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Search: battlefield robots

18 Apr

...from the military hospital in which he was staying. The US is dispatching army planners to Jordan but is wary of direct American intervention in Syria. Human Rights Watch has urged Libya to allow access for Al-Senussi, char For readers who follow the US’ current conflict with al-Qaeda and affiliated forces closely, you may recall two guest posts (here and here) about a recent symposium entitled The Boundaries of the Battlefield. The organizers of that symposium (full-disclosure: I was one of them) have written a summary report on the symposium....
18.04.13 | |

27 Feb

...target is planning a terrorist attack; what, if any, the battlefield limits are; and what, if any, is the basis in law. . . . . . . On balance, President Obama, who campaigned against the “dark side” of the war on terror and has insisted that America must lead by example as a nation of laws, owes Americans an accounting of his targeted killing program. Revenge killings don’t pass the test for me. They’re unacceptable under international law. I want to know that any target is selected because there...
27.02.10 | |

09 May

...for perpetrating the acts of abuse at Abu Ghraib. That finding had been supported in the 12 other major reviews conducted by the Department of Defense, the delegation said. There had been a total of 120 deaths of detainees in Department of Defense control in Afghanistan and Iraq. There had been no deaths in Guantanamo. The vast majority of deaths were caused by factors such as natural causes, injuries sustained on the battlefield, or detainee-on-detainee violence. In only 29 cases had abuse or other violations of law or policy been...
09.05.06 | |

25 Jan

...status is due. Thus, for example, if we catch Osama Bin Laden running from the battlefield, there would be no doubt that he is not entitled to POW protections and the Conventions would not mandate an Article 5 review. As I stated in my last post, in response to Ken Anderson, we have in any event provided those detained at Guantanamo more extensive procedural protections in the CSRT process than in a typical Article 5 tribunal, including the opportunity to be heard from, to present reasonably available evidence, to obtain...
25.01.07 | |

21 May

Details here. Assuming that we’re talking foot soldiers, this seems a pretty thin argument for keeping the rest under wraps, even through a cost-benefit/national interests optic. The equation: How much does keeping Gitmo up and running hurt US interests v. how much damage can released detainees cause if they return to the battlefield. I’m betting that for all but the very few high-level detainees, the former presents a much more serious (if diffuse) continuing hit. The proportion of Gitmo recidivists (assuming that’s the right description) is much more favorable than...
21.05.09 | |

30 Sep

...return of combatants to the battlefield during conflict.” International law, consistent with Charming Betsy, was imported into the statute in Hamdi, and now the plurality in Hamdi controls Padilla. The statute implicitly authorized detentions of enemy combatants consistent with the laws of war, and the Executive branch, the Fourth Circuit held, is acting consistent with those obligations. No meaningful distinction was made between an American and non-American enemy combatant. Nor was there any meaningful distinction made between the conventional war at issue in Hamdi (the ongoing war in Afghanistan) and...
30.09.05 | |

10 Jan

...the foreign forces were still present in Afghanistan and party to the ongoing armed conflict at the time. What might be made of the remedial obligation – that is, if IHL duties of protection are not met, what follows – that the applicants raised? In short, we typically think of the protection of civilians as actions taken on the battlefield, but in such special circumstances where there is an acknowledged special connection between the civilians in question and the state, could bureaucratic actions taken at home such as the proper...
10.01.22 | |

12 Jan

...of guidance as to the interpretation of the authorization of the use of military force in the Hamdi case, where the court interpreted that enactment and determined that the detention of an individual who was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan fell within the scope of that. And they relied there, I think, on customary practices in the conduct of warfare in determining what fell within the scope of the authorization. FEINSTEIN: Let me stop you right here, because that’s right. Because detention is a necessary following of an authorization...
12.01.06 | |

05 Feb

...the Tadic test: the organization requirement. The White Paper simply assumes that “al-Qa’ida and its associated forces” constitute a single organized armed group for purposes of IHL — “a transnational, non-state actor” that is “one of the parties” involved in “the non-international armed conflict between the United States and al-Qa’ida that the Supreme Court recognized in Hamdan” (emphasis mine). Indeed, the White Paper must make that assumption because, by its own admission, what justifies targeting a “senior operational leader” away from an active battlefield is precisely that, as a member...
05.02.13 | |

02 Mar

Last year the British media entered into a voluntary agreement with the British Ministry of Defence to have a news blackout of Prince Harry’s deployment in Afghanistan. Harry had been serving there about ten weeks when the news broke on the Drudge Report of his whereabouts. The BBC is now defending the news blackout. From the sounds of it, in exchange for extensive filming of Harry on the battlefield, the British press would keep mum about his deployment to Afghanistan. “So, for the past ten weeks, the BBC, ITV and...
02.03.08 | |

15 Dec

...without formal precedential value, it is predictable that other federal judges would reach the same result. The idea that military commission rules offer any legitimate advantage over federal courts is simply wrong. While Ghailani’s judge did exclude one witness the government desired to use on the basis that he had been identified through coercive interrogation, military commission rules should have produced the same result. In general, military commission rules for handling classified information are now very closely based on those used in federal courts, while issues such as battlefield intelligence...
15.12.10 | |

06 Jul

...this guy? Presumably it was acting under the statutory AUMF we’ve been discussing so much of late (e.g. here), on the theory that the statute authorizing the President to use force against those persons and organizations he deems responsible for the attacks of 9/11. That such persons or organizations may be captured outside the confines of the Afghan/Pakistan battlefield has long been a (more or less explicit) part of both Bush and Obama administrations’ readings of that statute, a reading informed (in this administration) by the understanding that the international...
06.07.11 | |