The public, the prisoners, and their rights

Somehow people think that they have rights to see the new photographs that Congress has. I have no idea why people think that. Perhaps they do not understand the meaning of right. But, people do not have this right. Freedom of the press does not mean that the press has a right to every piece of information. MY freedom of the press does not grant me the freedom to have any information and publish it. I cannot for example demand that your boyfriend turn over his naked pictures of YOU. I cannot demand those pictures even if those pictures exist somewhere. They are not my pictures, and I cannot print them. I do not have the rights to them. I also cannot demand the prisoner pictures just because they happen to exist in some room in Congress.

Freedom of press is not a right to get anything you want to put in your press. It is a right to publish those things you did manage to legally obtain.

The prisoners who we are holding, on the other hand, do have rights. These rights are granted to them by the Geneva Convention. Just because those appear to have been violated already, does not mean that we are permitted to keep violating them. The prisoners have the right not to have humiliating pictures of them on every website on the internet, in every newspaper on the planet, etc. Their children, wives, and loved ones do not deserve that, just so some left-wing racist Bush-hater could have a picture to go with their raving about American imperialism or something.

Suddenly no one really cares about the rights of the prisoners. Actually no one ever cared about the rights of the prisoners. What hypocrites.

The whole issue is really a way to knock Nick Berg off our minds, and refocus them on new pictures. Justice is once again a casualty of war.