Northman's Fury

It looks as though somebody has finally noticed that under the Bush Administration's overly broad definition of who qualifies as an "unlawful combatant", the PMCs the US is using in Iraq probably qualify:

The guards also operate under immunity from Iraqi law -- immunity was granted in 2004 by U.S. officials -- and in a murky status with respect to American laws.

The designation of lawful and unlawful combatants is set out in the Geneva Convention.Lawful combatants are nonmilitary personnel who operate under their military's chain of command. Others may carry weapons in a war zone but may not use offensive force. Under the international agreements, they may only defend themselves.

It's quite clear that PMCs like Blackwater are not under the military's chain of command. The question then revolves around how you define "defensive force". The problem with that, of course, is that if you define it in such a way that allows these PMCs to fight those they believe have "hostile intent", as the US military likes to say, then you also have to apply that standard to the insurgents the US is fighting. Want to argue that an invading and occupying military force doesn't have "hostile intent"?

John Hutson, a former top Navy lawyer, said he did not consider contractors to be unlawful combatants.

But that will be a difficult argument for U.S. officials to make, he emphasized.

"We are going to be hard-pressed to draw a distinction between the guys in Blackwater carrying automatic weapons and the bad guys setting bombs along the side of the road," said Hutson, now dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire.

U.S. officials have described many of the suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban affiliates it holds at Guantanamo Bay as unlawful combatants either for taking part in hostilities against the United States or by supporting the hostilities while not part of a nation's military.

By that standard, some of the private guards in Iraq and Afghanistan also could be seen as unlawful combatants, particularly if they have taken offensive action against unarmed civilians, experts said.

I would leave it at that, except there is one more paragraph that caught my eye.

Many of the current and former federal officials think the administration has an obligation under the Geneva Convention to clarify the contractors' status. Some are perplexed that the Bush administration did not resolve these issues -- or at least discuss them more thoroughly -- before putting contractors on such a complex battlefield.

Perplexed? Really? Have these guys been paying the slightest attention to what the administration has been doing for the last six years? For one, they have a very different definition of "resolving" an issue. As long as they have some sort of legal memo covering their asses, they probably consider the issues resolved.

Second, they've stated that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and don't apply to these wars. Why clarify the contractors' status for a treaty you're going to ignore?

While there have been numerous stories recently about the increased use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) like Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what the use of such companies without any effective oversight or legal framework is doing to the whole, “hearts and minds” strategy, there is little or no focus on what this is doing to the military itself.

The US has always fought its major wars with citizen-soldiers; average, run-of-the-mill men called up to defend their country and performing heroically. It’s part of the mythos of the nation, from the minutemen to the “greatest generation”, and for the most part it has served them well.

That model broke down in Vietnam because the war dragged on without any clear threat to the US as a whole, and the American people stopped supporting drafting soldiers to fight in such a conflict. The military subsequently became an all-volunteer force. Professional soldiers instead of citizen-soldiers would fight future conflicts.

The Iraq War has seen the extension of this, not just by relying on mercenaries to fill the gaps the volunteer force doesn’t have the men to fill, but by making the volunteer force a mercenary force in its own right.

Two recent stories to illustrate what I mean:

The Army is offering cash bonuses of up to $35,000 to retain young officers serving in key specialties -- including military intelligence, infantry and aviation -- in an unprecedented bid to forestall a critical shortage of officer ranks that have been hit hard by frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

. . .

In response, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates approved the unusual incentives last month as a temporary measure for this fiscal year, and over the past three weeks, more than 6,000 Army captains have accepted cash awards ranging from $25,000 to $35,000 in exchange for committing to serve three more years.

And:

The Pentagon has paid more than $100 million in bonuses to veteran Green Berets and Navy SEALs, reversing the flow of top commandos to the corporate world where security companies such as Blackwater USA are offering big salaries.

. . .

Overall, more than 1,200 of the military's most specialized personnel near or already eligible for retirement have opted for payments of up to $150,000 in return for staying in uniform several more years.

The US government’s decision to privatize war-fighting has not only proved a boon for mercenary contractors, but has made the US military itself a competitor for top military talent on the open market. Where before the call to serve one’s country would have been the enticement to keep men in uniform, it’s now moving more heavily towards financial incentives to offset private competition.

Gives a whole new meaning to “the best military money can buy”.

The plan apparently calls for the Marines to take over the leading role in Afghanistan, where they are currently almost non-existant, and leave the ground operations in the Iraq War to the Army. On the face of it, it sounds like a simpler deployment schedule for both services, but what caught my attention in the report was this piece:

The Marine proposal could also face resistance from the Air Force, whose current role in providing combat aircraft for Afghanistan could be squeezed if the overall mission was handed to the Marines. Unlike the Army, the Marines would bring a significant force of combat aircraft to that conflict.

. . .

Military officials say the Marine proposal is also an early indication of jockeying among the four armed services for a place in combat missions in years to come. “At the end of the day, this could be decided by parochialism, and making sure each service does not lose equity, as much as on how best to manage the risk of force levels for Iraq and Afghanistan,” said one Pentagon planner.

Tensions over how to divide future budgets have begun to resurface across the military because of apprehension that Congressional support for large increases in defense spending seen since the Sept. 11 attacks will diminish, leaving the services to compete for money.

It is a measure of just how dysfunctional the US military is when the debate about how to deploy troops boils down to how certain services can continue to justify their budgets. The Navy and Air Force don't want the Army to get more money than them, even if their contribution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is, shall we say, considerably less. This is, I'm sure, why part of Operation Enduring Freedom, aka the Afghan campaign, includes a naval component to interdict the land-locked nation. A brilliant use of resources.

It comes in large part because the US, and its allies, are trying to fight these wars using their peace-time military forces. There was a time that fighting wars meant massively increasing the size of the military to deal with the threat and then draw back down when the fighting was over. Since the "War on Terror" is designed to be a perpetual war, it needs to be fought with a perpetual military force, which also means perpetual budget battles between services.

So if the Marines take over Afghanistan and the Army leaves, the Air Force is no longer required to be there in any major combat role either. Less combat roles might translate into less pork from Congress for shiny new toys. So the real battle won't be about whether this makes logistical sense, but whether each service still gets their allotment of defence contracts. It should be interesting to see how it plays out.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

. . .

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alert to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

Since there is no information yet as to who or why the data was leaked, it is hard to make any accusations beyond sheer incompetence, which given the Bush administration’s record, means business as usual.

It is, however, reminiscent of a different politically-timed disclosure of an intelligence asset that disrupted a high-level sting operation. You almost wonder if they want the terrorists to remain free.

When scoring political points is more important than using intelligence assets properly, you are setting yourself up for quite a fall.

Since Blackwater, USA has gotten some, let's say bad press recently, the US State Department has been under fire for its use of the mercenary contractors. (If only someone would put our government's feet to the fire for their use of these guys.)

Anyway, Condi Rice has come up with a solution to make it appear as though the State Department is going to hold Blackwater accountable.

Under orders issued by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, video cameras will be mounted in Blackwater vehicles and federal agents will ride with the security contractors who escort diplomatic convoys.

. . .

The State Department will also deploy dozens of additional in-house Diplomatic Security agents to accompany Blackwater guards.

What use these agents and their video cameras will be when the mercenaries themselves still exist in a kind of legal limbo land where nobody can charge and convict them for any crime should be an interesting test. Of course, this is also the government who still won't allow all the pictures and videos from the Abu Ghraib investigations released despite repeated judicial orders, so the odds of anyone seeing any bad stuff from the cameras is virtually nil.

But beyond all that is a point put quite eloquently by Dave at the Galloping Beaver:

So, in order to continue to give Blackwater USA and its Republican-connected chairman, Erik Prince, a nice juicy government contract in Iraq, the government will pay to have government security agents ride along with the private security agents which the government has hired to relieve government security agents of the task of protecting State Department personnel.

I don't want to say "redundancy and waste" too loudly, but how much sweeter a deal can Blackwater get?!

Since it is often fashionable for the torture apologists of the Bush Administration to compare the current war against a noun to the struggle against fascism in WWII, the story of the men who were in charge of interrogating Nazi war prisoners is particularly damning of the tactics the Administration is defending.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"I feel like the military is using us to say, 'We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now,' " said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.

What's truly amazing about all this is reading people like Sister Toldjah and Captain Ed try to explain that the Third Reich and its adherents, with the world's largest military budget at the time, with its submarines targeting civilian liners, and its bombers and missiles raining down on civilian population centres, its armies ravaging the better part of two continents, and, oh, that little thing about putting some 12 million people, half of them Jews, into gas chambers, were really not that bad because they, "believed themselves civilized and members of the Western culture." (Yay for Western culture!)

Therefore treating the Nazis like human beings in WWII was apparently okay, but when faced with the ungodly terrible threat of few blokes in caves who can occasionally manage to kill a few dozen civilians at a time, we should immediately get rid of every legal framework and law that would require interrogators to retain any shred of humanity and do our worst to whomever we capture, be they high-value or not, in the hopes that we may get confessions good enough to justify our new tactics.

different threats sometimes require different strategies

Too true, and it is unfortunate that Bush and his supporters have some serious delusions about which threats are greater and what strategies actually work.

Iceland has withdrawn its solitary soldier positioned in Iraq today. John Avarosis has posted his story.