US War Theories Target Dissenters
September 12, 2015
Exclusive: In the Orwellian world of Official
Washington, the U.S. government is now wedded to
the theory of “information warfare,” meaning that
Americans who challenge national security policy
may be treated as “unprivileged belligerents”
under the new Law of War doctrine, retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce writes.
By Todd E. Pierce
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/12/us-war-theories-target-dissenters
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S.
Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in
November 2012. His most recent assignment was
defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense
Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the
course of that assignment, he researched and
reviewed the complete records of military
commissions held during the Civil War and stored
at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
When the U.S. Department of Defense published a
new Law of War Manual (LOW) this past summer,
editorialists at the New York Times sat up and
took notice. Their concern was that the manual
stated that journalists could be deemed
“unprivileged belligerents.” The editorial
explained that as a legal term “that applies to
fighters that are afforded fewer protections than
the declared combatants in a war.” In fact, it is
far more insidious than that innocuous description.
Here is the manual’s definition: “‘Unlawful
combatants’ or ‘unprivileged belligerents’ are
persons who, by engaging in hostilities, have
incurred one or more of the corresponding
liabilities of combatant status (e.g., being made
the object of attack and subject to detention),
but who are not entitled to any of the distinct
privileges of combatant status (e.g., combatant immunity and POW status).”
The key phrase here is “being made the object of
attack.” For slow-witted New York Times
editorialists, that means journalists can be
killed as can any enemy soldier in wartime.
“Subject to detention” means a journalist deemed
an unprivileged belligerent will be put into
military detention if captured. As with any enemy
belligerent, however, if “capture is not
feasible,” they would be killed if possible, by
drone perhaps if in a foreign country.
Currently, most U.S. captives deemed
“unprivileged belligerents” are imprisoned in
Guantanamo although some may be held in
Afghanistan. It must be noted that the United
States deems as an “unprivileged belligerent”
anyone they target for capture or choose to kill.
That the New York Times’ concern only arose with
publication of the new LOW manual suggests they
may have been in a deep sleep since 9/11 as the
Department of Defense (DOD) has openly worked to
impose limitations on information sharing and
news gathering since that event gave them a
pretext. It is now a well-established pattern of
the U.S. government to suppress rights guaranteed
by the First Amendment whenever they can get by
with it, as was seen with the New York Times own James Risen.
But the New York Times colluded with the CIA in
censoring Risen’s reporting. Furthermore, they
seemed to have ignored the U.S. government’s
momentous argument of the unlimited power of the
President to target journalists and activists for
“expressive activities,” as the Department of
Justice stated in the case of Hedges v. Obama, as described below.
It has frequently been noted there’s been an
ongoing “war” against journalists since 9/11. The
new DOD Law of War manual makes that official and
potentially takes it to the highest level of
conflict. While expressing concern, the Times’
editorialist does not seem to realize or care how
ominous it is that the DOD now openly declares
that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged
belligerents,” unlawful combatants, as the DOD
manual provides, instead of hiding the fact in
coded language as done since 2001. Inherent to
those classifications is that they represent the
“enemy” and can be killed by U.S. officials.
That will come as no surprise to those acquainted
with the foreign journalists who have been
targeted and killed by drones in places such as
Pakistan. Nor will it surprise Sami al-Hajj, the
Al Jazeera journalist who was held in Guantanamo
for years. But now it is clear that the same fate
could be in store for U.S. journalists.
That coded language is embedded in the claim by
Military Commissions prosecutors and the Justice
Department that there is a “U.S. domestic common
law of war.” What they claim is entirely based
upon martial law orders of the Civil War and the
military’s orders to remove Japanese-Americans
from the their homes on the West Coast in World
War II. All the cases they rely on for a
“domestic law of war” today were judicially
condemned during or almost immediately after the
wars in which they were a part of.
U.S. Domestic Common Law of War
U.S. Military Commissions Chief Prosecutor Brig.
General Mark Martins and his staff invented what
they call the “U.S. domestic common law of war”
in filings to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
That invention consists only of the martial law
precedents of the U.S. Civil War and the removal
of the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast at
the direction of General DeWitt. Both were later
seen as examples of military despotism.
The American people have been inured by a
deliberate effort of the U.S. military to accept
invocation of the law of war as a talisman to
permit any act by officials which would have been
known as illegal before 9/11. But as the manual
states: “Although the law of war is generally
viewed as ‘prohibitive law,’ in some respects,
especially in the context of domestic law, the
law of war may be viewed as permissive or even as
a source of authority. For example, the principle
of military necessity in the customary law of war
may be viewed as justifying or permitting certain acts.” (Emphasis added.)
“Military necessity” was the law of war basis for
removal of the Japanese-Americans. Military
necessity though indisputably a part of the law
of war is a totalitarian precept when applied to a civilian population.
The LOW manual explains the object of war by
quoting George H. Aldrich, Deputy Legal Adviser
to the U.S. Department of State during the
Vietnam War. He wrote of “a general acceptance of
the view that modern war is aimed not merely at
the enemy’s military forces but at the enemy’s
willingness and ability to pursue its war aims. .
. . In Viet-Nam political, rather than military,
objectives were even more dominant. Both sides
had as their goal not the destruction of the
other’s military forces but the destruction of
the will to continue the struggle.”
The “destruction of the will” of the adversary is
always the object of war, according to Clausewitz
and adopted by the U.S. military. But this has a
totalitarian element to it; the adversary’s
reciprocal object is to destroy our will.
Consequently, “our” will must be protected by
suppressing any dissent which could harm morale
and the population’s willingness to “continue the struggle.”
That was the foundational belief underlying
martial law during the Civil War. The
Constitution was an obstacle again to suppressing
dissent to a degree after the Civil War, but with
the invention of a U.S. domestic common law of
war and legalistic word play, this obstacle has
once again been removed as the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama.
The claim of being at war with internal and
external enemies is always made by totalitarian
states to justify their suppression of speech and
a free press through repression. For a brief
period in U.S. history, the Civil War, the U.S.
military adopted military repression through
martial law to suppress any dissent to its war practices.
Martial law was declared throughout the Union
States, the North, on Aug. 8, 1862, by Secretary
of War Edwin M. Stanton, at the request of
President Abraham Lincoln. Orders were published
to “arrest and imprison” any persons
“discouraging volunteer enlistments” or “giving
aid and comfort to the enemy” or for “any other
disloyal practice.” A military commission would
try the prisoners, and a second order “suspended”
the writ of habeas corpus in their cases.
Martial law was more formally declared on Sept.
24, 1862, by President Lincoln himself in
addition to suspending the writ of habeas corpus.
Lieber’s Code was then prepared as the order
giving effect to martial law. Contrary to how it
is presented by the U.S. Army and credulous human
rights commentators, Lieber’s Code was primarily
a harsh martial law order with Prussian
militarist law of war concepts introduced to the
U.S. to criminalize any expressions of dissent as “war treason.”
Thus, Col. William Winthrop explained that among
the greater number of individuals who were
brought to trial before the military commissions
during the Civil War, the offenses included
“hostile or disloyal acts, or publications or
declarations calculated to excite opposition to
the federal government or sympathy with the enemy, etc.”
Whiting’s Guidance
Solicitor of the Department of War during the
Civil War, William Whiting, gave legal guidance
to the Union Commanders for enforcement of
martial law. The “guidebook” was his own War
Powers of the President. This book could have
been used by any militaristic and totalitarian
regime, which in fact it was as it was derived
from authoritarian principles of martial law from
Prussia. Those authoritarian principles remained
in force under Prussia’s successor state,
Germany, during two world wars, and were the
legal basis of the infamous People’s Court which
tried “war treason” cases; cases of “disloyal”
expressive acts in most cases without more.
The guidance of Whiting was: “No person in loyal
States can rightfully be captured or detained
unless he has engaged, or there is reasonable
cause to believe he intends to engage, in acts of
hostility to the United States — that is to say,
in acts which may tend to impede or embarrass the
United States in such military proceedings as the
commander-in-chief may see fit to institute.”
This is the same argument that the U.S. government made in Hedges v. Obama.
What constituted an act of hostility? Whiting
defines that to include a sentiment of hostility
to the government “to undermine confidence in its
capacity or its integrity, to diminish,
demoralize . . . its armies, to break down
confidence in those who are intrusted with its
military operations in the field.”
An example of how martial law was to be carried
out was in an order to a subordinate commander by
the Army Department of the Pacific Commander in
response to complaints from the Citizens of
Solano County, California, of disloyal
“utterances” they were hearing from fellow citizens.
The order read: “The department commander desires
you to let the people understand generally that
the order of the President suspending the writ of
habeas corpus and directing the arrest of all
persons guilty of disloyal practices will be
rigidly enforced. . . . Practices injurious to
the government or offensive to the loyal
sentiment of the people will under no circumstances be permitted.”
Immediately after the Civil War, when it was
freshest in their minds, the Supreme Court had
this to say about martial law in Ex Parte
Milligan: “What is ordinarily called martial law
is no law at all. Wellington, in one of his
despatches from Portugal, in 1810, in his speech
on the Ceylon affair, so describes it. Let us
call the thing by its right name; it is not
martial law, but martial rule. And when we speak
of it, let us speak of it as abolishing all law,
and substituting the will of the military
commander, and we shall give a true idea of the
thing, and be able to reason about it with a clear sense of what we are doing.”
Martial law is a subpart of the Law of War and
since it is for application to a domestic
population as with the Northern States during the
Civil War by the Union Army, it is “moderated”
ordinarily from the even harsher provisions of
the Law of War which are now invoked in the Law
of War manual. Yet precepts of both are being
introduced domestically with Section 1021 of the
2012 National Defense Authorization Act and
domestically and globally by the “U.S. domestic
common law of war” precedents trumpeted by Chief
Military Commissions Prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins.
It must be noted that this is not to compare the
Union unfavorably with the Confederacy. The
Confederacy had the highest form of martial law:
slavery. But the Defense Department only uses one
legal precedent from the Confederacy today, which is “outlawry.”
Lieber’s Code addressed “outlawry” in Art. 148,
which provided, in pertinent part: “The law of
war does not allow proclaiming either an
individual belonging to the hostile army, or a
citizen, or a subject of the hostile government,
an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any
captor, . . . on the contrary, it abhors such outrage.”
This was adopted in the Hague Regulations and as
interpreted in earlier Army Law of Land Warfare
manuals, prohibited assassinations as well as any
declarations that an individual or group is
outside the protection of the law of war, which
is what designation as an unprivileged
belligerent does. The prohibition of
assassination has also been put aside with the
routine practice of assassination with drones today by the U.S. military.
The Confederacy committed the offense of outlawry
when its leaders declared all captured
African-Americans fighting for the Union were
outside the protection of the law of war (which
did preexist Lieber’s Code) and would be placed
into the indefinite detention of slavery. After
9/11, the U.S. government did the same with the
invention of the unlawful combatant/unprivileged
belligerent category and indefinite detention at
Guantanamo Bay and any other location U.S.
officials chose to place “unprivileged belligerents.”
Treason of the Professors and the Media
Ironically, shortly after the New York Times
expressed its concern for journalists in early
August, the Guardian reported in an article
written by William C. Bradford, a recently hired
assistant professor in the law department at the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The article,
entitled “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical
Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist
Fifth Column,” was published in the National
Security Law Journal of George Mason University Law School.
Bradford argued that the U.S. should be more
aggressive in attacking Muslims to include
attacks which are war crimes under the law of
war. But it was his advocacy that the U.S.
military attack other “lawful targets” in its war
on terrorism, which include “law school
facilities, scholars’ home offices and media
outlets where they give interviews” that caught
the most attention. These civilian areas were all
places where a “causal connection between the
content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist, according to Bradford.
Furthermore, Bradford wrote, “Shocking and
extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting]
scholars, and the law schools that employ them,
are – at least in theory – targetable so long as
attacks are proportional, distinguish
noncombatants from combatants, employ
nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the
defeat of Islamism.” In other words, dissenting
scholars are unprivileged belligerents and
subject to attack, just as journalists are according to the Law of War manual.
Not to defend him but Bradford was articulating
the underlying logic of the new Law of War
manual’s position that dissenting journalists can
be targeted as unprivileged belligerents. This,
as stated above, is consistent with oppressive
extra-constitutional martial law practices which
Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins boasts of as “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
One has to ask: where are the supposed watchdogs
of the press when military officers can so easily
slide historical falsehoods past them in
destroying freedom of the press? Further,
Bradford argued that law professors who
criticized the failure of the U.S. to abide by
the Geneva Conventions and the Law of War
represented a “treasonous” fifth column that
could be attacked as enemy combatants.
If there is treason being committed in the United
States, it must be seen in the acts of those
reconstituting the extra-constitutional martial
law cases of the Civil War period. That is, Brig.
Gen. Mark Martins and associated government
attorneys who, in effect, are engaged in an
indirect coup d’etat of the U.S. Constitutional
order. In fact, Bradford was alleged to have
written in favor of a direct military coup d’etat as well.
As it turned out, Bradford had other ethical
issues than just his incitement to commit war
crimes and target law professors. A combination
of factors led to his resigning his position at
the Military Academy and this individual crisis would seem to have passed.
The home page of the National Security Law
Journal in which his essay had been published
carried a repudiation of it by the incoming
editorial board. They summarized his article as
follows: “Mr. Bradford’s contention that some
scholars in legal academia could be considered as
constituting a fifth column in the war against
terror; his interpretation is that those scholars
could be targeted as unlawful combatants.”
But substitute “journalists” for “scholars” and
you have the position on journalists of the DOD’s new Law of War manual.
An insightful article in The Atlantic asks “how a
scholar pushing these ideas seems not to have
raised red flags any earlier.” That’s an
excellent question. The article was entitled “The
Unusual Opinions of William C. Bradford.” But
here’s the point; these opinions are not unusual
among some members of the military and right-wing
law professors such as Adrian Vermeule of Harvard
and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago.
Posner and Vermeule have carved out a niche in
American legal discourse in advocating that the
U.S. needs to turn to the legal “wisdom” of the
German Nazi lawyer, Carl Schmitt. In Terror in
the Balance, they suggest that the U.S. may need
to adopt censorship for, among other reasons,
“antigovernment speech may demoralize soldiers
and civilians.” For precedent, they point out
that “Martial law during the Civil War permitted
the military to try and punish people who
criticized the Lincoln administration’s conduct of the war.”
The Attack on ‘Lawfare’
Other prominent advocates of authoritarian legal
practices present themselves as protecting
against disloyal attorney who practice “lawfare,”
which is defined as a form of “asymmetric
warfare” that misuses domestic or international
law to damage an opponent through legal actions
in a courtroom. For instance, Ben Wittes of
lawfareblog.com would seem to espouse this type
of animosity toward public-interest lawyers who
use the courts to defend First Amendment liberties.
A fallacious argument, made by Wittes in a paper
which calls for “balancing” liberty and security,
is his idiosyncratic belief that “in American
constitutional law, for example, free speech does
not exist as a general right of the public to
communicate as much or as widely as it desires
but as an individual right not to have government restrict one’s speech.”
This is contrary to the understanding of the
Supreme Court which held in First Nat. Bank of
Boston v. Bellotti, that: “[T]he First Amendment
goes beyond protection of the press and the
self-expression of individuals to prohibit
government from limiting the stock of information
from which members of the public may draw.” In
other words, the First Amendment guarantees the public’s “right to know.”
Why does this matter? The Constitution’s Framers
understood that an informed population was
crucial for a Republic. As James Madison put it:
“A popular Government, without popular
information, or the means of acquiring it, is but
a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps
both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance:
And a people who mean to be their own Governors,
must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
This understanding of the criticality of the free
flow of information for wise democratic
decision-making is particularly important for
national security where ignorance comes with the
highest cost. This understanding formed
Clausewitz’s belief in a broad-based civilian
decision-making process in matters of national
security strategic policy, and not one driven by
military leaders with their one-dimensional thinking process.
The Vietnam War is Exhibit A as proof of this. If
it had been left to the Generals to decide, the
war would have continued “perpetually” even
though wiser heads realized from the beginning
that it was unwinnable by U.S. terms of
maintaining an unpopular government in South
Vietnam. The antiwar movement, whatever the
motives of some, proved to be more strategically
astute than General William Westmoreland who
would have continued the war until the U.S.
bankrupted itself in the manner that the Soviet
Union would years later in Afghanistan. It was
the American antiwar movement which gave effect
to Clausewitz’s strategy that when a war’s costs
exceed its “benefits,” a way must be found to end it.
Curiously, Wittes accurately notes in Law and the
Long War that to claim “the President has all the
powers of a normal war yet few of its restraints,
that the whole world is his battlefield, and that
this state of affairs goes on in perpetuity is
really akin to claiming a kind of worldwide
martial law.” In fact, that’s exactly what the
Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama
without the admission as to martial law.
Dissent as Treason
Since the Vietnam War, the belief that the media
and other critics of government policies act as
fifth columnists has become commonplace in
military-oriented journals and with the American
authoritarian-oriented political class, expressed
in articles such as William Bradford’s attack on “treasonous professors.”
To the question “how a scholar pushing these
ideas” did not raise a red flag, that might best
be asked of the National Security Law Journal’s
previous editorial board. It is worth noting
however that the editors who chose to publish
Bradford’s article are not neophytes in national
security issues or strangers to the military or government.
As described on the NSLJ website, the
Editor-in-Chief from 2014-2015 has broad
experience in homeland and national security
programs from work at both the Department of
Justice and the Department of Homeland Security
and currently serves (at the time of publication
of Bradford’s article) as the Deputy Director for
the Office of Preparedness Integration and
Coordination at FEMA. A U.S. government official in other words.
The “Articles Selection Editor” is described as
“a family physician with thirty years of
experience in the foreign affairs and
intelligence communities.” Websites online
suggest his experience may have been acquired as
a CIA employee. The executive editor appears to
be a serving Marine Corps officer who attended
law school as a military-funded student.
Significantly; Bradford was articulating precepts
of the “U.S. common law of war” promoted by Chief
Prosecutor Mark Martins because nothing Bradford
advocated was inconsistent with William Whiting’s
guidance to Union Generals. Except Whiting went
even further and advised that judges in the Union
states who “impeded” the military in any way by
challenging their detentions were even greater
“public enemies” than Confederate soldiers were.
This “U.S. common law of war” is a prosecution
fabrication created by legal expediency in the
absence of legitimate legal precedent for what
the United States was doing with prisoners
captured globally after 9/11. This legal
invention came about when military commission
prosecutors failed to prove that the offense of
Material Support for Terrorism was an
international law of war crime. So prosecutors
dreamed up a “domestic common law of war.” This
in fact is simply following the pattern of
totalitarian states of the Twentieth Century.
Government-Media-Academic-Complex
The logic of Bradford’s argument is the same as
that of the Defense Department in declaring that
journalists may be deemed “unprivileged
belligerents.” As quoted above, George H. Aldrich
had observed that in Vietnam, both sides had as
their goal “the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
Bradford argued that Islamists must overcome
Americans’ support for the current war to
prevail, and “it is the ‘informational dimension’
which is their main combat effort because it is
U.S. political will which must be destroyed for
them to win.” But he says Islamists lack skill
“to navigate the information battlespace, employ
PSYOPs, and beguile Americans into hostile
judgments regarding the legitimacy of their cause.”
Therefore, according to Bradford, Islamists have
identified “force multipliers with cultural
knowledge of, social proximity to, and
institutional capacity to attrit American
political will. These critical nodes form an
interconnected ‘government-media-academic
complex’ (‘GMAC’) of public officials, media, and
academics who mould mass opinion on legal and security issues . . . .”
Consequently, Bradford argues, within this
triumvirate, “it is the wielders of combat power
within these nodes — journalists, officials, and
law professors — who possess the ideological
power to defend or destroy American political will.”
While Bradford reserves special vituperation for
his one-time fellow law professors, he states the
“most transparent example of this power to shape
popular opinion as to the legitimacy of U.S.
participation in wars is the media.”
As proof, Bradford explained how this
“disloyalty” of the media worked during the
Vietnam War. He wrote: “During the Vietnam War,
despite an unbroken series of U.S. battlefield
victories, the media first surrendered itself
over to a foreign enemy for use as a
psychological weapon against Americans, not only
expressing criticism of U.S. purpose and conduct
but adopting an ‘antagonistic attitude toward
everything America was and represented’ and
‘spinning’ U.S. military success to convince
Americans that they were losing, and should quit,
the war. Journalistic alchemists converted
victory into defeat simply by pronouncing it.”
Space does not permit showing in how many ways
this “stab in the back” myth is false. But this
belief in the disloyalty of the media in
Bradford’s view remains today. He wrote:
“Defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and
empathy for American adversaries persist within media.”
Targeting Journalists
The right-wing militarist Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs (JINSA), with mostly
retired U.S. military officers serving as
advisers, has advocated targeting journalists
with military attacks. Writing in The Journal of
International Security Affairs in 2009, retired
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters wrote:
“Today, the United States and its allies will
never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There
will always be a hostile third party in the
fight, but one which we not only refrain from
attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media .
. . . Future wars may require censorship, news
blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on
the partisan media.” (Emphasis in original.)
The rationale for that deranged thinking was
first propounded by Admiral Ulysses S. Grant
Sharp and other authoritarian-minded officers
after the Vietnam War. Sharp explained, our
“will” was eroded because “we were subjected to a
skillfully waged subversive propaganda campaign,
aided and abetted by the media’s bombardment of
sensationalism, rumors and half-truths about the
Vietnam affair — a campaign that destroyed our
national unity.” William C. Bradford apparently
adopted and internalized this belief, as have many other military officers.
That “stab in the back” myth was propagated by a
number of U.S. military officers as well as
President Richard Nixon (as explained here). It
was more comfortable to believe that than that
the military architects of the war did not
understand what they were doing. So they shifted
blame onto members of the media who were astute
enough to recognize and report on the military’s
failure and war crimes, such as My Lai.
But those “critical” journalists, along with
critics at home, were only recognizing what
smarter Generals such as General Frederick Weyand
recognized from the beginning. That is, the war
was unwinnable by the U.S. because it was
maintaining in power its despotic corrupt ally,
the South Vietnamese government, against its own
people. Whether or not what came later was worse
for the Vietnamese people was unforeseeable by
the majority of the people. What was in front of
their eyes was the military oppression of
American and South Vietnamese forces and secret police.
Information Warfare Today
In 1999, the Rand Corporation published a
collection of articles in Strategic Appraisal:
The Changing Role of Information in Warfare. The
volume was edited by Zalmay Khalilzad, the
alleged author of the Defense Department’s 1992
Defense Planning Guidance, which was drafted when
Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary and Paul
Wolfowitz was Under Secretary of Defense – and
promulgated a theory of permanent U.S. global dominance.
One chapter of Rand’s Strategic Appraisal was
written by Jeremy Shapiro, now a special adviser
at the U.S. State Department, according to
Wikipedia. Shapiro wrote that the inability to
control information flows was widely cited as
playing an essential role in the downfall of the
communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
He stated that perception management was “the
vogue term for psychological operations or
propaganda directed at the public.” As he
expressed it, many observers worried that
potential foes could use techniques of perception
management with asymmetric strategies with their
effect on public opinion to “destroy the will of
the United States to wage war.”
Consequently, “Warfare in this new political
environment consists largely of the battle to
shape the political context of the war and the meaning of victory.”
Another chapter on Ethics and Information Warfare
by John Arquilla makes clear that information
warfare must be understood as “a true form of
war.” The range of information warfare
operations, according to Arquilla, extends “from
the battlefield to the enemy home front.”
Information warfare is designed “to strike
directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.”
This notion of information warfare, that it can
be pursued without a need to defeat an
adversary’s armed forces, is an area of
particular interest, according to Arquilla. What
he means is that it necessitates counter measures
when it is seen as directed at the U.S. as now
provided for in the new LOW Manual.
Important to note, according to Arquilla, is that
there is an inherent blurriness with defining
“combatants” and “acts of war.” Equating
information warfare to guerrilla warfare in which
civilians often engage in the fighting, Arquilla
states “in information warfare, almost anyone can engage in the fighting.”
Consequently, the ability to engage in this form
of conflict is now in the hands of small groups
and individuals, offering up “the prospect of
potentially quite large numbers of information
warfare-capable combatants emerging, often
pursuing their own, as opposed to some state’s policies,” Arquilla wrote.
Therefore, a “concern” for information warfare at
the time of the Rand study in 1999 was the
problem of maintaining “noncombatant immunity.”
That’s because the “civilian-oriented target set
is huge and likely to be more vulnerable than the
related set of military infrastructures . . . .
Since a significant aspect of information warfare
is aimed at civilian and civilian-oriented
targets, despite its negligible lethality, it
nonetheless violates the principle of
noncombatant immunity, given that civilian
economic or other assets are deliberately targeted.”
What Arquillo is saying is that civilians who are
alleged to engage in information warfare, such as
professors and journalists, lose their
“noncombatant immunity” and can be attacked. The
“blurriness” of defining “combatants” and “acts
of war” was removed after 9/11 with the invention
of the “unlawful combatant” designation, later
renamed “unprivileged belligerent” to mimic language in the Geneva Conventions.
Then it was just a matter of adding the similarly
invented “U.S. domestic common law of war” with
its martial law precedents and a framework has
been built for seeing critical journalists and
law professors as “unprivileged belligerents,” as Bradford indiscreetly wrote.
Arquilla claims that information warfare
operations extend to the “home front” and are
designed “to strike directly at the will and
logistical support of an opponent.” That is to
equate what is deemed information warfare to
sabotage of the population’s psychological will
to fight a war, and dissidents to saboteurs.
Perpetual War
But this is a perpetual war driven by U.S.
operations, according to a chapter written by
Stephen T. Hosmer on psychological effects of
information warfare. Here, it is stated that “the
expanding options for reaching audiences in
countries and groups that could become future
U.S. adversaries make it important that the
United States begin its psychological
conditioning in peacetime.” Thus, it is necessary
“to begin to soften the fighting will of the
potential adversary’s armed forces in the event conflict does occur.”
As information warfare is held to be “true war,”
this means that the U.S. is perpetually
committing acts of war against those deemed
“potential” adversaries. Little wonder that
Vladimir Putin sees Russia as under assault by
the United States and attempts to counter U.S. information warfare.
This same logic is applied to counter-insurgency.
The 2014 COIN Manual, FM 3-24, defines
“Information Operations” as information-related
capabilities “to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or
usurp the decisionmaking of adversaries and
potential adversaries while protecting our own.”
Those we “protect ourselves from” can logically
be seen as the internal enemy, as William
Bradford saw it, such as critical law professors
and journalists, just as Augusto Pinochet did in Chile with dissidents.
With the totalitarian logic of
information-warfare theorists, internalized now
throughout much of the U.S. government
counter-terrorism community, it should be
apparent to all but the most obtuse why the DOD
deems a journalist who writes critically of U.S.
government war policy an “unprivileged
belligerent,” an enemy, as in the Law of War
manual. William C. Bradford obviously absorbed
this doctrine but was indiscreet enough to articulate it fully.
It Has Happened Here!
That’s the only conclusion one can draw from
reading the transcript of the Hedges v. Obama
lawsuit. In that lawsuit, plaintiffs, including
journalists and political activists, challenged
the authority provided under Sec. 1021 of the
2012 National Defense Authorization for removal
out from under the protection of the Constitution
of those deemed unprivileged belligerents. That
is, civilians suspected of lending any “support”
to anyone whom the U.S. government might deem as
having something to do with terrorism.
“Support” can be as William Whiting described it
in 1862 and as what is seen as “information
warfare” by the U.S. military today: a sentiment
of hostility to the government “to undermine
confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to
diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break
down confidence in those who are intrusted with
its military operations in the field.”
Reminiscent of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t
Happen Here where those accused of crimes against
the government are tried by military judges as in
the U.S. Military Commissions, a Justice
Department attorney arguing on behalf of the
United States epitomized the legal reasoning that
one would see in a totalitarian state in arguing
why the draconian “Law of War” is a substitute for the Constitution.
The Court asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin
Torrance if he would agree, “as a principled
matter, that the President can’t, in the name of
the national security of the United States, just
decide to detain whomever he believes it is
important to detain or necessary to detain to
prevent a terrorist act within the United States?”
Rather than giving a straight affirmative answer
to a fundamental principle of the U.S.
Constitution, Torrance dissembled, only agreeing
that that description would seem “quite broad,”
especially if citizens. But he added
disingenuously that it was the practice of the
government “not to keep people apprehended in the U.S.”
Which is true, it is known that people detained
by the U.S. military and CIA have been placed
everywhere but in the U.S. so that Constitutional
rights could not attach. Under Section 1021, that
“inconvenience” to the government would not be necessary.
When asked by the Court if he, the Justice
Department attorney, would agree that a different
administration could change its mind with respect
to whether or not Sec. 1021 would be applied in
any way to American citizens, he dissembled
again, answering: “Is that possible? Yes, but it
is speculative and conjecture and that cannot be
the basis for an injury in fact.”
So U.S. citizens or anyone else are left to
understand that they have no rights remaining
under the Constitution. If a supposed “right” is
contingent upon who is President, it is not a
right and the U.S. is no longer under the rule of law.
In discussing whether activist and journalist
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a citizen of Iceland, could
be subject to U.S. military detention or trial by
military commission, Assistant U.S. Attorney
Torrance would only disingenuously answer that
“her activities as she alleges them, do not
implicate this.” Disingenuous because he knew
based upon the answer he previously gave that the
law of war is arbitrary and its interpretation
contingent upon a military commander, whoever
that may be, at present or in the future.
What could happen to Ms. Jónsdóttir would be
completely out of her control should the U.S.
government decide to deem her an “unprivileged
belligerent,” regardless of whether her
expressive activities changed positively or
negatively, or remained the same. Her risk of
detention per the Justice Department is entirely
at the sufferance of whatever administration may
be in place at any given moment.
Any doubt that the Authorization for the Use of
Military Force, along with Section 1021 of the
National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, is
believed by the U.S. Executive Branch to give it
the untrammeled power that Article 48 of the
Weimar Germany constitution gave to the German
President in 1933 was settled by the arguments
made by the Justice Department attorney in Hedges v. Obama.
Setting First Amendment Aside
One does not need to speculate that the U.S.
government no longer sees First Amendment
activities as protected. Government arguments,
which were made in the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit,
revealed that the Justice Department, speaking
for the Executive Branch, considers protection of
the Bill of Rights subordinate to the claim of
“war powers” by the Executive. One can only be
willfully blind to fail to see this.
By the Justice Department’s court arguments and
filings, the protections afforded by the U.S.
Bill of Rights are no more secure today than they
were to Japanese-Americans when Western District
military commander General DeWitt decided to
remove them from their homes on the West Coast
and intern them in what were initially called, “concentration camps.”
The American Bar Association Journal reported in
2014 that Justice Antonin Scalia told students in
Hawaii that “the Supreme Court’s Korematsu
decision upholding the internment of Japanese
Americans was wrong, but it could happen again in
war time.” But contrary to Scalia stating that
Korematsu had been repudiated, Korematsu has never been overruled.
The court could get a chance to do so, the ABA
article stated, in the Hedges v. Obama case
“involving the military detention without trial
of people accused of aiding terrorism.” But that opportunity has passed.
A U.S. District Court issued a permanent
injunction blocking the law’s indefinite
detention powers but that ruling was overturned
by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. A
petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asked the
justices to overturn Sec. 1021, the federal law
authorizing such detentions and stated the
justices should consider overruling Korematsu.
But the Supreme Court declined to hear the case
in 2014, leaving the Appeals Court’s ruling intact.
The Supreme Court’s decision to not overturn
Korematsu allows General DeWitt’s World War II
decision to intern Japanese-Americans in
concentration camps to stand as a shining example
of what Brig. General Marks Martins proudly holds
up to the world as the “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S.
Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in
November 2012. His most recent assignment was
defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense
Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the
course of that assignment, he researched and
reviewed the complete records of military
commissions held during the Civil War and stored
at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=170848#170848
--
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Twitter: @TonyGosling http://twitter.com/tonygosling
http://rt.com/op-edge/authors/tony-gosling/
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http://www.youtube.com/user/PublicEnquiry
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Diggers350/
http://cryptome.org/2014/06/video-report-axed-2.htm
http://www.reinvestigate911.org/
http://www.thisweek.org.uk/
http://www.911forum.org.uk/
http://groups.google.com/group/uk-911-truth
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"Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
_________________
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org
www.mediafor911truth.org
www.pilotsfor911truth.org
www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
www.rl911truth.org
www.stj911.org
www.l911t.com
www.v911t.org
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.globalresearch.ca
www.public-interest.co.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Bristol+Broadband+Co-operative
www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1407615751783.2051663.1274106225&l=90330c0ba5&type=1
<http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf>http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
<https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/>https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered
that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that
shall not be made known. What I tell you in
darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27
Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
Covetousnesse be gon: Come, Truth and Love arise.
Patience take the Crown; throw Anger out of dores:
Cast out Hypocrisie and Lust, which follows whores:
Then England sit in rest; Thy sorrows will have end;
Thy Sons will live in peace, and each will be a friend.
http://tinyurl.com/6ct7zh6
--
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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