Iraq

Clarity and resolve: keys to victory

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Our troops in Iraq must receive a clear mission and unwaivering support

Excerpted from commentary in today’s New York Post by retired U.S. Army officer Gordon Cucullu:

Rules of engagement (ROE), highly criticized as being too restrictive and sometimes endangering our troops, have been “clarified.” “There were unintended consequences with ROE for too long,” [Gen. David] Petraeus acknowledged. Because of what junior leaders perceived as too harsh punishment meted out to troops acting in the heat of battle, the ROE issued from the top commanders were second-guessed and made more restrictive by some on the ground. The end result was unnecessary – even harmful – restrictions placed on the troops in contact with the enemy.

“I’ve made two things clear,” Petraeus emphasized: “My ROE may not be modified with supplemental guidance lower down. And I’ve written a letter to all Coalition forces saying ‘your chain-of-command will stay with you.’ I think that solved the issue.”

Guantanamo, Lawfare

Civilian Courts Can’t Handle KSM

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David Rivkin and Rich Lowry, today, in the New York Post:

UNDOUBTEDLY, the media’s ideological bias prompts it to be dubious about KSM’s confession – for his statements powerfully rebut a favored media narrative, the notion that the Guantanamo-based detainee population is mostly comprised of “innocent shepards” wrongly swept up by the United States and its allies.

This notion is pivotal to the critics’ efforts to delegitimize the military-justice system that features CSRTs, military commissions and the detention in Guantanamo of captured enemy fighters for the duration of this war and their interrogation – all of which have been in play in the case of Sheik Mohammed.

The news of the confession, perversely, has even become an opportunity to renew calls for the closing of Guantanamo and the use of the criminal-justice system as the exclusive venue for dealing with KSM and his al Qaeda colleagues. This is foolishness.

Take the argument that, even if Sheik Mohammed is telling the truth, he is nothing more than an ordinary criminal and should be treated as such. This ignores the revolution over the last several decades in the rights of criminal defendants, resulting in a great emphasis on a variety of technical evidentiary and other rules. Given this emphasis, convicting individuals captured overseas, when all of the physical evidence also is derived abroad, is exceedingly difficult. Thus, trying al Qaeda personnel through the U.S. criminal-justice system would likely result in most of them going free.