PrairiePundit

Daily Mail on Sunday: We're not Russians, honest! Putin tries to pull wool over world's eyes as he sends 60 unmarked army trucks carrying hundreds of debadged soldiers from the east into Crimea A convoy of 60 unmarked military trucks carrying soldiers were spotted making their way from east Ukraine into Crimea (left). Russia has denied any affiliation with the several different military forces making their way via land and sea into Ukraine, which still remains severely divided after the government overthrow, with small pockets of violent protest still taking place throughout the peninsula, and a Russian blockade in the Black Sea (inset right) that is preventing any use of the Ukrainian navy. Currently 30,000 Russian troops are estimated to be in Ukraine. The Geneva Conventions require that troops wear identifying insignia when engaged in operations.  The Russians are clearly ignoring this requirement and feel invulnerable.  It is anther instance of the failure of inter...

While it is a good argument, this court has ignored fundamental principals of contract law in the recent past.  In a case involving the Geneva Conventions which by their own terms are only between the "high contracting partners" they force the US to provide Geneva type protections for unlawful combatants like al Qaeda even though it is in effect a unilateral contract which is supposed to be unenforceable.

Arthur Herman: On Sept. 18, Army Spec. Chazray Clark stepped on an IED in Kandahar province, instantly losing an arm and both legs. But the 24-year-old Michigan native was still able to say, “I’m OK,” when his sergeant frantically called out his name. The patrol’s commander immediately radioed for an Army Medevac helicopter, or Dustoff.   Clark’s comrade applied turniquets and carried him back to the landing zone for pickup. There they waited — and waited.   The Dustoff they needed was only two or three minutes away at a forward operating base. It couldn’t take off because, under Army rules, the rescue helicopters with their clearly marked red crosses need an armed-helicopter escort to enter a hot combat zone — and none were available.   An armed Air Force Medevac helo was available at Kandahar Air Base. It could have been dispatched to pick up Clark, who was still talking and fully conscious. The Army said no; rules are rules.   Finally, a Dustoff...

James Simpson: The  U.S. military  has developed the best system in the world for dealing with combat casualties. As medical technology has advanced, new methods of treatment have been developed, and the speed and efficiency of transport from the battlefield to essential medical services has greatly increased chances for combat wounded to survive. So it is particularly galling that with all these improvements, the  U.S. Army  has not similarly adjusted its regulations regarding deployment of medical evacuation (medevac) helicopters in combat zones to reflect the realities of modern warfare. It is bad enough that the  Obama administration  has imposed deadly rules of engagement to hobble the  military . The  U.S. Army  has been racking up its own body count. A new article in Soldier of Fortune magazine by  Dalton Fury , former Delta Force  commander and best-selling author of “Kill Bin Laden,” has explained the problem....

Marc Thiessen: It was disappointing to see  The Post’s editorial on waterboarding  this morning replete with so many discredited arguments.  Reasonable people can disagree about whether the United States should resume using enhanced interrogation techniques (as it appears it will if a Republican assumes the presidency in January 2013).  But we should at least debate this proposition based on facts. For example, The Post writes: “Imagine that a U.S. soldier is captured and subjected to waterboarding. Would Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann consider that torture?  Maybe not, given their disappointing responses to a question about waterboarding posed during Saturday’s Republican debate. And if they did object to the soldier’s treatment, they’ve lost the moral authority to argue against it.” Well, no.  It would be illegal for a foreign adversary to waterboard a U.S. soldier, even if the technique did not amount to torture. American troops are  l...

Michael Yon: Army Dustoff MEDEVAC helicopter crews have been performing stellar work in Afghanistan. When troops are wounded, the Dustoffs go into hostile territory often while taking ground fire. Most interesting: they go in unarmed. The helicopters are emblazoned with the Red Cross, and so according to the Geneva Conventions they are not allowed to carry offensive weapons. Just what constitutes an offensive weapon is another line of discussion, but the bottom line is that Dustoffs do not carry machine guns. The Air Force Pedro rescue helicopters are not burdened with the Red Cross, and so they carry two .50 caliber machine guns. The U.S. Marines and British Army also don’t burden themselves with the Red Cross, nor are there the World War II-type scenes with medics wearing crosses on their sleeves. The medics are armed. In fact, some medical crews working in Kabul are armed even while in the operating room. The Taliban and other enemies in Afghanistan do not subscribe to the ...

Image via Wikipedia Jack Goldsmith: THE Obama administration wants to show that federal courts can handle trials of Guantánamo Bay detainees, and had therefore placed high hopes in the prosecution of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani , accused in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa . On Wednesday a federal judge, Lewis Kaplan of the United States District Court in Manhattan, made the government’s case much harder when he excluded the testimony of the government’s central witness because the government learned about the witness through interrogating Mr. Ghailani at a secret overseas prison run by the C.I.A. Some, mostly liberals and civil libertarians, applauded the ruling, saying it showed that the rule of law is being restored. But many conservatives denounced it as proof that high-level terrorists cannot reliably be prosecuted in civilian courts and should instead be tried by military commissions. The real lesson of the ruling, however, is that prosecution ...

Dexter Filkins, NY Times: A man driving a Toyota minivan laden with explosives steered into an American convoy on Tuesday morning, killing 18 people, including 5 Americans, and wounding 47 civilians, caught in rush-hour traffic in the Afghan capital. The five American military personnel killed in the attack were not identified. A sixth soldier from another NATO country was also killed, officials said. The blast scattered body parts for 200 feet as the wounded, many of them women and children, some without limbs, lay in the road moaning for help. In a passenger bus, an Afghan woman lay dead in her seat, cut in half, with her baby still squirming in her arms. “I just dove on the ground to try to save myself,” said Mafouz Mahmoodi, an Afghan police officer. “And then I got up, and I saw the terrible scene.” The Taliban took responsibility for the attack in a posting on its Web site, saying the group had dispatched a young man named Nizamuddin, a resident of Kabu...

Keith Allred: ... The Geneva Conventions that comprise a substantial part of the law of armed conflict were debated and drafted in the aftermath of World War II, which left Europe and much of Asia in ruins and as many as 80 million people dead. Tragically, most of the dead were civilians and much of the damage was done to civilian property. The Convention drafters were clearly focused on preventing a recurrence. Central to this weighty objective was a scheme for clarifying who could and who could not engage in hostilities and what could and could not be attacked. The drafters divided the field into two major categories: combatants and civilians. Combatants may engage in hostilities, civilians may not. Combatants may be attacked, civilians may not. To help make this division work in practice, combatants are carefully defined, and generally speaking they're the members of the armed forces of the nations at war. Everyone else is a civilian. To enforce this scheme and to ...

NY Times: Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal , the top American commander in Afghanistan, has brought most American Special Operations forces under his direct control for the first time, out of concern over continued civilian casualties and disorganization among units in the field. “What happens is, sometimes at cross-purposes, you got one hand doing one thing and one hand doing the other, both trying to do the right thing but working without a good outcome,” General McChrystal said in an interview. Critics, including Afghan officials, human rights workers and some field commanders of conventional American forces, say that Special Operations forces have been responsible for a large number of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and operate by their own rules. ... General McChrystal has made reducing civilian casualties a cornerstone of his new counterinsurgency strategy, and his campaign has had some success: last year, civilian deaths attributed to the United States milit...

Paul Robinson: Last week the United Nations issued a report painting the Israelis as major violators of international law in the three-week Gaza war that began in December 2008. While many find the conclusion a bit unsettling or even bizarre, the report's conclusion may be largely correct. This says more about international law, however, than it does about the propriety of Israel's conduct. The rules of international law governing the use of force by victims of aggression are embarrassingly unjust and would never be tolerated by any domestic criminal law system. They give the advantage to unlawful aggressors and thereby undermine international justice, security and stability. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter forbids all use of force except that for "self-defense if an armed attack occurs." Thus the United Kingdom's 1946 removal of sea mines that struck ships in the Strait of Corfu was held to be an illegal use of force by the International Court of Justice, even t...

NY Times: The Obama administration is establishing a new unit within the State Department for countering militant propaganda in Afghanistan and Pakistan , engaging more fully than ever in a war of words and ideas that it acknowledges the United States has been losing. Proposals are being considered to give the team up to $150 million a year to spend on local FM radio stations, to counter illegal militant broadcasting, and on expanded cellphone service across Afghanistan and Pakistan. The project would step up the training of local journalists and help produce audio and video programming, as well as pamphlets, posters and CDs denigrating militants and their messages. Senior officials say they consider the counterpropaganda mission to be vital to the war. “Concurrent with the insurgency is an information war,” said Richard C. Holbrooke , the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who will direct the effort. “We are losing that war. “The Taliban have unrestricted, unc...

CNN: As the defenders of a besieged Bosnian town prepared to retreat, the prisoners of war held captive in the local jail feared the worst. "The prisoners were saying, 'If the town falls they will shoot us before they leave,'" recalls Charlotte Lindsey, a Red Cross field worker in the Balkans during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. "We went to the prison authorities and we said, "Look, you cannot let this happen. You are responsible for these prisoners." Forty-eight hours later, after the town had been captured, Lindsey and her Red Cross colleagues returned to find the prison empty. But the prisoners had all been found alive and liberated by the incoming army. "We interviewed some of the prisoners and they said the director of the prison and his deputy had stood in front of them to protect them," says Lindsey, now deputy director of communication for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). "They told us: 'They wa...

Observer /Guardian: Taliban fighters wearing suicide vests and armed with AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked the main police station in the eastern Afghan city of Khost yesterday. Their assault triggered lengthy gun battles that left seven militants dead and 14 people wounded, officials said. The attack was one of the most audacious in recent years and took place in an area that it was hoped had been stabilised. Khost is a major provincial centre and the site of one of the biggest US bases in Afghanistan . The assault signalled a further escalation in Taliban tactics of targeting poorly defended government installations rather than heavily armed international troops. One aim is to drive a wedge between local forces and officials and those trying to protect them. Local forces are attacked directly, international soldiers are struck with remote-controlled bombs. In recent weeks, tribal leaders have seen a major influx of fighters who are fleeing operations on the Pakist...

Reuters: Afghanistan's Taliban called on Americans to put pressure on their government over the capture of a U.S. soldier, saying in an internet message that Washington could not win the war despite its modern weaponry. "We call on the American people to see the tape of their captured soldier and listen to what he says," said the Taliban statement, an Arabic translation of which was posted on Islamist websites. "Let them make serious and productive efforts toward ending his detention," it said. In a video released by the Taliban at the weekend the captured soldier, named by the Pentagon as private Bowe Bergdahl, 23, said he was scared and missed his family. Prompted by his captors, he said Americans had "the power to make our government bring them (troops) home." ... I am sure the Red Cross will be all over the Taliban on this demanding they stop violating the Geneva Conventions ...

NY Times: An Al Qaeda affiliate in North Africa said on Wednesday that it had killed a Briton it abducted in Mali last January. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there was “strong reason to believe” that the captive had been executed. He called the killing “barbaric.” The Briton, identified as Edwin Dyer, was taken hostage on January 22 along with a Swiss citizen and two other tourists in Niger, close to the border with Mali, but was held in Mali. The group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb , had demanded the release of Abu Qatada , a Jordanian-born Palestinian cleric held in Britain whom a Spanish judge has called the leading Al Qaeda lieutenant in Europe. Britain has said he is a “significant international terrorist” but he has denied belonging to Al Qaeda. ... This comes only a day after Zawahiri ranted against the US "failure" to follow the Geneva Conventions. You can be assured that outside this blog there will be little to no mention of the Geneva Conventions in conn...

CNN: On the eve of President Obama's highly anticipated speech to the Muslim world, al Qaeda's second-in-command issued an audio statement saying the president of the United States is not welcome in Egypt. Obama is traveling to the Middle East in an effort to repair a damaged U.S. image and reset relations with the Islamic world. But the terrorist network's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, said those relations cannot be mended as long as the administration maintains its alliance with Israel. In a message called "Tyrants of Egypt and America's agents welcome Obama" that was posted on Islamist Web sites, al-Zawahiri once again lashed out at the United States. Obama's message to the Muslim world, he said, has already been delivered with his support for "Zionist aggression." "The White House declared that Obama will send a message from Egypt to the Islamic world but they forget that his messages were already received when he visited the W...

NBC: "I was given $122 to drop chips wrapped in cigarette paper at al-Qaida and Taliban houses," confessed 19-year-old Habibur Rehman, just before the Taliban shot him dead for spying for the United States. "If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars," he said. In a video released last week by the Taliban as a warning to other would-be spies, Rehman recounted how he was recruited to spy on the Taliban in North Waziristan and drop small transmitter chips on specific targets to call in CIA pilotless drone aircraft. "I thought this was a very easy job," Rehman said in the video before he was killed. "The money was good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money." The chips transmit a signal to a satellite overhead. The drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, are controlled and remotely piloted by the CIA in the United States, according to Pakistani...

NY Times: Every day from the deck of this nuclear-powered aircraft carrier off the coast of Pakistan, two dozen combat planes are catapulted into the sky for the 500-mile trip to southern Afghanistan . There the pilots circle Taliban strongholds like an airborne 911 service and zoom in when American and British troops, spread thin and often panicked, call in airstrikes. The Navy has been back in these waters providing more air power since August, in large part because the ground reinforcements that commanders have been pleading for have not yet come. From 15,000 feet up, the pilots protect supply lines under increasing attack, fly reconnaissance missions to find what they call “bad guys” over the next hill, and go “kinetic” with bombs that kill three, four or five Taliban fighters at a time. They can always tell when troops who call in airstrikes are under direct fire. “They’re trying to talk to you at the same time that they’re running and being shot at, so obviously there’s a lot of...

Jerusalem Post: ... In addition to stressing the role of humanitarian instruction and legal counsel in IDF operational decision-making, the strategy involves a heavy dose of turning the tables on Hamas and emphasizing the terrorist group's own humanitarian violations. Under the heading "distinction," the accompanying slide show emphasize Hamas's use of civilian structures with special status and protection such as mosques and medical facilities, describing it as part of Hamas's "modus operandi." The use of such structures, the presentation emphasizes, "renders them legitimate military targets." It then stresses that this behavior by Hamas "is in breach of international law and amounts to war crimes." The talking points blast Hamas for "intentionally and systematically endangering civilians by imbedding themselves within the civilian population," and condemn Hamas's "despicable methods of warfare" which "h...