From AFP
October 15, 2001
MILITARY legal officials stopped a US airstrike on a building where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was hiding, a report has claimed, adding that the move infuriated US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
A Predator reconnaissance aircraft identified a convoy of vehicles containing Omar fleeing the Afghan capital Kabul on the first night of the US-led airstrikes on October 7, said the report to be published in the New Yorker.
It said the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was controlling the aircraft and did not have the authority to fire its anti-tank Hellfire missiles, so it requested an air strike on a building where Omar and some 100 guards had taken cover.
But the report, quoting intelligence sources, said Central Command (CENTCOM) in Florida vetoed the attack on legal grounds.
It said CENTCOM commander General Tommy R. Franks was told the Judge Advocate General (JAG), the military's legal branch, "doesn't like it".
The article, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, said the Predator was told to fire a missile at the vehicles in front of the building to see who came out.
However the report said after some vehicles were obliterated nobody emerged.
It said an intelligence operative on the ground confirmed Omar was in the building and that he escaped a short time later, just before the building was eventually flattened by an airstrike.
The report said intelligence officials were "seething" about the incident and it quoted a senior military officer as saying it was a result of "political correctness" taking over the system.
The officer described Rumsfeld as "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors" after Omar got away.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke declined to comment on the report.
Ist es rechtlich zulässig,Osama bin Laden zu töten? Can President Bush order special forces to move in, on the ground, and assassinate the mastermind of the brutal al-Qaida network, without breaking U.S. or international laws?
Executive Order 12333 – first signed by President Ford and reissued by Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton – appears to ban unequivocally such action.
"No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination," the order states.
But former State Department lawyer Michael P. Scharf sees several ways around the order to justify a hit on bin Laden.
Bush can "circumvent the ban and legally carry out an assassination," asserted Scharf, now a law professor and director of the Center for International Law and Policy at New England School of Law.
He cites four ways it can be done:
Bush can declare "the existence of hostilities" and target persons in command positions, such as bin Laden, as "combatants."
He can rationalize a targeted attack on bin Laden as a legitimate self-defense operation under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, in light of evidence that bin Laden and al-Qaida were planning future attacks against the U.S.
More, he can narrowly interpret Executive Order 12333 to prohibit only "treacherous" attacks on foreign leaders.
Or, the president can simply repeal or amend the order – "or even approve a one-time exception to it," he said.
An assassination order is not without precedent.
The legal "contours" of the executive order were tested in 1986, Scharf notes, by the bombing of Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi's personal quarters in Tripoli.
Reportedly, half of the 18 U.S. fighter jets dispatched to Tripoli had a specific mission to kill Gadhafi and his family.
in 1998, Clinton ordered strikes on bin Laden's bases in Khost, Afghanistan, in an attempt to wipe out bin Laden and his henchmen. Clinton now says forces missed bin Laden by just an hour, confirming that he had targeted the terrorist leader for slaughter.
Interestingly, there was almost no international outcry over the cruise-missile attack on bin Laden. Outrage focused instead on Clinton's concurrent bombing of a pill plant in Sudan, which he mistakenly took for a bin Laden chemical-weapons operation.
Assassination has traditionally been viewed as illegal both in war and outside of war. During war, it's considered a war crime under Article 23 of the Hague Convention IV of 1907.
It provides that "it is especially forbidden ... to kill or wound treacherously, individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army."
However, the Hague Convention's ban is "not as broad as it might appear at first blush," Scharf said in a 1998 paper sponsored by the Hoover Institution's National Security Forum.
The operative word is "treacherous." Targeting military leaders for elimination during wartime is not viewed as treachery by military legal analysts.
Here are a few examples of assassinations or attempted assassinations that are not considered violations of the Hague Convention prohibition:
·§The 1941 raid at Bedda Littoria, Libya, by Scottish commandos, whose goal was to kill German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
·§The 1943 downing by U.S. aircraft of a Japanese airplane known to be carrying Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto.
·§The 1951 airstrike by the U.S. Navy that killed 500 senior Chinese and North Korean military officers and security forces at a military planning conference in Kapsan, North Korea.
Some might argue that the U.S. has not officially declared war on Afghanistan, or bin Laden's paramilitary group within the country, and therefore is confined by even stricter laws against assassination.
Under international laws, assassinating a state official or representative outside of war may itself constitute an act of terrorism. Article 2(a) of the Convention on Internationally Protected Persons, to which the U.S. and most other countries are parties, criminalizes such an attack.
But it's noteworthy that the convention accords such individuals protection only when they are outside their country – "whenever any such person is in a foreign state, as well as members of his family who accompany him," reads the actual language.
October 15, 2001
MILITARY legal officials stopped a US airstrike on a building where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was hiding, a report has claimed, adding that the move infuriated US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
A Predator reconnaissance aircraft identified a convoy of vehicles containing Omar fleeing the Afghan capital Kabul on the first night of the US-led airstrikes on October 7, said the report to be published in the New Yorker.
It said the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was controlling the aircraft and did not have the authority to fire its anti-tank Hellfire missiles, so it requested an air strike on a building where Omar and some 100 guards had taken cover.
But the report, quoting intelligence sources, said Central Command (CENTCOM) in Florida vetoed the attack on legal grounds.
It said CENTCOM commander General Tommy R. Franks was told the Judge Advocate General (JAG), the military's legal branch, "doesn't like it".
The article, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, said the Predator was told to fire a missile at the vehicles in front of the building to see who came out.
However the report said after some vehicles were obliterated nobody emerged.
It said an intelligence operative on the ground confirmed Omar was in the building and that he escaped a short time later, just before the building was eventually flattened by an airstrike.
The report said intelligence officials were "seething" about the incident and it quoted a senior military officer as saying it was a result of "political correctness" taking over the system.
The officer described Rumsfeld as "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors" after Omar got away.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke declined to comment on the report.
Ist es rechtlich zulässig,Osama bin Laden zu töten? Can President Bush order special forces to move in, on the ground, and assassinate the mastermind of the brutal al-Qaida network, without breaking U.S. or international laws?
Executive Order 12333 – first signed by President Ford and reissued by Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton – appears to ban unequivocally such action.
"No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination," the order states.
But former State Department lawyer Michael P. Scharf sees several ways around the order to justify a hit on bin Laden.
Bush can "circumvent the ban and legally carry out an assassination," asserted Scharf, now a law professor and director of the Center for International Law and Policy at New England School of Law.
He cites four ways it can be done:
Bush can declare "the existence of hostilities" and target persons in command positions, such as bin Laden, as "combatants."
He can rationalize a targeted attack on bin Laden as a legitimate self-defense operation under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, in light of evidence that bin Laden and al-Qaida were planning future attacks against the U.S.
More, he can narrowly interpret Executive Order 12333 to prohibit only "treacherous" attacks on foreign leaders.
Or, the president can simply repeal or amend the order – "or even approve a one-time exception to it," he said.
An assassination order is not without precedent.
The legal "contours" of the executive order were tested in 1986, Scharf notes, by the bombing of Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi's personal quarters in Tripoli.
Reportedly, half of the 18 U.S. fighter jets dispatched to Tripoli had a specific mission to kill Gadhafi and his family.
in 1998, Clinton ordered strikes on bin Laden's bases in Khost, Afghanistan, in an attempt to wipe out bin Laden and his henchmen. Clinton now says forces missed bin Laden by just an hour, confirming that he had targeted the terrorist leader for slaughter.
Interestingly, there was almost no international outcry over the cruise-missile attack on bin Laden. Outrage focused instead on Clinton's concurrent bombing of a pill plant in Sudan, which he mistakenly took for a bin Laden chemical-weapons operation.
Assassination has traditionally been viewed as illegal both in war and outside of war. During war, it's considered a war crime under Article 23 of the Hague Convention IV of 1907.
It provides that "it is especially forbidden ... to kill or wound treacherously, individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army."
However, the Hague Convention's ban is "not as broad as it might appear at first blush," Scharf said in a 1998 paper sponsored by the Hoover Institution's National Security Forum.
The operative word is "treacherous." Targeting military leaders for elimination during wartime is not viewed as treachery by military legal analysts.
Here are a few examples of assassinations or attempted assassinations that are not considered violations of the Hague Convention prohibition:
·§The 1941 raid at Bedda Littoria, Libya, by Scottish commandos, whose goal was to kill German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
·§The 1943 downing by U.S. aircraft of a Japanese airplane known to be carrying Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto.
·§The 1951 airstrike by the U.S. Navy that killed 500 senior Chinese and North Korean military officers and security forces at a military planning conference in Kapsan, North Korea.
Some might argue that the U.S. has not officially declared war on Afghanistan, or bin Laden's paramilitary group within the country, and therefore is confined by even stricter laws against assassination.
Under international laws, assassinating a state official or representative outside of war may itself constitute an act of terrorism. Article 2(a) of the Convention on Internationally Protected Persons, to which the U.S. and most other countries are parties, criminalizes such an attack.
But it's noteworthy that the convention accords such individuals protection only when they are outside their country – "whenever any such person is in a foreign state, as well as members of his family who accompany him," reads the actual language.
