Dance, my puppets!

The recent flap over the applicability, or lack thereof, of the Geneva Conventions to Taliban prisoners should serve to remind everyone that news, more often than not, is news because it serves someone's purposes to make it news. Anyone who regularly reads my strange ramblings will surely have noticed that I am often less interested in the news itself than in the question of why the news is news. News is made by puppeteers; the aim of news is not to inform opinion, but to manipulate it. The news narrative tells us, supposedly, about events; the metanarrative tells us who wants us to know about events, what they want us to think about them, and why.

Go back to the initial report: "Troops told Geneva rules don't apply to Taliban," squawks the headline. Yet the lede tells a slightly different story (canine emphasis):

Canadian troops in Afghanistan have been told the Geneva Conventions and Canadian regulations regarding the rights of prisoners of war don't apply to Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters captured on the battlefield.

That decision strips detainees of key rights and protections under the rules of war, including the right to be released at the end of the conflict and not to be held criminally liable for lawful combat.

That's no minor qualification. The Geneva Conventions cover not only the treatment of prisoners of war, but the treatment of civilians and the treatment of "unlawful" combatants -- those who take up arms without being members of any organized force. The story is not that the Geneva Conventions will not be applied, as the headline suggests, but that prisoners will not be treated as "prisoners of war."

"Prisoners of war" have special status. Since the conventions are the products of states, and states want to preserve the exclusive right to wreak violence upon each other, prisoners of war are viewed as having done no wrong. They may not be punished for fighting, and must be released as soon as hostilities cease. The only reason they are kept prisoner is to deny their use to the enemy. And since the conventions are the products of states, the same standards are not applied to people who take up arms without official sanction, or recognizable chains of command, and so on. That's the law.

Whether Taliban prisoners should be treated as members of an organized militia and accorded prisoner of war status is an open question. Whether a sound case can be made one way or the other is not, however, and anyone who argues that Canada is "ignoring Geneva" is therefore a fool.

And the Defence Minister immediately responded with a meaningless response:

The Canadian military will follow the Geneva Convention in dealing with prisoners taken in Afghanistan, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor said Wednesday.

“When they take prisoners, they will always follow the rules of the Geneva Convention, no lower standard than that,” he told the Commons.

Which tells us diddly-squat about which provisions of the conventions will apply, and does absolutely nothing to change the original story.

But all that is beside the point. The headline encourages readers to believe that Canada is ignoring Geneva altogether. Having read the headline, the reader approaches the story with that suggestion in mind, and as any number of blog postings have shown over the past couple of days, tends to emerge with that impression intact.

The copy editor's lot is a tough one. The poor bastard has to come up with a headline that summarizes the story in just a few short words, words that will fit in the space alloted. And he's probably no expert on the Geneva conventions, nor indeed on anything else save stylebooks.

But before we write this off as the work of a harried copy editor, who somehow persists in remaining ink-stained although his work is entirely computerized, and is therefore all the more wretched, let's note what's missing from the story.

First and foremost, any clarification that certain rights remain guaranteed under the Geneva Conventions, or indeed that the conventions cover more than just prisoners of war. This despite the fact that the reporter, Paul Koring, apparently interviewed one Amir Attaran, a law professor with an interest in the subject. Perhaps Koring simply didn't think to ask the right questions.

Secondly, any indication of where the story comes from. No "according to documents obtained by the Grope & Flail through the Freedom of Information Act." No mention of an announcement. There's only a faint hint of where the story may have originated, in the first quote:

“The whole purpose of those regulations is to know if Geneva applies,” said Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who has been pressing the Defence Department for details of its detainee policy for months.

And possibly, who has now obtained that information, and passed it on to the Globe? We don't know who the puppeteer is here, although the puppets started dancing like mad almost as soon as the report was published.

Not that this suggests some conspiracy at the Globe to misrepresent the news (although they've done it in the past, most notably in the leadup to the Quebec G8 summit). Often, the explanation is much simpler: reporters don't know everything, and neither do their copy editors. They hold much the same prejudices and carry much the same misconceptions as the general public. And the puppeteers who make the news know this.

Witness a recent CP story on the cormorant cull at Presqu'Ile. A milkbone to the first person who can point out two obvious problems therein.

I just want to know who's pulling my strings, before I'll willingly dance.

Cross-posted from the Amazing Wonderdog just to keep Babbling Brooks happy. :-)