International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

I just listened to a story on NPR about the history and policies of the ICRC. The Red Cross has a mission of ensuring humane treatment of prisoners all over the world. One of their policies is to work "under the radar", and to not go public with information about abuses that they encounter. They claim that this policy gives them more credibility and allows them to negotiate on behalf of prisoners for all sides of a conflict. Earlier this year, the ICRC was aware of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but did not go public with the information. Intead, they worked with U.S. political and military personnel to try to rectify the situation. The NPR story also noted that the ICRC had knowledge of the systematic extermination of prisoners at Auchwitz, but remained publicly silent about it. This policy of silence has its critics. However, I can see the point of it. I think that the ICRC tries hard to be seen as neutral, and to always fight on behalf of prisoners.

The ICRC was founded in the early 1800s as a result of the founder's visit to a battlefield in Italy.

I think the ICRC is an important humanitarian organization. War is bad enough as it is. Think of what war would be like without the Red Cross.

Comments

Sean Meade said…
a marked contrast to Amnesty International. i would guess both have their place...
5:05 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The agony of victory....a.k.a. picking my jaw up off the floor

Allright. I've now had nearly 24 hours (although its taken me a couple of days to complete this post) to calm down, reflect upon and digest the improbable gut wrenching game yesterday in which the heavily favored Colts lost to the Steelers 21-18. I wrote last year of not being as emotionally attached to the Steelers as I have been in the past. I wrote last week of how I thought that I might be spending too much valuable time following the Steelers, especially since I have absolutely no control over the outcome of their games. Let me just say this: yesterday's game was probably in the top five emotionally draining, and ultimately gratifying, experiences of my life. Ouside of my wedding and the birth of my two sons, I can't remember being as nervous, deflated, joyful, stunned and exhilirated as I was yesterday----all withing about a ten minute stretch of seemingly neverending time! What could have been a devestating loss to live with in the offseason (and, forever, for Jerome
Read more

"The Axis of Evil and the Doctrine of Preemption Three Years On"

Jerod and I attended a lecture by Brookings Institution fellow Michael O'Hanlon last night at Park University in Parkville, MO. The lecture was part of the Jerzy Hauptmann Distinguished Guest Lecture series. As a Park University M.B.A. alum, I received an invitation to the 13th annual lecture in the series. I like going to events like this, especially since I was interested in the content of this particular lecture, of which the title was the title of this post. Dr. O'Hanlon described himself as a Sam Nunn Democrat at the beginning of the lecture. It's always difficult to prevent political feeling from entering into objective analysis, and I don't know how you measure the "objectiveness" of analysis, but I feel that most Brookings scholars are at least "fair", and Dr. O'Hanlon was no exception. His analysis of the doctrine of preemption was focused on the effectiveness of the doctrine, as opposed to any moral righteousness or implications of the
Read more

Removing a password that was created in a previous version from an Access 2007 database

Earlier this week I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to remove a password from an Access 2007 database (file extension .accdb). The database was created in a previous version of access and subsequently "upgraded" to the Access 2007 format. I believe some type of a wizard was used to perform the "upgrade." The security model is evidently different in Access 2007 than in previous versions. It doesn't appear that you can set/unset database passwords. Instead, in Access 2007, there is an option to Encrypt with Password. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be logically similar to the earlier version password architecture, but there was no way that I could find to easily remove the password that had been created in the earlier version when using the Access 2007 interface. Access security has always been confusing to me, and I need to take the time someday to understand how the security model is supposed to work in Access 2007. An
Read more