Category Archives: Military

Britain, Government, Legal, Military, Society

Court Martial Review Board of a Royal Marine Sergeant found guilty of murder…

THE TENETS OF JUSTICE

In the High Court, yesterday, three judges lifted the anonymity of the Royal Marine Sergeant found guilty of murdering a seriously wounded Taliban prisoner – the first British serviceman to be found guilty of murder on the battlefield since the Second World War. A fundamental and central tenet of British justice is that justice should be seen to be done.

Defence counsel argued, with reason, that both he and his family could become targets for vengeful extremists. The judges dismissed this argument.

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Yet, what of another trial currently taking place of two men accused of murdering Fusilier Lee Rigby? In this case, the jury has heard the statement from one of the accused, Michael Adebolajo, who has stated how he deliberately drove a motor vehicle into the soldier at 40mph, before attempting to decapitate him with a meat cleaver.

Adebolajo believed that Fusilier Rigby was a ‘fair target’ because, he said, a soldier is ‘someone who joins the army with a kind of understanding that your life is at risk.’ According to Adebolajo, this applies even if he is a ‘random individual’ who just happened to be walking down a street at the wrong time. However, the jury has decided in his case that Adebolajo is wrong that any soldier is deemed fair game for beheading just because they ‘know the risks’.

Primarily, the law needs to balance open justice with protecting the citizen. As long as there are those who feel it is perfectly acceptable to kill people for political or religious grounds and society is aware of such people, then the law really should protect potential targets. The Royal Marine Sergeant has been sentenced by the Court Martial Review Board to a life in prison, and he is to serve a minimum of ten years. He has also been dismissed from the service with disgrace. Any thought, however, of naming the other Royal Marines involved in the case of the murdered Taliban insurgent, who have subsequently been found not guilty, should be rejected outright as speedily as possible.

It is the view of this site that the Royal Marine Sergeant should not have been named.

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Afghanistan, Britain, Government, Military, National Security

The court martial of a Royal Marine sergeant and two others…

VERDICTS

Society’s norms are cast adrift in a world of firefight and ambush, where air strikes leave disfigurement and random death in its wake. Protagonists could argue that society has no real business judging people who live and operate in a world of war-torn combat.

That is why it has been imperative that the Royal Marine Sergeant found guilty of murdering a wounded Afghan insurgent in September 2011 was tried in a court martial. Some may suggest the guilty verdict is an outrage; after all, there was no disagreement that the victim was an armed enemy combatant sworn to kill British soldiers if he could.

Others, too, may consider the not guilty verdicts of two other Royal Marines in the dock also appalling. The cleared two had been present at the killing, did not try to prevent it, and therefore, by the standards applied by most criminal courts, equally guilty – even though they did not pull the trigger. This kind of scenario, however, is one that never gets put before a civilian court.

Afghanistan was a war zone in which the participants – British soldiers and Afghan fundamentalists – were not only trying to kill each other but also, in the case of the Royal Marines, had lawful justification for doing so when in a firefight.

What is more, Helmand is a notorious battlefield where the Royal Marines’ enemies do not obligingly wear uniform. One moment they can be innocent and virtuous civilians, the next a lethal and devastating enemy intent on murdering soldiers, a juxtaposition that makes counter-insurgency operations especially difficult. Amid such severe brutality and death there is an altered morality.  Because the rules of engagement that soldiers operate under may result in a killing and may seem bizarre to some, this could also generate sympathy for the marines caught up in a situation that has become ever-more bitter.

Nevertheless, rules do exist for a very good reason. Morality may be altered, but it still exists. The code of the Geneva Convention, to which British armed forces have long subscribed, says that combat ends when the enemy either surrenders or is incapacitated to such an extent that fighting becomes impossible. Killing the enemy after either of these points has been reached becomes murder.

The court martial heard recordings of the conversation held by the Royal Marines at the time the Afghan insurgent was murdered. They show that the soldiers knew of the rules, especially the one convicted who was a sergeant in command of the others. In an attempt to vindicate himself the sergeant assumed the victim would not have respected the Geneva Convention and would have happily murdered the Royal Marines had he been in a position to do so. He claimed, which was also recorded, that he believed the man was dead before he shot him through the chest.

As the outcome of the court martial has shown this was rightly rejected. There is no justification at all. The Royal Marines were deployed to Afghanistan in a humanitarian cause which was to aid the removal and suppression of a Taleban regime which not only supported and facilitated killing and the terrorising of other nations including ours, but also brutalised their own people. The Afghan insurgent murdered by the Royal Marine sergeant is in complete violation of his rules of engagement. And he knew it.

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Foreign Affairs, Government, Intelligence, Military, United States

Drones and the unproven efficacy of these weapons…

U.S. DRONE POLICY

The unedifying and continued use of drones has once again brought the issue to the door of the United States.

Nabila Rehman and her brother Zubair, aged 9 and 13 respectively, were picking okra in their garden. They posed no threat to the U.S. or anyone else, but their innocence did not keep them safe. The pair were injured by shrapnel from a drone-missile that killed their grandmother and wounded five other children at the family home in North Waziristan, in Pakistan’s north-western border zone.

Earlier this week, they confronted the U.S. Congress with the ugly and devastating reality of the drone attacks. Under President Obama, use of drones has become an increasingly important weapon in response to dealing with terrorism.

Attack from the air is always terrifying, but unmanned aerial vehicles – controlled and guided by faceless operatives thousands of miles away – are in a definite league of their own. The ethical objections to their use, however, not as battlefield weapons but as tools of assassination with inevitable collateral death and injury to the innocent, have been swept aside by their ostensible military effectiveness.

For both the U.S. and the Pakistani government, which have secretly colluded in the drone strategy, drones may have seemed the perfect answer to liquidating dangerous militants and extremists in Pakistan’s treacherous no-man’s land. North Waziristan is a notoriously difficult region for western intelligence services and monitoring the movements and activities of insurgents always risks others being unwittingly caught up in the crossfire.

But the fury and anger drones provoke, as Nabila and Zubair’s testimony bears out, can make them counter-productive. As President Obama and other western leaders know, far from helping to secure peace in the West, drones frequently embolden its enemies. Indeed, those flocking to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in their droves were done so in seeking refuge and protection from the continued onslaught of U.S. drone attacks.

A RESPONSE TO THE ECONOMIST

On 8th February, 2013, MD responded to an article on The Economist, ‘The debate over drones’. That response is reproduced:

“The Fifth Amendment to the US constitution protects “any person” (not just US citizens) from being “deprived of life . . . without due process of law.”

Until the 9/11 attacks, the legal position was unambiguous: in war, active combatants could kill and be killed, subject to rules governing surrender and the use of banned weapons. But the ‘law of war’ applied only to conflicts between armed forces of opposing states, invoking the right of self-defence. Confrontations with insurgents and terrorists were strictly governed by human rights law, which requires state use of force to be reasonable in the circumstances. This ‘reasonable force’ requirement invokes a necessary and human restraint over soldiers’ actions and, as a direct extension, must surely apply to drone targeters. The rule of war is not being adhered to in places where drones are operating as “suspects” are being killed without much compunction.

The states that deploy drones argue that they are operating under war law, where human rights are less relevant. The US argues that it is in an ‘armed conflict with al-Qaeda . . . and may use force consistent with its inherent right to self-defence . . . including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning to attack us.’ However, this statement prompts many questions. For instance, how can you have an ‘armed conflict’ without an enemy state? Or, what criteria is being used for putting names on the secret death list or what is the required degree of proof before suspects are targeted and killed?

There are no accountability mechanisms for the use of drones – no inquests, and often not even a casualty list which is a direct contravention of the normal rules of war and engagement. The US does, though, announce and celebrate when it hits a ‘high-value target’.

In aerial drone warfare, there is no fairness or due process to enable potential victims, their relatives or any outside body to challenge the accuracy of the information on which the targeting decisions have been made.

Some analysts may suggest that drone strikes are an exercise in self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. But Article 51 applies only to attacks by other states, not by terrorist groups. Yet, what is becoming increasingly of concern is that the record of drone attacks demonstrates that very often individuals are targeted when they constitute no clear or present danger.

Drone killings in tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen have taken the lives of targets who are armed and who presented a clear danger, but others have merely been attending weddings or funerals or emerging from hospitals or mosques. ‘Decapitation strikes’ in Pakistan have resulted in families being killed by mistake and which have severely damaged US relations with a politically tense and nuclear-armed nation that is not at war with the US.

American officials also say that the Fifth Amendment could not avail a US citizen who joined an enemy force. This is correct as far as it goes, but the Fifth Amendment must entitle a citizen or his family to know whether he is on a death list and to apply to have himself taken off it.

Those who press the Hellfire buttons in Nevada do not pause to consider whether their targets are engaged in combatant missions or not. The criteria for drone use are covert CIA prerogatives, beyond the jurisdiction of the courts or the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.”

© MarkDowe2013: all rights reserved

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