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<div class="">In response to the many articles and claims that the Obama Administration ROE were too restrictive to conduct war, and claims that no changes to the ROE have occurred, or that Trump has changed them. Here is proof that changes did occur in 2015,
changes that are so horrific……..no wonder they are no longer available for purchase online. </div>
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<div class="">Please see: International Law Professor Francis Boyle, interview by Sherwood Ross <b style="font-size: 10pt;" class="">General News <time datetime="2015-08-13T19:22:57" pubdate="" class="">8/13/2015 at 19:22:57</time></b></div>
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<h1 class="articletitle" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128); font-family: Verdana, Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; margin: 0px 0px -3px;">
Boyle: New Pentagon War Manual Reduces Us To "Level of Nazis"</h1>
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<div class="">The Pentagon's new Law of War Manual(LOWM) sanctioning nuclear attacks and the killing of civilians, "reads like it was written by Hitler's Ministry of War," says international law authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.</div>
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<div class="">"Historically, this is a terrible development," he added in an exclusive interview with this reporter. "We are reducing ourselves to the level of the Nazis."</div>
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<div class="">The grim, 1,165-page-long document, issued in June by the Defense Department's Office of the General Counsel, also sanctions the use of napalm, herbicides, depleted uranium, and drone missile strikes, among other barbarities.</div>
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<div class="">Boyle points out the new manual is designed to supplant the 1956 U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 written by Richard Baxter, the world's leading authority on the Laws of War. Baxter was the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and
a Judge on the International Court of Justice. Boyle was his top student.</div>
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<div class="">Boyle today is the leading professor, practitioner and advocate of international law in America. He drafted the U.S. implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.</div>
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<div class="">"Over the years, 27-10 has proven to be a total embarrassment to the Pentagon because it sets forth a fair and accurate statement of the Laws of War both as of 1956 and as of today," Boyle says. He termed the new manual a "warmongering" document.</div>
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<div class="">The new document seeks to distinguish between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" acts of military violence against civilian targets, using the criterion of military necessity," points out Peter Martin of the World Socialist Website.</div>
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<div class="">"Thus, acts of mass slaughter of civilians could be justified if sufficient military advantages were gained by the operations."</div>
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<div class="">The bulk of the document, Martin continues, "amounts to a green light for military atrocities, including mass killings." </div>
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<div class="">Martin said the most comprehensive previous such document, the 1956 Pentagon field manual, did not state that civilians, unlike military personnel, should be spared "unnecessary suffering" because it assumed... "that any deliberate targeting of
civilians was illegal and a war crime."</div>
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<div class="">Among the flagrant violations of international law sanctioned by the Pentagon's new LOWM, Martin writes, are:</div>
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<div class=""># Legitimizing the use of nuclear weapons. LOWM states, "There is no general prohibition in treaty or customary international law on the use of nuclear weapons."</div>
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<div class="">This flies in the face of a number of existing international covenants. Under the UN Charter as interpreted by the World Court in its Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, even threatening to use nuclear weapons,
as the U.S. and Israel have threatened Iran, is illegal and thus a war crime. </div>
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<div class=""># Authorizing the use of banned incendiary weapons such as napalm, herbicides (as Agent Orange in Viet Nam), depleted uranium munitions (as used in Iraq). Napalm, for example, is banned under Protocol III of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional
Weapons.</div>
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<div class=""># Authorizing the use of cluster munitions, mines and booby-traps, the LOWM rationalizes that "the United States is not a Party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions." (That's a disgrace, of course, when the overwhelming majority of nations have
signed it.)</div>
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<div class=""># Defends drone missile attacks, both by the Pentagon and intelligence outfits such as the Central Intelligence Agency, declaring flatly: "There is no prohibition in the law of war on the use of remotely piloted aircraft"" To the contrary, targeted
killing off the battlefield is prohibited.</div>
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<div class=""># Authorizes the use of exploding hollow-point bullets, stating the U.S. is not a party to the 1868 St. Petersburg declaration banning their use. (At this writing, the U.S. is only 147 years late.)</div>
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<div class="">In sum, the move by the Pentagon to supplant the 1956 manual with the LOWM represents an effort to justify the excesses of its trillion dollar-a-year war machine, one that is as large as the next dozen nations combined.</div>
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<div class="">The Pentagon today operates some 900 military bases globally, allegedly for "defense," yet engages in warfare in a dozen foreign countries. The new Pentagon manual illuminates in bold print the downward drift of the U.S. from a democratic to a
totalitarian society.</div>
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<div class="">LOWM has received no play in a media "following orders to conceal from the American people"the Pentagon's preparations for new and more massive war crimes, along with the destruction of democratic rights spelled out in the U.S. Constitution,"
Martin says.</div>
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<div class="">(Indeed, it seems TV "news" stations beam more commercials than news stories, and reports of any carnage inflicted by the Pentagon are virtually non-existent.)#</div>
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<div class="">(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based award-winning journalist who formerly reported for The New York Herald-Tribune, The Chicago Daily News, and major wire services.)</div>
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