Joel Mathis

...it can end up having the same effects that cops sometimes do at home. WaPo : Ahmad’s relatives are among the civilians killed in events that are being documented with an unprecedented level of precision in a new accounting of the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State. Using U.S. military geolocation data being made public for the first time, U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars has pinpointed locations, some of them to within a meter squared, for hundreds of strikes resulting in more than 1,400 civilian deaths. Throughout the campaign, strikes took place in crowded urban environments, where it was more difficult to distinguish between civilian and Islamic State targets. They also occurred in remote or militant-controlled areas, which complicated intelligence gathering and target verification. Let me explain myself. When police officers in America shoot unarmed civilians, they frequently end up unpenalized because the law gives great leeway to agents of the state who use lethal force w

Good lord, the damage we do in the name of our own safety: “This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars,” said David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and the lead author of the report. “It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.” While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing role in these conflicts. Vine says that while having these numbers is helpful, it does not offer any insight into what kinds of lives displaced people are living. “Every day you live in a refugee camp is a day it’s been degraded compared to what it once was,” he said. “It’s anoth

NYT : A federal appeals court panel has ruled for the first time that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are not entitled to due process, adopting a George W. Bush-era view of detainee rights that could affect the eventual trial of the men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “The Due Process Clause may not be invoked by alien without property or presence in the sovereign territory of the United States,” Judge Rao wrote, a position also taken by Judge A. Raymond Randolph. The reach of American courts extends throughout the world. The reach of America's rights before a court does not. 

NYT :  The Pentagon has admitted for the third time that its bombing campaign against terrorist groups in Somalia, which has been underway for more than a decade, had caused civilian casualties there, a military report said on Tuesday. “Our goal is to always minimize impact to civilians,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the commander of Africa Command, said in the report. “Unfortunately, we believe our operations caused the inadvertent death of one person and injury to three others who we did not intend to target.” A couple of observations: First, I hate how the Pentagon language about a terrible tragedy that has caused grief for an innocent family -- or families -- is treated as a technical oopsie. This is horrific. It is not a clerical error. We shouldn't treat it as such. On a related note: I do wonder how many enemies the United States creates -- versus the number it eliminates -- with these kinds of attacks. Do Americans even know we're at war in Somalia?

Republicans are starting to sound scary. This is a sitting congressman: And this is a senator who stands a decent chance of being president someday. The first tweet advocates "hunting down" American citizens as though they were opponents in the misbegotten "war on terror." Cotton, meanwhile, served in the Army in Iraq, which was was war-on-terror-adjacent. One thing that was notable about America's war on terror efforts is how cruel they often were. Dick Cheney told us we'd have to work the "dark side," and so we did -- at Baghram, Gitmo, and at secret torture sites around the world. Civil libertarians opposed these actions in real time, and a few low-level soldiers were prosecuted. But nobody in a position of real responsibility was held accountable, and indeed, pundits like Marc Thiessen made their names and careers defending the torture regime. When Barack Obama took office, he declined to prosecute the war criminals in his predecessor's adm

Let's gut the First Amendment forever! That's not precisely what Gary Schmitt says today in The Weekly Standard , but that about covers the gist of it: Congress and the president should enact a statute that straightforwardly makes it illegal to publish or circulate materials that support, praise, or advocate terrorism as long as we are still formally at war with al Qaeda and its allies. Schmitt says such a statute could be "narrowly drawn" so that we don't go back to the bad old days of seditious libel. Maybe. But we still don't know which circumstances would cause the United States Congress to end the "war" authorizations spelled out in the AUMF and various other laws. Given the way our leaders have interpreted that so far, it might be a crime to praise the Muslim Uighurs who have rebelled against the Chinese government, or the Chechnyan Muslims who have revolted against rule from Moscow. More likely it might be used to prosecute Americans who pra

Over at No Left Turns, Bill Voegeli offers a thoughtful response to my Philly Post piece decrying President Obama's signing of the NDAA. I suggested Obama had betrayed the cause of civil liberties; Voegeli sees it a bit differently. If I'm reading it correctly, his argument is two-fold: • The now-bipartisan embrace of once-unthinkable security measures represents a considered response to the terror threat that the United States faces. "National security is a hard, grave business. Candidates who spoke as glibly as bloggers and editorialists about respecting boundaries regardless of the consequences become far less categorical when they're in important positions of national power and must confront just how horrific those consequences might be." • Secondly, that we're at war, and sometimes during war the Constitution is set aside in order to save it. "Drawing the lines and rightly understanding the nation's exigencies is not merely a post-9/11 pro

Boot is so exasperated with those weak appeasers in the Obama Administration: One of the most discomfiting aspects of the forthcoming U.S. pullout from Iraq is what it portends for Afghanistan. In a nutshell, it appears more and more likely that Obama will pull out of Afghanistan too, even though the war there is far from won. Thus we read in the  Wall Street Journal  today : “The Obama administration is exploring a shift in the military’s mission in Afghanistan to an advisory role as soon as next year, senior officials said, a move that would scale back U.S. combat duties well ahead of their scheduled conclusion at the end of 2014.”   The Afghan army is capable but still needs time to develop. If we pull out too fast the army could fracture and the entire country could be plunged into a civil war which would, among other possible consequences, allow Afghan territory to once again become a haven for  Al Qaeda  and other transnational terrorist groups.  That seems a high price to pay

That's what Bentley Rayburn suggests at National Review today: Congress should remember that we are still facing very real threats. Today, we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fighting al-Qaeda across the globe using intelligence and special-operations forces backed up with Predator drones and other modern technologies. We’re also protecting the nascent democratic movements in Libya and elsewhere, expanding operations to hot spots like Yemen, and rotating home a fighting force worn down by a decade of repeated, extended combat deployments. Terror attacks are on the rise as the threat spreads around the globe — according to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 2,534 terror attacks worldwide in 2010, nearly triple the 945 recorded five years ago. I found that last paragraph interesting, so I went to the National Counterterrorism Center website. I couldn't verify Rayburn's numbers, but I did find a couple of other very interesting charts in the NT

The former Bush Administration torture advocate thinks Obama is a wuss for actually trying to justify the assassination of an American citizen: It may be that the Obama administration thinks that U.S. citizens who join the enemy are entitled to special rules — like those that apply to the police, instead of those that apply to the military. But this would be wrong too. As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week, ever since the Civil War, our national leaders and the Supreme Court have agreed that a citizen who joins the enemy must suffer the consequences of his belligerency, with the same status as that of an alien enemy. Think of the incentives that the strange Obama hybrid rule creates. Our al-Qaeda enemy will want to recruit American agents, who will benefit from criminal-justice rules that give them advantages in carrying out operations against us (like the right to remain silent, to Miranda and lawyers, to a speedy jury trial, etc.). Our troops and agents in the fie

Mario Loyola knows : For purposes of combat actions such as the targeted killing of Awlaki, the battleground in our war against al-Qaeda is not “everywhere.” It is in those few countries that either willingly or unwillingly provide significant safe havens for al-Qaeda. Yemen is in the first rank of that group of countries, along with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia.  All I can say is: Germany , we're coming for you. London , you might see some Predator drones in your skies. Toronto , get ready for some Hellfire missiles.

These findings shouldn't be all that surprising. It's human nature: People don't like outsiders coming into their country and running things. Careful diplomatic talk about sovereignty isn't all that useful if people in Kabul or Baghdad see that it's actually American troops keeping order; that's going to rub folks the wrong way. That doesn't mean America never fights abroad. But if we want to be greeted as liberators, we should liberate and leave. And if we don't think ahead of time that's possible -- after an honest accounting of the facts instead of Rumsfeldian apathy to the concept -- then we need to calculate whether such an intervention is really likely to be worth it. In most cases, it probably won't.

Jonah Goldberg's debating partner. Toward the end of an otherwise-modest column on the government's plan to assassinate an American citizen affiliated with Al Qaeda, Jonah Goldberg stacks the deck: Some civil libertarians seem to think we can never, ever kill an American citizen without a trial by jury (and perhaps not even then). That would have been silly during the days of conventional warfare. Now it's plain crazy. Perhaps "some" civil libertarians believe that, but it's not the position of the ACLU, which has brought the lawsuit challenging the government's plan. In its complaint (PDF) asking for an injunction, the organization acknowledges there are times when due process will be skipped: Outside of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law prohibit targeted killing except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific, and imminent threats of death or serious physical injury. The summary use of force is lawful

I've got nothing against blasphemy -- in fact, I kind of love it. I love "South Park," enjoyed "The Last Temptation of Christ" more as a novel than as a movie, think "Dogma" is overrated but enjoyable and, generally, like to see sacred cows nudged a little bit. I think it's wonderful, essential and necessary that we can do such poking in America -- and it pisses me off, frankly, when the "South Park" guys come under threat for depicting Mohammed. Or, looking abroad, when European cartoonists face violence, threats and censorship for doing the same. Still, I didn't draw Mohammed today . And I won't be publishing any of the cartoons. At least, not for now. Why? Simple. I have Muslim friends and acquaintances -- at least one of whom, I know, is very offended when Mohammed is drawn or otherwise depicted. Not to the point of threatening or undertaking violence, thank goodness, but still: It's an act that wounds her. And tha