This is a brilliant idea, and poetic justice of the highest order: Iraqi Police Use Kidnappers’ Videos to Fight Crime. (Hat tip: mardukhai.)

MOSUL, Iraq, Feb. 4 - In one scene, the videotape shows three kidnappers with guns and a knife, preparing to behead a helpless man who is gagged and kneeling at their feet.

In the next, it is one of the kidnappers who is in detention, his eyes wide with fear, his lips trembling, as he speaks to his interrogators.

“How do I say this?” says the kidnapper, identified as an Egyptian named Abdel-Qadir Mahmoud, holding back tears. “I am sorry for everything I have done.”

In the first week after the elections, the Iraqi Interior Ministry and the Mosul police chief are turning the tables on the insurgency here in the north by using a tactic - videotaped messages - that the insurgents have used time and again as they have terrorized the region with kidnappings and executions.

But this time the videos, which are being broadcast on a local station, carry an altogether different message, juxtaposing images of the masked killers with the cowed men they become once captured.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the New York Times if they didn’t immediately express concern for the “rights” of the head-choppers.

The broadcast of such videos raises questions about whether they violate legal or treaty obligations about the way opposing fighters are interrogated and how their confessions are made public. …

Officials in Mosul, short on manpower, apparently hope the psychological force of the broadcasts will help undermine the insurgency, making its fighters appear weak and encouraging citizens to call up with their reactions or information about those still at large. A program loosely based on “most wanted” crime shows in the United States is also being developed, a Mosul television official said.

“Because of their confessions and the disgusting things they did, we have reached our limit,” said the Mosul police chief, Ahmed al-Jaburi. “There is no more patience.”

If nothing more, the confessions, as they are called in the videos, offer a rare glimpse into how the gangs operate and plot their killings. The videos also try to divest the terrorists and criminals of their religious platform by challenging them with questions about Islam.

“These are men who do not fear God,” an Interior Ministry official said at the beginning of one of the segments this week. He described the men as Iraqi and other Arab terrorists. “Our special forces will crush their filthy heads!”

“We are going to show you some men who have the blood of innocent people on their hands,” the official said. “We are going to show you their confessions, say their names and those of their leaders, and we expect you to help us find them.”

Some people said they found the practice of showing the insurgents on television troubling.

[Guess who? —ed.]

Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch said such tactics raised the issue of whether the people were tortured or otherwise coerced into making the statements. Last week the organization issued a report based on interviews in Iraq that “found the abuse, torture and mistreatment of detainees by Iraqi security forces to be routine and commonplace,” said Ms. Whitson, the executive director of the group’s Middle Eastern division. For example, she said, the police often described detainees as guilty before any trial had occurred and made them available to journalists to be photographed.