It’s good that newspapers and Internet sites are showing the photographs of Uday and Qusay Hussein in death. Their mutilated faces are in great contrast to most images we see of people, often with impossibly white teeth, lithe bodies and conditioned hair. Death is that part of life we don’t want to think about, that we fear; the more we have reason to witness it, to think on it, the more we can come to some semblance of serenity about it and allow our fear to dissipate.

The decision by the United States to make the photographs widely available to news outlets is not so good. It’s being suggested this violates the Geneva Convention, which forbids subjecting enemy prisoners or fatalities to humiliation or ridicule.

The Hussein brothers were not prisoners of war; but perhaps they could have been. Were they given the chance to surrender? Newspaper reports say a man came to U.S. officials in Iraq and reported the brothers were in a villa outside the city of Mosel. The U.S. sent troops and rockets and destroyed the villa. A 14-year-old son of Qusay was reported to have been among the dead.

The brothers have been called evil personified; it’s true they were very active in their father’s regime. Both were aces in the deck of wanted cards issued by the U.S. But does that excuse the hypocrisy of the U.S.? There were bitter complaints when Iraqi television showed footage of American combat fatalities, but once the shoe came onto the other foot the U.S. behaved no better than Iraq.

Uday and Qusay should not have been killed. Every effort should have been made to take them alive and send them to the World Court for trial. This kind of thing has happened before.

The Nuremberg military tribunal was set up in Germany after World War II to try 177 major culprits believed to have had overall responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. The court’s members came from allied nations. Other commissions held 900 war crimes trials involving about 3,000 defendants. Not good enough for the U.S.

There have been international tribunals to try war crime allegations in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Special war crimes courts that include national and international judges have been created in Sierra Leone and Cambodia. No go for the U.S.

The world has the International Criminal Court, created by the Rome Statute in 1998. It’s based in The Hague and it’s the first ever permanent, treaty based, international criminal court established to promote the rule of law and ensure that the gravest international crimes do not go unpunished. Canada belongs; the U.S. does not. America doesn’t want anyone else having the power to prosecute its citizens.

At one point the U.S. State Department panel studied who it could try in a court, and how. It worked with exiled Iraqi judges and lawyers to develop a system that could prosecute war crimes. U.S. military officials have made it clear they consider Iraqi guerrilla fighters to be war criminals. Yet in the killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein we see instead good old Wild West justice.

The U.S. went to war without U.N. approval. Now it’s not going to turn over any judgment to nations that didn’t jump on the war bandwagon. And being bloodthirsty, it’s not going to leave matters in the hands of any court unlikely to impose the death penalty.

Uday and Qusay Hussein should have gone to trial, but the U.S. wants to be judge, jury and executioner — always the biggest sheriff on the block, always with the biggest badge.