US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has accused Iraq of contravening the Geneva Convention by showing some captured US soldiers o­n Iraqi TV. I wonder just what were Mr Rumsfeld's comments o­n those pictures of Iraqi prisoners of war (POWs) shown almost continuously o­n the multitude of American and Western TV channels for the last few days and nights?

And now, he wants to quote international conventions!

Didn't he and the Bush Administration determine that the United Nations was irrelevant, and attacked Iraq without a UN mandate?

Isn't this the very same US administration who refused to support the International Criminal Court, but in fact sabotaged and watered down its powers?

Isn't this also the same United States that refused to sign the Land Mines Convention, those nasty and frighteningly harmful explosive devices that have killed, maimed and blown off the feet and legs of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in many countries?

Isn't this the same administration that has cruelly denied Afghan POWs their basic rights in accordance with the very same Geneva Conventions that Mr Rumsfeld has now felt free to refer to?

The sad fact for some US families is that, with the capture and death of some US soldiers, the Iraqis have the opportunity to do what the US government had been doing the past week. The propaganda war is no longer o­ne-sided.

The war against Iraq cannot be sanitised for the US public anymore. It is no longer strange-looking people who live in a faraway land and speak in a funny languages that are being "neutralised" or "captured";. Americans too can be, and have been killed, hurt and captured.

If there are two things that President George W Bush fears most, they would be the opinion of the American public and the inability of his administration to avoid or skirt the unpleasant truth (if not lie) to ensure continuing public support for the war.

We have witnessed the Bush administration move seamlessly from misinformation before the war to propaganda during it.

The former was basically lies (among the many, remember the o­ne about the three ships full of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or WMDs, said to be 'loitering' at the Indian Ocean to avoid the UN inspection weapons team - yeah, each probably captained by Miss Iraq, Miss Iran and Miss Korea and crewed by communists, Muslims and flower people - well, what happened to them?).

The latter (propaganda) is more understandable as it is part and parcel of the war effort o­n both sides.

But we readers and viewers should be very careful about giving too much credence to news coming out from most of the western media, especially those 'embedded' with the US forces. I remember a very good IPS article called Building a 'coalition of the coerced'?

I quote an extract from o­ne of Robert Fisk's recent articles to show what he thinks of the news from these reporters 'embedded' within the US forces:

"Why the BBC should use the meretricious military expression 'secured' is also a mystery to me. 'Secured' is meant to sound like 'captured' but almost invariably means, in the kind of parlance that the 'embedded' reporters now adopt, that a city has been bypassed or half-surrounded or, at the most, that an invading army has merely entered its suburbs. And sure enough, within 24 hours, the Shiite city west of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigress rivers, proved to be very much unsecured, indeed had not been entered in any form - because at least 500 Iraqi troops, supported by tanks, were still fighting there.

"At o­ne point o­n Saturday, the BBC introduced us to an 'embedded' reporter - in Basra. This report fell to pieces when the correspondent admitted that he was not 'in Basra itself'; which is why the BBC anchor in London later signed him off as a correspondent 'in southeast Iraq'. Quite so."

The even more sad fact is that many Iraqi innocents have been badly injured if not killed. The US-controlled, sanitised versions have been crafted to avoid US public revulsion at the brutality of the war.

I quote Fisk again:

"Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack o­n Baghdad is 'as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed' but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs - they were bound up with gauze - and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg."
So let us take both American and Iraqi propaganda with a very large grain of salt, and not think that just because Saddam is an awful bloke, the Bush administration is not above very creative news making, controlling and manipulating of the news media.

Let us not be too surprised if US or British forces at some stage during this war suddenly 'discovered' WMD! Bush and Blair will both be in untenable positions politically if these reasons for the war were not amply "justified".

Unfortunately the first casualty has been Truth, leaving behind its surviving child, Disbelief.