On December 29, ...

... 1893, Vera Brittain was born at Newcastle-under-Lyme, England. When World War I broke out, she urged her brother and his best friend, with whom she'd fallen in love, to enlist. Even before both were killed in that conflict, Brittain began to turn away from war and toward pacifism. In 1993, she published her memoir of that time, Testament of Youth. She has been an inspiration to IntLawGrrl Elizabeth Hillman.
... 1972 (35 years ago today), a 5-year moratorium that had been placed on executions in Canada ended. In that period support for the death penalty seemed to have increased. By a narrow vote the country abolished capital punishment in 1976. The penalty continues in Canada's neighbor to the south, of course, although abolition by New Jersey just this month (the global consequences of which our Opinio Juris colleague Peggy McGuinness posted here and here) reduced the number of U.S. retentionist jurisdictions to 38 -- 37 states plus the federal government -- though compared with prior years there were fewer executions in 2007. A reporter's even envisioned what a United States without the death penalty would look like.

Coalition of the billing: contractors in Iraq

I have to give credit for that snappy title to Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who's written on military contracting. Cited in the LA Times, Singer quipped that the figures on who’s fighting in Iraq indicate that it’s not a “coalition of the willing”, as originally touted. Even counting the recent troop buildup, American military personnel (160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees) are outnumbered by the 180,000 American, foreign and Iraqi civilian contractors. Apparently, using private contractors is nothing new—the practice dates at least to the American Revolution. Functions vary, from construction to security to weapons system maintenance, and some military officials claim that having contractors cuts costs and allows troops to get down to the business of fighting. But William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert, claims that “hiring guns” is not only “obscene”, but dangerous, because the military doesn’t have control over all of the coalition forces’ guns. Another danger is that contractors can and have refused to deliver supplies in combat zones. Still another danger is the lack of accountability: there is no centralized record, so we don’t know how many contractors there are, or where they are. In addition, private security contractors have been involved in firefights with Iraqis, but only a few have been prosecuted for serious crimes committed by American forces (contractors are immune from criminal prosecution in Iraq and not likely to be successfully prosecuted in the US, particularly given the limitations on the War Crimes Act imposed by the Military Commissions Act). But accountability for crimes in Iraq doesn’t stop at equal treatment between soldiers and contractors. As we’ve seen with the torture at Abu Ghraib, lower-level troops have been court-martialed while the top brass has escaped censure, with the notable exceptions of Generals Janis Karpinski, who was demoted, and Antonio Taguba, who says he was forced to retire after his investigation into the matter . See also yesterday's post by Vera Brittain noting lower-level prosecution, whereas there may be a generalized problem with troops from Camp Pendleton. Who's doing the training there?