Rather than start a new thread, I’ll just add to this one:
The news reports today have Obama saying that Seal Team 6 was prepared to shoot their way out of Pakistan if needed. They were authorized to engage in battle with Pakistani police and/or other security forces.
I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise, but I’m left aghast. Did we want ObL so badly that we were willing to kill security forces of a country that we are supposedly an ally with in this so-called WoT? What would the reaction be in Pakistan if we had killed x number of Pakistani security forces? Would we be safer having gotten ObL but deliberately killed x number of Pakistani “good guys” in the process? I’m having trouble answering that question in the affirmative.
Agreed. I’m just pointing out that you don’t necessarily have to believe Obama was in on the “conspiracy”.
Can you imagine how short Obama’s political career would be if he ordered the SEALs to give themselves up if Pakistani forces intervened? I agree with you, but consider the alternative. If he was going to send them in, the least he could do was not hamstribg them.
I’d rather he hadn’t revealed that he authorized the use of force against Pakistani forces, though.
I’m clearly not getting through to you, Yeticus Rex, but I’ll try just one more time.
No. Like I keep telling, if you’re a human being, you’re covered by at least one of the Geneva Conventions. The specific coverage will vary as you move in and out of the different categories (ex: civilians get more protection than POWs/wounded combatants, who in turn get more protection than active combatants), but no category gets “strip[ped] of protections,” as you would like. All categories have a common prohibition against willful killing, as set forth in Common Article 3, which you seem absolutely determined to ignore.
You’re editorializing. The Geneva Conventions do not have a category of “unlawful combatants;” that’s a self-serving Bush-era invention. The Geneva Convention does have a “combatant” category, which applies to enemies actively fighting your forces. These can be killed when engaged in combat. Possibly thinking and/or planning about future combat is not enough to satisfy this category; a combatant must actually be engaged in current combat. This means that the person has a gun, and is currently shooting at you with said gun.
I doubt I can break it down any further than that.
Thank you for sharing your opinion, but I was under the impression that we were discussing international law as it currently exists, not how we would like it to exist.
Well, alright, that’s a valid position. But how do you suppose the Geneva Conventions came to be in the first place? They certainly weren’t arbitrarily imposed on us by Martians…
Look, your country negotiated into the Geneva Conventions for the same reason that the other State Parties did - everybody wants to have their nationals treated with decency by others, and in exchange pledges to treat foreigners with decency. This works as long as the prohibitions are respected; as soon as you start talking about “special cases,” you may as well dump the treaties and go back to the Dark Ages. After all, absolutely any violation can than be justified as a “special case.”
I remember something that happened many years ago… Shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan, I believe there was at least one soldier that managed to get himself captured by the brave Afghani partisans. I was clicking through the TV channels, and encountered a Fox News host angrily addressing the captors… With unsuppressed rage, he was reading the Geneva Conventions as they apply to POWs.
Now, ignore for the time being that the partisans were likely not state actors, and thus not bound by the Geneva Conventions. Under your world view, why should we expect them to treat a captured US soldier humanely? Maybe they genuinely do respect and abide by the Geneva Conventions - but then they capture a Yankee, and that’s as “special” a case as any. Why not start removing body parts with a rusty butter knife, eh? If you’re fine with exceptions to the rule, you can’t really complain when the other side starts inventing grounds for its own exceptions; and then the Geneva Conventions are only useful as glorified toilet paper.
[QUOTE=Commissar]
The Geneva Conventions do not have a category of “unlawful combatants;” that’s a self-serving Bush-era invention.
[/QUOTE]
The use of the term ‘unlawful combatants’ is certainly not in the 3rd Geneva Convention, but it’s completely horseshit that this was a ‘Bush-era invention’, since it stems from a much earlier view of irregular combatants captured during hostilities. It’s hard to take you seriously when you say stuff like this.
Or…do you have a cite showing that Bush et al made up the whole ‘unlawful combatants’ thingy? Feel free to back that up.
Irregular and out of uniform combatants are treated differently under various protocols, and the language in the GC is vague about their status, mostly leaving up to authorized tribunals of the occupying country to decide what to do with them. I don’t believe that there is anything in there about ‘Possibly thinking and/or planning about future combat is not enough to satisfy this category’, but again, feel free to back up your assertions with some facts. I’d be shocked that an occupying power would have to wait for irregular (or regular) forces to actually shoot at them before they can take steps, though, so I’m highly skeptical and am putting this on par with your assertion that Bush et al made up the whole ‘unlawful combatants’ thing on the spot.
You might try to back up your assertions with some fact…that might help some.
I am not saying that the term was invented by Bush’s regime; I am saying that the “unlawful combatant” category, presented as a viable alternative to the categories set forth in the Geneva Convention, is an invention of the Bush regime. To the best of my knowledge, no other State Party has attempted to ignore its Geneva Conventions obligations by unilaterally creating a non-covered category of foreign detainees.
Also, I would appreciate it if you could debate calmly and without recourse to juvenile name-calling (in reference to your “horseshit” comment).
Sure, but you’re leaving out the part where the “tribunals” are expected to abide by their nation’s Geneva Conventions obligations. Yes, in vague situations, they can determine that the detainee is a civilian with no POW protections, and can be tried for, say, murder within the regular criminal justice system. Or they can determine that the person is a POW, cannot be tried, and will be released when hostilities cease.
What said tribunals cannot do is accept a bizarre third category that magically deprives the detainees of all Geneva Conventions rights and lock them up for life in an extra-judicial concentration camp in the Caribbean. That kind of goes a bit beyond what the treaties allow. :rolleyes:
I’d be shocked too. Then again, no one here is making such a claim, so I have no idea what you’re objecting to. There is nothing in the Geneva Conventions to prohibit the arrest and detention of suspects/criminals/combatants/commanders/etc. The one thing you cannot do is slaughter them in cold blood when it is possible to capture them and they are not engaged in current combat. Had the US captured bin Laden, there would have been no Geneva Conventions violation.
And yet we give them billions and billions of dollars each year.
That wasn’t the question I asked. Let me repeat:
“What would the reaction be in Pakistan if we had killed x number of Pakistani security forces? Would we be safer having gotten ObL but deliberately killed x number of Pakistani “good guys” in the process?”
I have no doubt that the insertion team had ROE allowing them to fire their weapons in self-defense from Pakistani police/military units. However, I still think that elements of Pakistan’s military were alerted ahead of time and that Obama’s announcement is meant to deflect attention away from that conclusion. If those forces were alerted ahead of time and standing down or providing a perimeter to keep out any hapless civilians, then you’d only need to fire your weapons on some guy who didn’t get the word, and was shooting at you. And hopefully, the likelihood of that would be small.
Like RNATB, I think he shouldn’t have made the announcement in the first place. Why keep the peculiarities of the raid on the front page? What purpose does this announcement serve? To tell Pakistan that the U.S. reserves the right to do something like this again, with guns blazing if necessary? That’ll help the stability of Pakistan’s government… At this point, the only people I’ve read who were still wondering about the specifics of the raid are military wonks and cranks, and no one listens to them anyway… Just keep your mouth shut and move on.
Like you, I have doubts about the utility of killing OBL, if it also meant killing a few dozen Pakistani police and military. Can you imagine how bad a bunch of blown up APCs/cop cars and dead Pakistani army/cops would have looked on Al Jazeera? Talk about inflaming the Muslim world… Frankly, I have a hard time not seeing that as an act of war. As it is, if I am a senior leader in Pakistan, I am strongly thinking that my Air Force is dangerously incompetent. And how far was the escalation going to go? Do you really think the raid didn’t have high CAP from F-22s and B-2s? Were the B-2s going to blast a corridor home through Pakistan’s IADS? Were F-22s going to shoot down any Pakistani aircraft that came near the ex-filtrating helos? Whole lot of ways this could have turned real ugly, real fast.
I am willing, to a point, to entertain that all this blustering on both sides is just so much Kabuki theater. But it’s starting to get to be too much. I’m am now beginning to think that we should either have gotten Pakistan to cooperate with us, or we shouldn’t have one the raid at all, rather than risk a out-and-out battle with Pakistani forces. Especially since, according to Obama, there was only slightly more than a 50/50 chance (per our intel) that ObL was actually there.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
“What would the reaction be in Pakistan if we had killed x number of Pakistani security forces? Would we be safer having gotten ObL but deliberately killed x number of Pakistani “good guys” in the process?”
[/QUOTE]
Probably very negative. Of course, we wouldn’t have DELIBERATELY killed x number of Pakistanis, there was simply a contingency that IF it all fell in the pot that the Seals would know what the ROE was. It takes a level of guts for someone in command to make a call like that so that the folks on the sharp end know what they can or should do if it goes really wrong. A lot of commanders would try and be vague or cover their own asses, rather than step up and take the responsibility by being clear if things go badly wrong.
What it really comes down to is whether you think getting Osama was important and worth the risk, or whether you think it would be better to just let him go, since obviously trying to work within the accepted status quo wasn’t getting us any close to getting him. We COULD have told the Pakistanis exactly where Osama was and let them deal with it…but my guess is that the outcome of that would have been very different, and those making the assessment and the call realized that.
No, not really. If you think we got lucky, and you don’t want to rely on luck in the future, then you act differently.
Things could have turned out real well in Iraq, if we had gotten lucky.
Well, I’ve been on record for a long time saying we’d be better off just keeping ObL marginalized rather than capturing or killing him.
But the option we had was to find some way to work with the Pakistanis on this. I’m not at all comfortable with the way this could have played out. ObL just isn’t important enough to me to risk getting in a firefight with the Pakistani Military. All we need is to destabilize that country and it’s buy-bye nukes. And we weren’t even very sure we were getting ObL, according to Obama.
People keep saying that, but I’m not sure it’s true, or to what extent it is true. We had this place under heavy surveillance, and maybe we could have flushed some of these alleged AQ sympathizers out. But mainly I hear that it is thought to be former government officials who are supposedly AQ sympathizers.
You’re not getting through to me because your argument is disingenuous.
I read Article 3. Many times. The line “Persons taking no active part in hostilities should be treated humanely (including military persons who have ceased to be active as a result of sickness, injury, or detention)” seems to be a point of contention. You see something there that protects ObL, while I do not. So let’s try to parse this out to see where the crux of misunderstanding is.
At the time of the SEALs encountering the resistance at the compound:
ObL was a civilian. True or False?
ObL was a POW. True or False?
ObL was previously wounded. True or False?
ObL was sick. True or False?
ObL was taking an active part in hostilities. True or False?
I have answered “False” to all of the above except for #5.
For your sake, I will use the term “active combatants” to absolve you from using the term “self-serving Bush-era invention”. ObL was still an active combatant by running an ongoing active terror organization, PLUS he had control of his security forces who were combatant against the SEALs, therefore making him a combatant by placing armed guards between him and the SEALs. It really doesn’t matter if he himself had a gun or not in his hands since he had hired guns already between him and the SEALs; he used them to resist capture.
Sure it was. It’s not like you’d have to tell everyone in the Pakistani parliament; you’d just need to talk to senior members of the air force, army, and whoever has their finger on the nukes. You’re not really asking for permission, so much as providing a warning that this isn’t India coming at them, and could their troops kindly not shoot at the helicopters flying in. Most of those guys, due to inter-service training in the U.S., at NTC, during joint exercises, or just from the 10 years of grab-assing around Af-Pak, probably have back channel ways to talk to senior leaders of the U.S. military and vice versa. Not sure how much notice they’d need to give in order for deconfliction to be effective. The shorter the time, the less chance it’d leak to OBL, of course.
(All this assumes of course that we take the courier story at face value, and not think that someone in the ISI didn’t decide that sheltering bin Laden was getting to be more trouble than it was worth, and sold him out. This also takes care of the thorny issue of determining whether OBL was really in the house or not.)
Repeating myself a bit from another thread, but the default option was always to level the house with a small JDAM or 4. That option is essentially unstoppable for the Pakistanis, and really, any other gov’t on the planet. The delay from being told where OBL was hiding, to the operation itself, was in trying to put together another option: the raid. But the U.S. always could blow up the house. With a B-2 orbiting in the area, it could be done w/in a minute.
So, make your series of calls and watch the house with your orbiting drone or from the hides the CIA had in the area. From all of the reports, the house didn’t have internet or telephone, and you’re no doubt monitoring all of the cellular traffic, so you can see if anyone shows up at the bin Laden villa or otherwise warns him. Maybe there’s another means for communicating, like flashing lights from another house in the area? Still, if anyone tries to leave, blow up the house with the small JDAMs. A lot more of a slap to Pakistan than leveling some guy’s hut in the NWTA with Hellfires, but not exactly unprecedented these last 10 years. If no one leaves, proceed with the raid. Trust in your contacts to ensure that the cops and military don’t try to interfere. If they do, then the ROE accounts for that. Given that most militaries aren’t instantly ready for combat 24/7, then hopefully you have the time you need to approach, assault, gather what you want, and leave the objective.
The cops are probably going to be the most challenging part of this. I wonder how they got the armed response units that AK84 mentioned to not interfere with a 30 minute long assault in their neighborhood?
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that my answer differ from yours:
(1) TRUE – because not combatant
(2) FALSE
(3) IRRELEVANT – doesn’t matter if he was wounded in the recent place
(4) TRUE – unless you view kidney failure as a trifling matter
(5) FALSE
The problem is that you simply assume that bin Laden was participating in hostilities, and you do not wish to have this assumption scrutinized. That’s not a viable argument, since the truth value of the assumption determines the outcome of the analysis.
As far as “active participation is hostilities is concerned,” the Red Cross suggests the following test: “Measures preparatory to the execution of a specific act of direct participation in hostilities, as well as the deployment to and the return from the location of its execution, constitute an integral part of that act.”
Well, that makes sense. But what happens if you don’t know that an individual is planning any future “hostilities?” Red Cross: “All feasible precautions must be taken in determining whether a person is a civilian and, if so, whether that civilian is directly participating in hostilities. In case of doubt, the person must be presumed to be protected against direct attack.”
Oh, and then there’s this: “In addition to the restraints imposed by international humanitarian law on specific means and methods of warfare, and without prejudice to further restrictions that may arise under other applicable branches of international law, the kind and degree of force which is permissible against persons not entitled to protection against direct attack must not exceed what is actually necessary to accomplish a legitimate military purpose in the prevailing circumstances.”
Seems like as good a test as any to me. Why don’t you attempt to satisfy it by proving that bin Laden was scheming up some hostilities when killed. And, after you do that, go ahead and prove that nothing short of murder was available in this case. Then, and only then, will you have a strong argument for your position. I’ll wait.
So if Bin Laden was drafting communiques to his generals all day, but right as the SEALS broke in, he was taking a break making a baloney sandwich, he was not a legitimate target? Is that how you are spinning this? If we had dropped a JDAM on his compound and blown him to Osamareens, it would be just as legitimate.
not..arbitrarily..imposed..by..Martians.. Ok, got it.
Right. The Geneva Conventions frankly are a sharp bit of philosophy.
Well, to some of us it is obvious when bullshit is resorted to.
I’m sorry the war exposed you to FOX News. But I don’t believe Afghanistan is even a country, so I do not expect the Geneva Conventions to be respected. And that is actually one of the reasons I think the US should GTFO of Afghanistan.
Easy. Without a state, there are no state actors.
Not so fast, pardner. Are you reading my mind? Are you a fucking adept at telekenesis, clairvoyance, clairaudience or some other craft of magic? Because suddenly you are talking about ‘my world view’, and I wonder how you could have become such an authority on it, considering I do not recall discussing with you at length my world view. Anyway
I don’t. I don’t think the Geneva Conventions carry any weight with Joe Afghanistan, because there is no state.
Not so terribly unusual the last decade or so. Maybe some of them have heard of the Geneva Conventions, I don’t know, but frankly without a state they aren’t binding or even very relevant.
I don’t know what would stop them. They don’t even know who we are. They live in a tribal society- NOT a state.
Yah, but now you’re changing the subject from all that crap to OBL, who is clearly not some ‘generic’ special case, but rather, as I already stated, a 1. Unique 2. National 3. Focus of attention 4. for over a decade. Who else? Who! Stalin? Americans hate him, but already dead sorry. Satan? Not real, sorry. Bush? People don’t actually want to kill him honestly. I don’t see who tops OBL in the national ‘kill-that-guy’ consciousness. And with good reason IMHO.
Without a state, you’re lucky to get that much use out of them.