'US applied double standards'

2003-07-28 11:14

Cairo - An Egyptian government newspaper on Sunday accused Washington of double standards by releasing photographs of Saddam Hussein's dead sons after denouncing the Iraqis for showing pictures of dead US soldiers.

"The United States and the Western media moved heaven and earth when Iraqi television broadcast (images) of the dead bodies and of US prisoners, in the first days of the US-British aggression against Iraq," Al-Ahram daily said.

The newspaper said such actions were a "violation of the Geneva Convention, but the United States did the same thing, but in a worse way, by publishing the photographs of the corpses of Uday and Qusay", the daily said.

"The official American and Western position on the publication of the photos of the American dead (in Iraq), then the publication of the photos of the bodies of Uday and and Qusay is an example of double standards," it said.

The United States had denounced the broadcast of images of dead Americans and captured soldiers on Iraqi and Arab television during the first few days of the war in Iraq in March.

On Friday, the White House defended its decision to release pictures showing the corpses of Saddam Hussein's two sons, rejecting comparisons with Iraq's wartime photos of slain US soldiers and prisoners of war.

"I think there is a big difference. It is consistent with the Geneva Convention," spokesman Scott McClellan said.

US officials have said that they released the gory pictures, which claim to show the corpses of Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, to prove to the Iraqi people that the two men really were killed in a firefight in northern Iraq.

- AFX