Over at Bloomberg Noah Feldman has some interesting observations about Seymour Hersh’s account of the assassination of Osama bin Laden:
Hersh’s account — which cites both named and unnamed sources — differs in three important ways, raising new legal questions. First, Hersh says that the U.S. knew bin Laden was being held in the Abbottabad compound as a prisoner of the Pakistani ISI, that country’s intelligence service. The U.S. knew that his ISI guards would be gone from the compound — and as a result, Hersh implies, the U.S. knew with a high degree of likelihood that there would be no guns in the compound and no resistance.
If the U.S. in fact knew that bin Laden was effectively a prisoner -– not to mention that he was unarmed and unprotected — then killing him would almost certainly have violated the laws of war. A former combatant who is “hors de combat†— rendered incapable of fighting — isn’t a lawful target for killing. A prisoner is a perfect example. (To make matters worse, Hersh also reports that bin Laden was known to be an invalid.) Of course, Seal Team Six couldn’t be 100 percent certain that bin Laden was unarmed and without a kamikaze device — and who knows what orders they received. But according to Hersh, the chain of command knew bin Laden was effectively an unarmed, unprotected prisoner.
Read the whole thing. The key point is that killing an enemy is lawful under the laws of war but murdering one is not. Also, it’s possible that the White House committed a war crime but Seal Team Six did not. It all depends on the details, who knew what and when.
For a lawyer and Rhodes scholar, Feldman is shockingly ignorant about the laws of war. He misrepresents “hors de combat” the the principle of proportionality. There really is no excuse for that. Almost everything he writes in that essay about what is illegal is wrong whether or not one believes Hersh’s fiction.
Pushback on the pushback.
The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful
That from the Columbia Journalism Review, by Trevor Timm. The description of Timm:
For the record, I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but the original story put forth by the administration had all kinds of problems.
“SEYMOUR HERSH HAS DONE THE PUBLIC a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.”
I don’t know. I’ve read a lot of critiques of Hersh’s story and they really focus on his reporting and not him except for the inconvenient fact that it appears he may have plagiarized RJ Hillhouse.
The problem with Hersh’s story is that the sourcing for it sucks, it contradicts known facts, it’s internally inconsistent and makes no sense logically. Parts of it may be true when removed from Hersh’s narrative – the “walk-in” source is one example, but there’s no evidence for the Pakistani-US-Saudi conspiracy narrative that’s the core of the story. That’s not to say the official, public government narrative is the truth either….
Forgot to mention that Hersh might turn out to be right. I doubt it, I’m very skeptical of his story, but who knows? The world is a strange place.
That’s not to say the official, public government narrative is the truth either….
I have trouble with the official story for a few reasons. Mostly it comes down to the rapid destruction or secreting away of evidence about the raid. That’s suspicious as Hell, and none of it makes sense to me unless they’re hiding something nasty. Not that I expected Obama to carry bin Laden’s head in on a pike for a Special Joint Session of Congress (admit it, though, that would have been cool), but treating his body like he was some latter day Attila the Hun?
It all just seems rather hinky to me.
The issue that I’m skeptical about in the prevailing narrative about the events is its significance. Even if the facts turn out to be as reported by the White House, you may recall that at the time I said I didn’t think it had much geopolitical significance. Strong (reflexive) supporters of the White House have been trumpeting it as a tremendous accomplishment (“GM is alive; Bin Laden is dead”). I think that subsequent events have supported my interpretation.
However, I think it’s worth considering the geopolitical significance of Hersh’s account being correct. I think it might have some and practically none of it good.
I think it did have some significance. If a nation sets out to do something, it’s important to get it done. We’ve failed in many ways in many things, but getting bin Laden is a tangible thing to point to: Fuck with us, we will get you. Not always true, obviously, but he was easily the highest profile name out there at the time. Propagand is not without value.
Related: we are now conducting ground operations in Syria. Pretty sure I was told that would never happen.
So, your position is that assassinating Hitler while leaving the Third Reich intact would have been all we needed to do in Europe in World War II?
My point is that the significance was substantially diluted by the absence of a robust attack on violent Islamist terrorism. I’m not saying that it had zero significance. I’m saying it didn’t have a great deal of significance, something clearly not the administration’s view.
I’m saying that removing the Third Reich and letting Hitler skate to South America not only wouldn’t have looked good, it would have been a bad thing for the image of the nation. (Note that we had to make up for all the Nazi scientists we took on after the war, too.) Going after much lesser fry than Hitler is something the Israelis are STILL doing, and not a damned one of cases from the last 20 years (roughly) has accomplished anything larger. Sometimes justice/revenge is enough.
One of these days I probably need to put up a couple of comparative maps illustrating territory controlled by radical Islamists in 1995 vs. territory controlled by radical Islamists in 2015.
Counter-terrorism policy is heavily driven by domestic politics, so the UBL killing was important from that aspect. It’s very roughly analogous to the Doolittle raid – in the grand scheme of things the Doolittle raid had no material effect on the course of WWII, but it served a very important purpose domestically. The same is true, albeit to a lesser extent, with the UBL raid.
That’s why I articulated my point the way I did. Domestic vs. geo-political.