Op Ed: Top American Legal Authority Says New Pentagon War Manual Reduces Us To Nazi Level

Francis Boyle, the world-renowned international law expert and professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign, has denounced the Pentagon’s recently released Law of War Manual (LOWM) as an affront to humanity. Boyle, who was the top student of Richard Baxter, the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a Judge on the International Court of Justice, stated that the 1,165-page document reads “like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War.” 

The LOWM sanctions the use of nuclear attacks, the killing of civilians, napalm, herbicides, depleted uranium, and drone missile strikes. Boyle believes that the manual is designed to supplant the 1956 U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10, which he says has proven to be an embarrassment to the Pentagon. He has described the LOWM as a “warmongering” document, and noted that it seeks to distinguish between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” acts of military violence against civilian targets, using the criterion of military necessity. 

Peter Martin of the World Socialist Website has further commented that the LOWM “amounts to a green light for military atrocities, including mass killings.” Martin said that the 1956 document did not state that civilians should be spared “unnecessary suffering” because it assumed that any deliberate targeting of civilians was illegal and a war crime. Boyle has declared that the LOWM is a “terrible development” and that it reduces the U.S. to the level of the Nazis.

Martin lists the following as some of the egregious transgressions of international law that the Pentagon’s new LOWM has authorised:

# Making the use of nuclear weapons acceptable. According to LOWM, there is “no universal prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons in treaty or customary international law.” This violates a number of current international agreements. Even threatening to use nuclear weapons, as the United States and Israel have threatened Iran, is illegal and therefore a war crime, according to the World Court’s interpretation of the UN Charter in its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons.

# Permitting the use of prohibited incendiary weapons including depleted uranium munitions, Agent Orange, and napalm (as used in Iraq). For instance, Protocol III of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons forbids the use of napalm.

# The LOWM justifies the use of mines, booby traps, and cluster munitions by stating that “the United States is not a Party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.” (Of course, that’s a shame given that the vast majority of countries have signed it.)

# Defends the use of drone missiles by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, stating unequivocally that “there is no limitation in the rules of war on the use of remotely piloted aircraft.” Targeted killing is not permitted off the battlefield, though.

# Declares that the United States is not a signatory to the 1868 St. Petersburg proclamation that forbade the use of exploding hollow-point bullets. The United States is currently only 147 years behind schedule.

The Pentagon’s recent move to replace the 1956 manual with the Law of War Manual (LOWM) has been met with criticism from some quarters, who view it as an attempt to justify the expenditure of its trillion-dollar-a-year war machine. This machine, which operates some 900 military bases around the world, is said to be as large as the next dozen nations combined. 

The LOWM has been described as a sign of the US’s drift from a democratic to a totalitarian society. However, it has received little attention in the media, with some suggesting that the media is following orders to conceal the Pentagon’s preparations for new and more massive war crimes. 

The lack of coverage of the carnage inflicted by the Pentagon has been noted by some, with many TV news stations airing more commercials than news stories. War, it seems, is a topic that is being deliberately avoided.

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