January 29, 2002

SPEAKING AND REMOVING ALL DOUBT,

SPEAKING AND REMOVING ALL DOUBT, vol. 9 -- THE SPECTATOR'S STEVEN GLOVER

Steven Glover tries to defend his recent savaging by Mark Steyn for gullibly accepting the rather silly Herold "study". First off, Steyn's (and my) competing source, Human Rights Watch, denies it made an estimate of 1,000 civilian fatalities.

Was it possible, I asked — mindful of Mark’s Americo-centric view of the world and his likely suspicion that the London office is a provincial offshoot of Human Rights Watch — that the New York arm would have offered its own statistics? No, it was not possible... So far as I can see, the only person in the world who has produced a comprehensive toll of civilian dead is Marc Herold

Someone better tell Murray Campbell of the Globe and Mail, who quoted a New York-based HRW official (who he names in the piece) on Jan. 3 as giving him the 1,000 statistic. Part of that quote, again:

Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based organization, offers a rough estimate of at least 1,000 civilian deaths, while the Reuters news agency said Wednesday that perhaps 982 people have died in 14 incidents where non-military targets were hit by bombs.

I have so far seen four attempts at an estimate, including the two above, as I outlined earlier. Never letting a fact get in the way of his argument, however, Glover continues:

[Herold]...strikes me as being surprisingly lucid for an American academic, and measured and balanced in its tone.

Here's Herold's actual "measured and balanced" conclusion, offered without comment:

Afghanistan has been subjected to a barbarous air bombardment... There is no difference between the attacks upon the WTC, whose primary goal was the destruction of a symbol, and the U.S.-U.K. coalition's revenge bombing of military targets in populated urban areas. Both are criminal. Slaughter is slaughter. Killing civilians, even if unintentional, is criminal.

Glover, still babbling, also writes:

Since the Kosovo war reputable organisations have estimated that between 500 and 1,500 civilians died as a result of the bombing.

Human Rights Watch and NATO BOTH agree now the number was around 500.

Finally, he burbles:

[Steyn takes] rather inconclusive issue with a few examples among the hundreds which Mr. Herold mentions.

Sigh. Do I really need to debunk that "study's" ludicrous methodology again? No, please. Do it yourself. It's all online. Take any given day of Herold's casualty figures and try to reconcile them with reality... or even find the clippings he says that are there (many aren't, in fact). Steyn and I happened to both pick the first day of bombing (it was the laziest option)... but they're ALL like that... a melange of anonymous and biased sources, reporting in some cases hundreds or thousands of miles away from where the bombs fell about stories they heard third or fourth-hand. Either that, or Herold is quoting the Taliban itself (Al-Qaeda presumably, being unable to comment at the time). It's a joke. If it were a paper in the history classes I took, it would get an F. I don't care about women's studies... the fact this man has a Ph.D in anything is an insult to academics everywhere.

Posted by BruceR at 05:47 PM

POW NEWS UPDATE: RON ROTUNDA

POW NEWS UPDATE: RON ROTUNDA MAKES A FOOL OF HIMSELF, TOO

Law professor Ron Rotunda twists himself into a legal pretzel trying to justify the Bush position that all prisoners in the Afghan conflict were unlawful combatants, and hence eligible for Geneva. Like Barbara Amiel (below), he has two main arguments for excluding the Taliban, as well as Al Qaeda, from Geneva protections. Like Amiel, the first is the now-long discredited "4 conditions" for being accepted (ie, the "they don't wear uniforms" argument). Strike one. And his second?

The Taliban soldiers, or many of them, committed war crimes, such as hiding weapons in mosques, and using their own people as human shields.

I will bet money, right now, that no one being held at Guantanamo today is being held solely because they are suspected of hiding a weapon in a mosque... or siting a defense installation in a city. And even if they were, you cannot damn an entire armed force for the actions of individuals. Otherwise we would have hanged the entire SS and been done with it. That's strike two. Got anything else to offer, Ron?

For an intelligent argument by someone who's actually thought about the issue, check this out instead.

Posted by BruceR at 05:12 PM

THAT'S WEAK, NOAM, REALLY WEAK

THAT'S WEAK, NOAM, REALLY WEAK

Noam Chomsky gives the weakest defence I've ever seen from the guy in Salon's letters today, defending his mis-quote of what Human Rights Watch believed the consequences of the Sudan pharmaceutical bombing were. It's SO weak and transparent, that putting it out (instead of just, for once, saying "oops, I'm sorry for the mistake") borders on the pathological. It's almost Stephen Ambrose territory...

The original Chomsky quote:

That one bombing [of the al-Shifa plant in Sudan], according to the estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths. [by destroying the Sudanese pharmaceutical/fertilizer industry].

After Human Rights Watch promptly denied it had ever made such an estimate, Chomsky ruffled through his notes again, and came up with an HRW statement that the withdrawal of aid workers following the bombing, not the bombing itself, could produce a "terrible crisis."

One: an opinion is not an estimate.
Two: the quote refers to a completely different, if tangentially related issue.

As Cartman would say, "this is really weak."

UPDATE: There's a great take-down of Chomsky's ludicrous Al-Shifa/WTC comparison (which he has repeated frequently since Sept. 11) here.

Posted by BruceR at 04:09 PM

LATEST FROM THE POW CHANNEL:

LATEST FROM THE POW CHANNEL: BARBARA AMIEL CHIMES IN

"No reading of the Geneva Conventions can possibly justify the inclusion of al-Qaeda or Taliban prisoners," writes Her Ladyship in her latest today. Her reasoning for the Taliban inclusion? Two-fold: first the now-tired attempt to apply the stipulations on what constitutes "organized resistance movements" (uniforms, etc.). As stated here before, those rules don't apply either to professional soldiers or non-professionals fighting foreign invasion: it stands to reason the Taliban are one or the other. And as pointed out here or elsewhere, if uniforms are the catch-all, then there's a lot of American and British "unlawful combatants" in Afghanistan, too (and a few in the Northern Alliance, one suspects.)

Second, she claims that soldiers fighting for unrecognized governments are not protected. Not true, either... as any Chinese PoW from the Korean War could tell you. The West has long used a de facto government standard, and the Taliban was certainly that. But blithely ignoring the lack of facts on her sides, she continues:

The very people who are now invoking those Conventions to cover combatants who clearly flout all the rules, ie. terrorists, are undermining the whole point of the Geneva Conventions. If they are successful, we will regress to primitive warfare.

Therefore the Taliban should not be covered, even though the Nazis were? Come on, Barbara.

One more time: the initial American position was that ALL prisoners they took in Afghanistan were "unlawful combatants." (They have since taken steps to moderate that view somewhat.) The moderate position (shared by Colin Powell, Human Rights Watch, the Washington Post editorial board, and this writer) is that all combatants should be presumed to be PoWs, until those who had some responsibility for supporting Al Qaeda's operations outside Afghanistan can be triaged out through some kind of military or civil judicial process, charged, ultimately convicted, and hopefully hanged. The average Taliban soldier may not be a great human being by our standards, but he's not a terrorist, or a war criminal, and is in any case by any reasonable interpretation covered by Geneva. Any accomplice in the Sept. 11 attacks (or the embassy or Cole attacks) clearly is not covered by Geneva. In between, as with all things human, there is a grey area. And George Bush on his own should not have the power to turn grey to black. Otherwise Geneva's gone, international respect for due process is gone, and the dogs of war worldwide are a little looser on the leash.

Her Ladyship is correct to observe that any system of rules of war could not long survive the inclusion of flying planes into buildings as a non-criminal act. But she overlooks the other hidden threat to that system presented by the foregoing of even a semblance of due process in this case by the world's "Cradle of Democracy."

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs rightly calls HRW to task today for being quoted as objecting to the type of cage the prisoners are in. I'm almost certain this is a misquote: HRW has confined its concerns since Day 1 up until now exclusively to the PROCESS of PoW determination, not the conditions at Guantanamo. If they should ever depart from that line, I'd agree they would be departing from common sense, too.

Posted by BruceR at 03:59 PM

ACTUALLY, THE HOCKEY SHIN GUARDS

ACTUALLY, THE HOCKEY SHIN GUARDS SHOULD PROBABLY HAVE BEEN A GIVEAWAY, TOO...

Canadian defence minister Art Eggleton admitted today that soldiers in a widely circulated Kandahar photo escorting prisoners were, in fact Canadians (from the JTF2 counter-terrorist unit). This writer is kicking himself for not noticing that himself. But it does put paid to the argument about what Canadians will do if they collect Afghan prisoners. (Crypto-nationalist Liberal MP John Godfrey wants them turned over to the Afghan government, along with anyone the UN forces in Kabul detain.) We already did. And we turned them over (as is only proper) to the Americans. Oh, well... next issue?

What's amazing is all those journalists who were up on the Canadian green uniform issue never noticed the wire photo with Canadian green uniforms in it until now, even though it was in the Jan. 22 issue of all three major Canadian papers, among others.

Posted by BruceR at 03:06 PM

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Victor, Victor,

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Victor, Victor, Victor... didn't I tell you the explosions in NYC were most likely 0.24 kT each... not 1.0 kT? He repeats the error again, today.

Hanson makes a bigger mistake in his piece on why Geneva doesn't apply in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a signatory to the 1949 convention. Since no successor regime repudiated them, up to and including the Taliban, they would still be presumed to apply. (Certainly the Taliban did allow at least some ICRC ministrations during the civil war, indicating they were not wholly opposed to the principles at stake.) And as outlined before, that means soldiers fighting specifically to defend Afghanistan (it might be different, say, if they were invading another country) are explicitly covered "if they obey the rules of war." That likely exempts Al Qaeda from protection, but nets the Talibs pretty soundly.

That simple fact kills off the first half of Hanson's piece, and only leaves the one Hanson objection to exempting the Taliban, along with Al Qaeda, standing:

If we remember that the Taliban sanctioned the al Qaeda bases... then de facto, all of al Qaeda and the Taliban are terrorists.

If some Afghans supported international terrorism, all supported international terrorism. If Nathan Hale was a spy and deserved to be hanged, all American rebels were spies and deserved to be hanged. Doesn't anyone else see the slippery slope here? Would it really be so wrong to confine the punishment for complicity in war crimes to individuals in the Taliban leadership, not the whole movement? Other than letting Bin Laden in the country, did the Talibs ever threaten U.S. interests on their own?

Posted by BruceR at 02:11 AM

YES, WE ARE ALSO STUPID,

YES, WE ARE ALSO STUPID, BUT WE'RE STUPID FASTER

Just think... if you've been a regular reader of Flit, you'd have seen us being gulled by the mine strike footage nearly two weeks before Glenn Reynolds! Where else on the Internet are you going to save that kind of time? Come on, Glenn... at least I had the decency to turn it into a nice animated gif...

As to the provenance, I've heard Chechnya and I've heard Afghanistan. Nothing conclusive either way, though.

Posted by BruceR at 01:34 AM

THE DOG'S BARKING -- BETTER

THE DOG'S BARKING -- BETTER PUT HIM TO SLEEP

Joanne Jacobs and Mickey Kaus both make the case for amending the Geneva Conventions. Believe it or not, I agree: the 1949 conventions clearly did not (could not) anticipate the kind of transnational armed agency that Al Qaeda represents. Automatically classifying international terrorists as "unlawful combatants" could be a useful amendment, for instance. I just feel that the best way to get people to listen to your proposals (and encourage them to follow both the current conventions and the ones you're putting to paper) is NOT to take the existing conventions and publicly deride and circumvent them.

Americans may only suspect it, but there are lots of people in the world who admire the kinds of ideals that country was founded on. The American backing of the Geneva Conventions has increased their moral power until now. Every step they take to undermine them now all but guarantees a commensurate increase in the level of war-related atrocities in the world as a whole, along with an decrease in the respect shown for all established international norms. By trading long-term inhumanity for short-term expediency, America is setting an example that will be followed... and not just by the truly evil, either. That's what's being lost, for very little apparent short-term gain.

The far better tack for America to take from the get-go would have been that they would follow the Conventions as written, and use the non-life threatening sillyness that resulted to justify their immediate amendment. Saying they simply did not apply for ill-explained reasons by diktat all but guarantees the Conventions will never now be reopened for discussion by the signing powers. If the Americans are going to ignore them anyway, why even bother?

Posted by BruceR at 01:25 AM

THINKING FOR SOLDIERS, vol. 5

THINKING FOR SOLDIERS, vol. 5 -- CHRIS BRAY, "THE MEDIA AND GI JOE"

From the current issue of Reason. The piece wanders all over the place conceptually (the title's really not representative), and I'm not sure I see what the author's solutions to the problems he poses are, but it's still worth a read.

Posted by BruceR at 01:12 AM