Oh, we are such hypocrites.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | PoW footage 'breaks convention' "If we look at the reactions today in the US and the Arab world, they have been very similar. People have perceived [the pictures] as being an offence, a humiliation," ICRC spokesperson Antonella Notari told BBC News Online.

PoWs should not be used as part of the propaganda war between the two sides, and all warring factions should respect that, says Ms Notari, a former PoW in Somalia herself.

Those rules should have also been applied to images of PoWs at the US base of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"At that time, we approached the US authorities to ask them not to use these pictures," she says.

For more than a year now, the American Government has been criticised for the way it has treated hundreds of prisoners from the fighting in Afghanistan, says the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Barnaby Mason.

It has denied that those held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the rights of PoWs - instead Donald Rumsfeld came up with the description "unlawful combatants".

Pictures of some of them hooded and kneeling have been shown on television.