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Search: battlefield robots

23 Jan

...an essentially open-ended nature, neither battlefield-type tribunals nor the CSRTs are really adequate. I don't have space here to go into what the correct form of procedure should be, but this principle seems to me the essential starting point. John Knox Geoffrey Corn says, ""Doubt" is the trigger for an Article 5 Tribunal. However, nothing in that provision of the Third Convention indicates that such doubt exists whenever an individual questions his status. Nor does state practice support such an assertion." As I noted earlier in response to one of...
23.01.07 | |

24 Jan

...suffering. In 1965, David Henry Mitchell II, who was eventually convicted of willful failure to report for induction, challenged the legality of Lyndon Johnson's war. He raised basic constitutional issues: the absence of a formal declaration, broken treaties, a pattern of war crimes on the battlefield. No soldier, Mitchell argued, should be forced to participate in criminal policies, to choose between near-sedition and the commission of war crimes. Federal Judge William Timbers refused to hear the evidence. When Mitchell's attorneys argued that under the Nuremberg Principles soldiers have a duty...
24.01.07 | |

25 Jan

...Commander in Chief for 4 years. His power therein is not contingent on his current poll numbers. He should certainly heed the opinion of the people, but ultimately, the judgement call is his. For true democratic control of the war, the people would require access to all our battlefield knowledge and information. Security makes this impractical, and the limitations of each citizen's time does as well. William J. Neill As a preface to what you read below, I am neither a Constitutional scholar nor an academic. I served in the...
25.01.07 | |

28 Jul

...detain people on the battlefield who are "innocent." There is simply no incentive for this behavior -- yet many on this board think it happens on a daily basis and would stretch any norm to keep it from happening. Meanwhile, I do deeply worry that the occasional innocent capture will be covered up by the administration, because it has every incentive to do so. Please note, I am not saying that what the Bush administration does is either lex lata or lex ferenda, I am just saying that there are...
28.07.08 | |

19 Oct

...value of a drone on the battlefield as anything more than a novelty. Once the war on terror started, and the value of drones became apparent to everyone. The Air Force jumped into the game and tried to muscle out the CIA. Unfortunately, almost immediately the Air Force drone program was caught in the inevitable Pentagon procurement death spiral where large numbers of a good enough system (predators/reapers) are sacrificed for fewer of a perfect-but as yet undeveloped system, see F-35. In the war on terror the drone's best asset...
19.10.11 | |

12 Oct

...standard. Whether it is the proper legal standard for necessity or not, it appears to address the necessity of the resort to force in a country without a battlefield. Unfortunately, I am not sure whether it can be said that the fact sheet contains an ad bellum proportionality standard, though it purports to impose a strict in bello standard. Jordan For evidence that the Obama Doctrine is in the alternative (i.e., both law of war paradigm and self-defense paradigm -- Koh, et al.) see http://ssrn.com/abstract=2402414 However, the U.S. cannot be...
12.10.14 | |

20 Oct

...or militia, or a law enforcement agency or civil defense force, they would meet combatant immunity criteria under the third Geneva Convention, or even the API provision Michael cites above. I, like Michael, have read in (unclassified) places that the CIA is being trained in the laws of war by JAGs. This may help to ensure that their means and methods in use-of-force operations comply with the laws of war, but it does not change their "battlefield status" under the laws of war. In other words, the particulars of their...
20.10.11 | |

12 Dec

...person should be held (as was done over and over in the First Gulf War) and their status, rather than the kind of blanket fiat approach of the Presidential terribly erroneous February 7, 2002 order. For persons captured away from the battlefield or in countries in which we are not in conflict, it is possible that Cole is seeing a possibility of them being detained and held upon some basis that can stand up for review by a court. Those persons are being assimilated to security detainees in an occupied...
12.12.08 | |

03 Oct

...Afghanistan, could the Taliban permissibly attack the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan or Central Command headquarters in Florida (from the perspective of IHL, not domestic criminal law)? To take that example further...if so, and if the Taliban elements exercising command and control of those attacks happened to be in a quiet neighborhood in Karachi, could the U.S. not counter those attacks with an armed attack against the command group operating beyond the battlefields of Afghanistan so long as its actions were consistent with IHL? In other words, why can't the...
03.10.11 | |

11 Jan

...to make each of those determinations. I for one am certain that the evidence used is tainted by the massive torture process that has gone on for so many years in our name. I doubt the reliability of the secret evidence. The conditions under which many of the detainees were picked up originally - as bounties as opposed to on a battlefield - are not hidden. This reality raises another issue about why people are being held. Yemen is dangerous - and with consent of the Yemen government it appears...
11.01.13 | |

25 Jun

Jessica Dorsey Though I can't say I was in agreement with it, Mike's TJIL article The Boundaries of the Battlefield (http://www.tilj.org/content/journal/47/num2/Lewis293.pdf) was one of the earliest pieces that led me to start my own research in the fields of IHL and counterterrorism. We organized a homonymous conference in 2013, http://www.asser.nl/about-the-institute/events/?id=733, at which we had the pleasure of welcoming Mike in The Hague as one of our high-level speakers. His easy mannerisms and sharp analysis during the panels and discussions enriched our event greatly, and we had hoped to invite Mike...
25.06.15 | |

05 Sep

...I coming into force) included a statement of this rule as binding on US forces. The position of DOD has been since that time that this is a binding rule of custom, and the fact that the United States rejected Additional Protocol I has never detracted from this position. It might be fair to point out the challenge of application of this rule in the context of the contemporary battlefield, and that contrary to the term used to characterize the rule, the exact language prohibits "excessive", and not "disprapportionate" collateral...
05.09.06 | |