find the rest of your rebels.

In fact, if someone kills a cop then they are dead unless they surrender to a lawyer.

These are just local police, what do you think a military does?

Its called martial law and it is not pretty.

We tie the hands of our military behind their back while most of us are eating at Denny’s.

Just because someone seems to have not been covered doesn't give you an excuse to torture them.

True enough. I think the point is exactly how these pictures came to be. Did the servicemen photograph their own exploits, or did some Rather/Mapes photographer plant the seed?

As long as C^BS' credibility is drawn into question on one story, you've got to question every story! It's obvious that Dan Rather's main goal is destruction of the Republican party, and that his stories aren't so much reporting as they are the means to his political ends. With motives like that, his credibility should be widely investigated.