Lemme put it this way. If I'm a brown person and I've made an enemy of both the Taliban and the U.S. military: which side do you think is better to be caught by? The side that will put a bullet in your head, or the side that will put an electric drill inside your head?

War is war. Either you are appalled that people are killing each other or you aren't, don't act like murderers not following "rules" matters to you.

Not so much.

whataboutism

Because the atomic unit of propaganda is not lies, it's emphasis. With any article about anything, the most important question to ask is "Why are they writing about this right now, instead of anything else?" Granted, prisoner killing strikes most of us as a ghoulsh thing, but that alone doesnt make this newsworthy in the context of a war. The newsworthy part comes when the western press chooses to amplify this story while quashing others, playing up the other team's crimes and ignoring our own,giving rise to the narrative of the enemy as universally inhuman and unworthy of mercy. Our war crimes are always accidents and mistakes, their war crimes are always the result of their inherent (perhaps hereditary) bloodlust.

The point of this "whataboutism" it to point out that this article is presenting the killing of prisoners of war as some kind of horrifying aberration from the norm, without actually saying what the norm is. Because the norm, for my entire life, has been the unnacountable mass slaughter by the US of not just POWs, but innocent people.

The killing of POWs is the norm, we set the norm, and now we're crying foul when our enemies follow this norm while sweeping it under the rug when our allies do the same.

Am I saying this makes the killing of POWs morally good? No. Byt what I am saying is that this article was written in bad faith to perpetuate a war where our ally has been shelling civillians and deploying death squads for nine years, with shells and death squad training we gave them.

Decrying the killing of noncombatants is fine and good in a vaccum, but it's a sick joke coming from the 200-year reigning Champion of Noncombatant Murder.

International law is one area where whataboutism is a perfectly valid and accepted line of argument. Unlike domestic law, there is no enforcement mechanism for stuff like war crimes and most laws aren't clearly written down. If a country like Russia or the US executes some prisoners of war, the war police isn't going to show up to write them a ticket.

International law only exists where countries agree it exists. Part of that agreement is treaties and the like, but most of it is what International lawyers call "state practice". Countries can say that a law exists all they want, but if they don't follow the law in their actions then the law doesn't exist.

Therefore, "America, you consistently fail to follow this law so I'm entitled to act as if it doesn't exist" is a totally reasonable argument as far as International law is concerned.