Military vet Jeff Emanuel observes:

Privates First Class Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker were members of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)’s “Strike” Brigade, based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Both Menchaca and Tucker volunteered to be members of the US Army. Both volunteered to be infantrymen. Both knew, as do all members of the US Armed Forces, that they could end up in harm’s way as a result of their volunteering—doubly so since both initially enlisted well after the Iraq War (and postwar process) had begun. In a written statement, Tucker’s family said that their son had joined the military in part out of a desire to “do something positive.” They also released to the press the text of a message he left on their answering machine less than a week before his capture, in which he reaffirmed his commitment to, and belief in, his mission. “I’m defending my country,” he said, and he asked his mother to be proud of him.

Interestingly silent on this and other atrocities carried out by the insurgents in Iraq are the “human rights” groups who seem to spend every day accusing the United States of torture, war crimes, and various human rights violations. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called the Iraq war “illegal,” and John Pace, former UN chief of Human Rights for Iraq, has said that human rights conditions are “as bad now as they were under Saddam,” but was it America that filled mass graves with hundreds of thousands of murdered Iraqi civilians? Last month, Human Rights Watch again accused the US of “brutalizing Muslim suspects in the name of the war on terror,” but how many times have Americans strapped bombs to their own chests and purposely detonated themselves in a large crowd of civilians? Amnesty International’s website highlights America’s use of “torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” against terrorist captives, but how many prisoners—Muslim or otherwise—have Americans brutally beheaded?

Laura Ingraham and Bill O’Reilly kicked around the issue last night.

Andy McCarthy weighs in on Geneva and savagery–and al Qaeda’s reminder to the Supreme Court, which will soon decide “the most important case of its term, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.”