What Every Professional Journalist Needs to Know About War Crimes

As I perused the web this morning I was delighted to come across a resource on the laws of war at the Society of Professional Journalists' website. In describing some of the historical antecedents of the existing laws of war, they make an important and correct observation:

"There is no one 'Geneva Convention.' Like any other body of law, the laws of war have been assembled piecemeal, and are, in fact, still under construction."

Important point, since so many commentators refer to "the Geneva Convention," but there are actually four; and since the laws of war are not limited to the Geneva rules but include the Hague Conventions and various other treaties and rules from customary law.

An important source of international humanitarian law, however, seems to have been overlooked by the SPJ: the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court. The website reads:

"It is impossible to produce a complete and up-to-date list of war crimes. Even today, weapon systems such as land mines are being debated at the highest levels of international policy."

That's not true, and nor does one sentence follow from the other. In fact, a complete and (at that time up-to-date) list of war crimes appears in Article 8 of the Rome Statute, the multilateral treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. While there are other lists, the Rome Statute is authoritative in the sense of being the product of a multilateral discussion involving most UN member states.

Whether additional things should be added to that list and what else might qualify under an item on the list, are different questions and, perhaps, await the first ICC Review Conference next year.

Battlefield Bots

iRobot Corp has just received a $3.75 million R&D contract from the US Army to build two iRobot warrior platforms.

IRobot said in a press release: "A powerful and rugged robot, the iRobot Warrior can perform a variety of critical missions such as evaluating danger zones and inaccessible areas, providing real-time video, audio, and sensor readings to warfighters and SWAT teams. The robot will feature an advanced digital architecture and a multi-mission chassis that supports up to 150-pound (68 kg) payloads."

In all the excitement over replace existing cannon fodder with our new robot minions, it's important to consider the ethical rationale and concerns about autonomous weapons on the 21st century battlefield. Good thing the US Army is thinking about ethics, while developing the robots. Or at least, fact-checking how much popular opposition they might encounter on ethical/legal grounds. A survey completed last October by Georgia Tech's Mobile Robot Lab asked the public, politicians, roboticists and military personnel questions like:

"In which roles and situations is the use of such robots acceptable? What does it mean to behave ethically in warfare? Who, and to what extent, is responsible for any lethal errors made? What are the benefits and concerns for use of such robots?"

The full report is here, but in particular note the following findings:






So, let's see, R&D in this area is proceeding apace despite a concern that robot warriors will lower the threshold for resorting to armed violence, and that "our" soldiers' protection will come at the expense of "their" civilians' lives.

Kenneth Anderson has the latest in a series of posts on legal issues at Opinio Juris.

The Insect-Drones Are Coming!

No joke:

It may seem like a futuristic arcade game, but a scene from an Air Force animated video shows a new wave in military strategy. The scene goes like this: Bad guys are being shadowed from a careful distance by small robotic drones designed to resemble birds and insects. When one of the bad guys opens his apartment door, a tiny robo-bug — looking like a garage door opener with wings — sneaks in to spy. In another scene, a robo-bug creeps into a sniper’s roost and delivers a deadly shot.

Air Force officials think Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs, could be a significant part of the Defense Department’s arsenal in the not-so-distant future. Civilian researchers and airmen at the Air Force Research Laboratory, based at this installation outside Dayton, Ohio, have set a 2015 deadline to roll out the first generation of tiny drones. This first group, they hope, will be the size of birds and be able to operate several days without recharging.

Britain’s Special Forces have tested a 28-inch-long MAV, called the Wasp, on reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan. Last year, the U.S. Marines placed a $19.3 million order for the small unmanned aircraft, developed by California-based AeroVironment. The Wasp can be fitted with explosives that could theoretically be used in a surprise attack.

Could this be another healthy step in the so-called "bloodless" revolution in US military doctrine? I think yes, possibly. Little unmanned drones can get into positions that a human sniper couldn't, enabling more discriminate targeting and saving civilian lives on the other side. A solution perhaps to the current and counterproductive strategy of dropping 500 pound bombs from 30,000 feet when trying to take out seven insurgents... They also contribute to force protection. In Iraq small unmanned drones have already been used to identify IEDs.

But I was less heartened when I continued reading this article. I haven't yet acquired and watched the video it's describing, but from the reporter's depiction, Air Force marketing teams are characterizing the military utility of these assets in far from "bloodless" terms:

The marketing video, created by the Air Force scientists to explain their vision, claims the drones would be “unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal.”

Hmm. Not that they would be discriminate. In fact, depending on how they're deployed, they could be quite the opposite, according to Wired Magazine. Furthermore:

Parker added that the use of tiny MAVs could have civilian applications. For example, small unmanned air vehicles could be dispatched into rubble after a natural disaster to search for signs of life.

Hmm, they'd have no military application in protecting civilians and other noncombatants in war zones? For example, dispatching them into rubble after a barracks has been targeted to search for signs of wounded there or in the vicinity? (Which it would then be the responsbility of the US military to treat humanely.) Funny that this is described as an afterthought, and something divorced from military affairs, rather than integral.

My concern is not with the drones - they're likely to be an improvement over existing "precision guided" munitions and reconnaissance methods. My concern is with the military's frame. That their marketing researchers think the best way to sell these assets to the public is by emphasizing their lethality, rather than their precision and humanitarian applications, is a sad sign of the times.

Child Detainees

According to the Washington Post:

"The United States has detained approximately 2,500 people younger than 18 as illegal enemy combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since 2002, according to a report filed by the Bush administration with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child."

Read all about it here.

The 33 comments, some advocating genocide against those whose children risk their lives to protect kin and country, are here. An interesting and depressing commentary on the state of debate.

Feith an Idiot... or Just Diabolical?

The left blogosphere is full of flak today about Doug Feith's interview on 60 minutes last night, in which he claims that the Iraq war was right because President Hussein was a threat, even though he admits the claim of WMD was exaggerated. No one seems to be buying it, heck Jason Sigger won't even buy his new book though he says he'll read it.




Let's focus for a moment on the most significant part of Feith's argument, which is not that the war was right, but that it was legal under the doctrine of "pre-emption." This is a departure from earlier justifications of the war, which either claimed the war was preemptive by manufacturing a fake threat, or admitted it was preventive and tried to justify it anyway. What Feith has done though, is to reinterpret preventive war as preemptive war.


Since Cleitus asked awhile ago, let me begin by clarifying the just war distinction between preventive and preemptive war. Preventive war consists of basic real-politik, that is identifying enemies who may threaten you at some time in the future and knocking them out while they're still weak. This was standard and accepted practice among states until the establishment of the UN Charter regime. (It was also, arguably, the logic that led to World War I, hence 20th century efforts to reconstitute the norms governing the use of force.)

Pre-emptive war, by constrast, involves a situation where the state in question is already poised for the attack. Contra political realism, which argues you should never allow your enemy to pick the time of the battle, just war theory argues that force is only justified when that moment is upon you - in this case, pre-emptive war becomes akin to self-defense.

The UN Charter outlaws preventive war (Article 2.4) but permits self-defense (Article 51). Supporters of the Iraq war have used two strategies to justify it. Originally, it was said to be preemptive because of the imminent threat of WMD, and the 2002 National Security Strategy refers to

"preemptive actions to counter a significant threat to our security."

When that fell through, some argued that the US has a right to engage in preventive war. In effect, the National Security Strategy of 2006 makes this case, arguing

"it is an enduring American principle that this duty obligates the government to anticipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage."

But this is the first time I've seen a public official so brazenly confuse preemption with prevention. His justification for the war is clearly prevention, and he doesn't fudge it at all:

"In an era where WMD can put countries a position to do an enormous amount of harm, the old idea of having to wait until you actually see the country mobilizing for war doesn't make a lot of sense."

OK, fair enough. He could reasonably say, preventive war is morally OK in this brave new world. But instead he insists this actually is preemption, or as he calls it "anticipatory self-defense."

Just like "coercive interrogation" isn't torture. It is wrong to dismiss Feith as an idiot. This latest wilful and brazen reinterpretation of international law is only one more datapoint in a larger pattern since 9/11.

No wonder the average American is confused about the laws of war.

Slate Magazine Take Two

No sooner did I criticize Slate Magainze for not including war law in its military fix-it list, then Jack Goldsmith posts on fixing "The Laws in Wartime."
Among his suggestions:

1) "Close Guantanamo." (He doesn't address what to do with the detainees or why closing Guantanamo is preferable to simply upholding detainee rights there.)

2) "Boost Trust" (By - wait for it - making more threat information available to a public that distrusts the government for inflating threats. Question: to what classified arseal of threat data does Goldsmith have access on which to build this case?)

3) "Fix Interrogation." He thinks we can do this not by preventing the CIA from breaking the rules, but by requiring the President to "make a classified finding giving reasons why aggressive techniques are required":

"This approach would maintain the option of using lawful interrogation techniques that might stave off a crisis, while at the same time addressing legitimate concerns about... legal compliance."

Come again? Lawful interrogation techniques are already an "option"; we don't require torture warrants for them. And how would another layer of justification for wanton violations of international law address concerns about the law?

One thing Goldsmith suggests makes sense: that the US should work with its allies to clarify how to apply the laws of war to asymmetric conflicts, instead of contining to interpret international law unilaterally. There is more support than is recognized for modifying the "quaint" old rules, but to be more than just treaty noncompliance the US needs to get its allies on board.

A Global Ban on Robot Warriors?

Should autonomous weapons systems be permitted on the battlefield in the absence of a clear sense of how fully they can comply with the laws of war?

Noel Sharkey, a robotics expert at University of Sheffield in the UK, thinks not. In an article entitled "Killer Robots: Friend or Foe," MSNBC'S Alan Boyle writes:

"Nowadays, Sharkey is sounding the alarm about the prospect of real-life robot wars: He's calling for an international ban on autonomous weapon systems until it can be shown that they can obey the laws of war. 'I think we should be addressing this immediately,' Sharkey told me. 'I think we've already stepped over the line.'"

The precautionary principle, popularized in the environmental policy-making arena, suggests that the burden should be on policymakers to demonstrate the safety of a new product or technology, rather than on citizens to demonstrate its harmfulness.

So maybe Sharkey has a point. Should the use of lethal robots on the battlefield be the subject of a multi-lateral treatymaking process? What threshhold might we envision determining whether such autonomous sytems constituted a lawful alternative to organic warriors?

Defending the Death Penalty

Not me (necessarily). The Bush Administration.

Funny that they feel that need to defend their decision to seek the death penalty against 6 Guantanamo inmates accused of various levels of involvement in the events of 9/11. After all, no international law prevents the US from executing convicts - though there may be an emergent international norm against the death penalty, the US is not bound by the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. So the Bush Administration really doesn't need to bother justifying this.

Besides, the strategy being used - comparing the US military commissions to the Nuremberg tribunals - is going to backfire, because there is a significant difference and a significance similarity that doesn't work in the Bush Administration's favor.

The difference is 60-some years of international jurisprudence and the establishment of the International Criminal Court by multilateral treaty - a court which does not allow for the death penalty, even for the architects of genocide.

The similarity is the lack of due process in the two proceedings (required, by the way, by Common Article 3, Article 1(d) of the Geneva Conventions even for unlawful combatants - the Bush Administration has admitted this article applied to GWOT detainees). At Nuremberg, Nazis were executed for "crimes against humanity" - a concept that did not exist prior to the crimes being committed, so court's legitimacy was undermined by claims of ex-post-facto justice. As for the Guantanamo Six, at least one of them, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, is known to have been tortured by the US government during interrogations, so evidence that could hang him is unlikely to be accepted by advocates of due process.

In other words, invoking Nuremberg was exactly the wrong strategy for the White House. Instead, they should have stuck to the letter of the Geneva Conventions. The conventions provide no immunity from prosecution and even execution for those who engage in political violence without formal combatant status - that is, being incorporated into the legitimate armies of parties to an conflict. The Guantanamo Six do not qualify and therefore the question of whether they can be executed is moot under international law.

It's ironic that the White House would raise this at all then, given its penchant for flouting well-established norms. In this case, the law seems actually to be on the US side. Rather, this would have been a great opportunity to demonstrate our adeherence... complete adherence... to the spirit and letter of the Geneva Conventions. Oh, but wait, there's still that due process / torture thing...

Laws of War For Dummies

My co-blogger Cleitus the Black laments the lack of reading material on the laws of war for the curious layperson. I heartily agree and shall be happy to muster a periodic post clariying some general precepts as I understand them, in between my usual rants.

For a start, while there is no decent "Geneva for Dummies" reader, a few helpful books on the laws of war for a general audience have come out in recent years and others are forthcoming. One is Michael Byers, War Law - a rather perfunctory treatment, but short and readable.

Another helpful resources is the Crimes of War website maintained by former journalists Roy Gutman and David Reiff. And then there is of course the website for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Cleitus and I shall work at getting a "must read" list up and running on this blog. (You hear that, Cleitus?) Stay tuned.

The Laws of War (Part the First)

Distinguished readers, scholars, and assorted vertebrate...

Seeing as how my dear colleague and associated devoted legions (of readers, I being the only person here to command legions in the traditional sense) love to question how trivial incidences of murder, rapine, and bad literature can be justified under the Laws of War, I feel it is incumbent upon myself to open that veritable Pandora's Box by asking, (solely for the benefit of the masses) - what are these so-called "laws" - in common terms, such that the average Hoplite can understand... Better yet, in terms so simplistic that even the Commander in Chief of the mightiest military the planet has ever seen can wrap his primate brain around them without having to make up words to make it all make sense.

Of course, a large part of the problem is, there are just so many laws! No less than 45 draft or complete documents, some ratified by many governments, some ratified by few. A notable example would be the 1938 draft of the RULES OF AERIAL WARFARE, which had as Article XXII the following: "Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of military character, or of injuring non-combatants is prohibited."

How this documented, if ratified, would have affected the outcome of WWII, where a major strategic element employed by the Allies consisted of doing just that is questionable.

In any case I propose the following.

For purposes of this discussion (which will by its very nature be prolonged) let us confine each post to dealing with a single document, or pertinent Article thereof, if a document has multiple key points.

Let us be thorough in asking all questions, raising such proposals for changes, and in short, performing such due diligence that, when we have completed our congress on the subject, we may be suitably ready to publish "The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Laws of War", which will no doubt become an International best-seller, and all us to both retire, or at the very least allow me to purchase a title and engage in all the myriad pleasures and vices thereunto pertaining.

For starters, I should think we might best begin by discussing how wars come to be. War, like sound, cannot exist in a vacuum; like a fire, it must be started. Therefore, we must have and aggressor and a defender, and we should define these terms.

The definition of defender - to ward off attack from; guard against assault or injury; one supposes the Random House definition will do quite nicely.

As for an aggressor, this requires a little more research. UN Resolution 3314 defines aggression as "the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State."

QUESTION - what about non-state actors?

Examples of aggression spelled out in Resolution 3314 include: "invasion or attack... any military occupation... bombardment by the armed forces... blockade of the ports or coasts..."

QUESTION - So, is it safe to say that, for the purposes of international law, an aggressor is any actor who carries out such actions?

I look forward to your learned discussion, and shall encourage you to choose the next subject for this discourse, although, should you move too slowly, I may act aggressively and put it forth myself. And I should note, that because I am but a simple man, perhaps it is best to move forward in an elementary manner, ie, having established the definitions of aggressor and defender, define when war may be waged legally, thence on to how it may be waged at the strategic, the operational, and finally, the tactical levels.

From the Mouths of Babes

My smallish son and I watched Robin Hood: Prince of Theives this weekend, which of course begins with an awful prison scene in a Jerusalem dungeon circa 1050 A.D. He wasn't too traumatized by the floggings, brandings and mutilations, since the film rather quickly moved onto jollier subjects like trouncings with quarter-staffs, outlaw trickery, fencing, archery and good old fashioned romance.

But later he asks, "Are our jails like that?"

I tell him, no, we take care of our prisoners because we believe that even criminals have rights.

"Even if they're our enemies, like in the Crusades?" he asks. "We would still give them food and take care of them? Because we're good guys, right?"

I pause.

Can Robots Fight Humanely?

Fascinating new report from Georgia Tech discusses the specs and moral conundrums involved in the DoD's gradual shift toward the use of AI on the battlefield.

It's not a new trend - DOD has been deploying the equivalent of Imperial droids in Iraq and Afghanistan for years - but the concept that robots might actually be better than their "emotional" human counterparts at upholding the laws of war is catching on now in the popular consciousness.

Would robots be inherently more humane, less susceptible to group-think and the kind of "passion" that supposedly led Wuterich and his gang to massacre civilians in Iraq? So argued Ronald Arkin, director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, at a conference this week sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Of course, as Dave Grossman has detailed in his brilliant book On Killing, it's emotions (like, empathy, honor, compassion) that account for weapons-bearers' uncanny ability to stay atrocity. Would robots instead simply be the perfect tools by which to carry out the unlawful orders of their programmers?

A great deal of faith is being placed here on the idea that the generals, civilian policymakers, and their minions in the R&D industries want the troops to behave well, and it's just the bad apples who muck things up. A lot of history suggests otherwise. Maybe we need robot robot-programmers, as well...

Now There's an Idea.

The Federal Times reports:

"The Defense Department wants contractors to train employees and subcontractors on the laws of war before they deploy with troops abroad.

Training programs would cover international treaties, combat orders, U.S. law, military law, host nation law and third-country laws. Contractors are already required to abide by these laws regardless of whether their employees have been briefed about them.

The training will help prevent violations of the laws when contractors and subcontractors are supporting troops on the battlefield, said Shay Assad, DoD’s director of procurement policy.

DoD will accept comments on the proposed regulation until March 10."

Not clear, of course, whether training contractors in the laws of war will help much since the laws of war don’t actually cover weapons-bearers who are not members of the armed forces of a party to the conflict. Training them in how toothless and weak the rules are is likely only to provide them with an increased sense of impunity. The real question is who will prosecute them if they violate the law. As long as they face no greater penalty than termination for, say, raping civilian girls, it’s hard to see how things will change.

"War is Hard Enough Without Worrying About Being Held Accountable When You Slaughter Civilians"

So USMC Staff Sargeant Frank Wuterich had his charges reduced from murder to voluntary manslaughter this week, after leading three other US Marines in the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha, Iraq in 2005.

He doesn’t even deny it. But the military court that has investigated the killings has determined that they don’t amount to murder, because they were carried out “in the heat of passion.”

Well, given that this was not a premeditated massacre but a situation in which a small group of Marines followed their leader on a rampage after their comrade was killed by an IED, there may be something to be said for this verdict.

However, I would have liked to see Wuterich get the murder charge anyway, because he is completely remorseless about the incident. In an interview on 60 Minutes last year, Wuterich told the world he’d done nothing wrong – in other words, he actually believes with hindsight that the rules of engagement in a counterinsurgency operation include barging into civilian homes with guns blazing and shooting until all inside are dead. If only because he has had the gall to behave publicly as if this is / should be standard operating procedure for the US military, the military should have made a prime example of him.

Retired Major General Walter Hoffman, Former Army Judge Advocate General, disagrees with me. He discussed the decision on the McNeil News Hour, and put it in these words:

“War is difficult enough without having to look over your shoulder to see if someone is going to file charges against you for making an error, when people around you are dying, and bullets are flying in the air, and explosions are going off.”

No sir. War is difficult enough without wondering whether anyone is looking over your commander’s shoulder, expecting you to expect him to expect you to behave like a warrior, instead of behaving like a berserker.

The Power of Just War Theory

International relations scholars of the realist ilk (as well as certain collaborators of mine on this blog) often express skepticism of the power of basic just war principles over the actions of weapons-bearers facing battle or governments facing grave security threats.

Evidence of this position is often given in the language of body counts. A litany of atrocities is listed, seemingly underscoring Sherman's famous dictum that "war is hell."

To that I would respond with Fredrick Kratochwil and John Ruggie's point that ethical norms "are counterfactually valid." You know they exist not because they are always followed, but because they are invoked even when they're broken.

As evidence of my position, consider this blog post reprinted on Armchair Generalist's website. It is the "in case of death" letter of a military blogger just killed in action in Iraq, the first US casualty of the New Year:

"I suppose I should speak to the circumstances of my death. It would be nice to believe that I died leading men in battle, preferably saving their lives at the cost of my own. More likely I was caught by a marksman or an IED. But if there is an afterlife, I'm telling anyone who asks that I went down surrounded by hundreds of insurgents defending a village composed solely of innocent women and children. It'll be our little secret, ok?"

Israel's Use of Cluster Bombs Legal? Wrong.

So, according to BBC, an inquiry by the Israeli government has considered the evidence against generals who deployed cluster munitions in urban areas during the 2006 war with Lebanon, and concluded – wait for it – that this was wholly consistent with international law:

According to BBC, “The Israeli army announced there would be no indictments against officers who used them, after a year-long enquiry.
‘The use of the weaponry was a concrete military necessity,’ a statement said.”

Israel’s Judge Advocate General has accepted this finding.

Hmm. Let’s see, cluster munitions themselves aren’t technically banned under international law, but articles 49 and 51 of the first Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions do outlaw indiscriminate attacks, including those resulting from the use of weapons whose effects by their nature cannot be controlled or directed at military objectives.

How do cluster munitions measure up against these standards? The weapons work by fragmenting into small “bomblets” after launch, which litter the target area, creating many small explosions on impact rather than one big one (though “small” is relative: a single BLU bomblet will kill anyone within 50 meters and severely injure anyone within 100 meters).

The main problem is many of the bomblets fail to explode when dropped, and sit around waiting for civilians (such as unsuspecting children who are attracted to their bright colors) to tamper with them, sometimes after the war is over.

Because of the high fail rates (between 8-12% in Kosovo, leading to more post-hoc civilian deaths than those from land mines; and up to 20% in Afghanistan), cluster munitions are now generally considered an inherently indiscriminate weapon – not because governments mean to hit civilians with them, but because their effects cannot be controlled after they’re deployed.

So, Israel’s dropping of an estimated 4 million of these onto Lebanese urban areas is illegal under international law for sure, eh?

One problem: Israel never actually became a party to Additional Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions, so arguably it’s not bound by those rules. Nor has it signed onto the 5th Additional Protocol to the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), which deals with Explosive Remnants of War. And even if they had, that treaty doesn’t ban the use of cluster munitions but only enjoins those states who’ve signed to clean up after themselves.

Nonetheless, the protection of civilians against indiscriminate attack is considered a part of customary international law, meaning that so many states agree it is wrong that it is to be considered criminal no matter whether the state that is responsible agrees it is or not.

Israel’s Judge Advocate General Avihai Mandelblit seems to accept as much, insofar as it he is not justifying the ruling on the basis of Israel’s non-party status to the relevant treaties. Instead, the public statement invokes a loophole in the language of humanitarian law that allows for carnage against civilians in cases of “military necessity.”

While no impartial war crimes court would likely consider this such a case – a settlement with Lebanon was already in the process of being reached when the weapons were used – the ruling does showcase the ambiguity of humanitarian law and the weakness of the legal protections that do exist for civilians (unlike the lengthy and detailed provisions for imprisoned combatants, go figure).

Actually, this ruling is probably good for the future of civilian protection, insofar as it will likely galvanize efforts to ban the use of these weapons outright. The Norwegian government has spearheaded an effort, now backed by 110 civil society organizations and 84 countries, including half the world’s stockpilers and half its producers, to draft an international treaty banning cluster munitions entirely by the end of 2008.

But the Israeli ruling also exposes another tremendous failing of the existing Geneva regime: that the only entities responsible for enforcing the rules are the very governments whose soldiers break them. No efforts on the horizo to draft a treaty to change this.

Are Civilian Contractors Working for an Occupying Force A Legitimate Military Objective?

Turkey Bombs PKK; BBC Misconstrues International Law

From BBC this morning:

"Turkish officials said the warplanes had targeted the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), in areas near the border.

But officials in northern Iraq said the planes had struck several villages. There were reports that one woman was killed, although this was unconfirmed.”

Here is a classic example of the media using the wrong indicators to gauge whether air attacks are targeting military objectives: the sex of the victims. So the story goes, if there are “women and children” dead, then the attack has hit civilians.


The assumption – quite wrong in the case of the PKK, with its 40% female fighters – is that if you’re a woman, you’re definitely a civilian. On the other hand the bodies are “battle-age males” all is fair game, irrespective of whether those males were involved in the fighting.

The same grisly logic was behind Ratko Mladic’s careful separation of “women and children” from men and boys at Srebrenica, prior to massacring 8,000 unarmed “battle-age” males (some as young as twelve); and the US government’s refusal to allow “battle-age” males to flee Fallujah with their families in 2004. These are, of course, illegal acts, since civilians are protected under the Geneva Conventions irrespective of sex, and that immunity is lost only when one takes up arms during an attack.

Anyway, by acting as if sex and age are some kind of proxy for “civilian status,” the news media is fomenting this faulty assumption that so often results in war crimes. Its reporting would be better to emphasize whether the victims appeared to be close to military objectives, or whether they were armed or otherwise doing something associated with the lawful target of the attack.

Worth Watching

Without endorsing any particular Republcian presidential candidate's overall platform, I must say the the following video is worth watching on its own merits:

Say WHAT???

According to the Washington Post, "Evidence from Waterboarding Could be Used in Military Trials":

"The top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress yesterday that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA's aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, a tactic that simulates drowning.

"Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, who oversees the prosecutors who will try the detainees at military commissions, said that while "torture" is illegal, he cannot say whether waterboarding violates the law. Nor would he say that such evidence would be barred at trial."

It was bad enough when the USG practiced waterboarding, allegedly to gain "actionable intelligence" in extreme cases, in violation of international and domestic law. But out and out claiming it is defensible as a means of gathering evidence for military trials must constitute some kind of bizarre tipping point.

What is the deal with this guy? Is he actually representing the policy of the USG or has just committed a political and legal blunder that will cost him his career? Let's hope the latter: distancing itself quickly from this argument and seeking the Hartmann's resignation would seem to be a no-brainer for the Bush Administration.

Comments on this article from the Post blog suggest such a move would have widespread support:

"This filthy sonofabitch should be drummed out of the military on his totalitarian fascist derriere. Even Republican Lindsay Graham can't stand him."

"With your support of using "evidence" obtained by torture you have smeared America, our constitution and our honor with your feces."

"God help this country. Can someone help me out with what to tell my kid about this, about what this country stands for?"

In reponse to that last, tell your kid this country stands for speaking out when your leaders predictably become corrupted by power. We as a people are not defined by the barbarism of our government's practices, so long as we actively oppose it. Let's hope the Senate Judiciary Committee remembers this.