A 1,176 page document released by the Pentagon reviewing its policy on war reporting effectively legalizes the killing of journalists by American military forces. Reading the Law of War Manual’s Orwellian protocol, one thinks more of 1984 than the First Amendment.
“Unprivileged Belligerents”
The manual states that journalists can be labeled “unprivileged belligerents”, a broad category that includes ISIS and al-Qaeda militants. Others were unsure of the phrase’s actual meaning. Georgetown University journalism professor Chris Chambers told RT News that he didn’t know what it meant, “because the Geneva Convention, other tenets of international law, and even United States law – federal courts have spoken on this – doesn’t have this thing on ‘unprivileged belligerents’.”
Perhaps the phrase’s history should tell us something.
Replaced “unlawful enemy combatant” in Department of Defense doctrine
As Telesur pointed out, the Bush-era term “unlawful enemy combatant” was used to justify the treatment given to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, as the Geneva Convention’s definition of “prisoners of war” gave prisoners more legal protections. “Unprivileged” prisoners – whether civilian journalists or armed insurgents – are not guaranteed the rights that a normal prisoner of war is entitled to.
Journalists React to the Document Released By the Pentagon
Viewing it as an assault on the press, some prominent journalists have responded to the rules with vitriol. The New York Times condemned the rules in an angry editorial today: “For the Pentagon to conflate espionage with journalism feeds into the propaganda of authoritarian governments.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists spoke out against it on a similar basis, drawing a parallel to the way national security reasons are cited by regimes like Russia and China to legitimize jailing reporters.
Frank Smyth, the committee’s senior advisor for journalist security wrote, “By giving approval for the military to detain journalists on vague national security grounds, the manual is sending a disturbing message to dictatorships and democracies alike.”
Aside from the information mentioned above, the legal guide also covers the conditions for censoring war journalists and the permitted methods of killing enemy combatants. For those interested, the entire Law of War Manual is here.
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Pentagon Releases Scary New Rules for War Reporting
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