Is Matt Bartlett’s Foreign Fighters Against ISIS Legal Under International Law?

Given the global threat posed by Islamic State / ISIS, is Matt Bartlett’s Foreign Fighters Against ISIS not violating existing international laws pertaining to mercenaries? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Given their brutality in full display on every major online social network, Islamic State or ISIS seems to be the very reason why civilized nations established the International Court of Justice, but should fighting them via means of still questionable legality be the best course of action. After all, there are still a lot of people who are calling for the prosecution of former US President George W. Bush and former US Vice President Dick Cheney for their use of “private contractors” during the wake of the March 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom which for all intents and purposes nothing more than glorified mercenaries and therefore in violation of the Neutrality Act? 

One redeeming feature of Matt Bartlett’s Foreign Fighters Against ISIS – which also has its own Facebook page – is that Bartlett had put in place a due diligent vetting process that screens out trigger happy yahoos or worse the “Christian counterparts” of Islamic State which most of them comes from the United States of America that form the Evangelical Christian core of the US Republican Party. According to a recent BBC Newsnight interview, Matt Bartlett personally vets potential volunteers wanting to join the Kurdish group Peshmerga via a Facebook group Foreign Fighters Against ISIS. 

As of the Thursday, March 5, 2015 interview, Bartlett has helped up to 20 volunteers head to the Iraqi region of Kurdistan to fight – as in engage in a shooting war - the Islamic State extremists. Bartlett said: “I see ISIS as a major threat which is on our doorstep.” Bartlett’s group has direct links with the official operation of the Kurdish Peshmerga’s Foreign Recruitment Assessment, Management & Extraction (FRAME) programme. 

Bartlet said “We have a very tight vetting framework in place to be considered to be passed on to the next level.” Given that prospective combatants must have prior military combat experience he says “We want to have your army discharge number, we want to be able to vet you to a high level before we pass you across to the Peshmerga.” The Kurdistan group showed their gratitude to Mr. Bartlett by posting a photo with a thank you message on the group’s Facebook page. Which is refreshing given that Islamic State has been recruiting conscripts the world over using major social media sites for a much longer time than Bartlett’s Foreign Fighters Against ISIS. 

Mr. Bartlett said he had spent a lot of time considering going out there himself as a civilian volunteer and was in discussion with a number of people about doing so. Bartlett works as a business development manager and has no military background but said he had joined in with the anti Islamic State fight because “It’s not a Middle Eastern threat it’s a global threat.” And other people with a beef against Islamic State / ISIS also want to pitch in their part in order to end the extremist group’s brutal onslaught across the region are now sympathetic with Bartlett’s scheme despite its questionable legality under international law because of NATO’s “Hamlet like psychosis” when it comes to prosecuting a military action against Islamic State / ISIS. 

With legal precedents on international law that now make privateering and nation-states issuing letters of marquee and reprisal and the hiring of mercenaries illegal, Bartlett’s Foreign Fighters Against ISIS seems has a shaky legality in the eyes of international law. Given that the last high-profile court case mercenaries happened back in June 1976 when a group of foreign mercenaries – mostly British and American - captured during the Angolan Civil War was brought in front of Chief Judge Ernesto Texeria da Silva. It seems like we are fighting the unmitigated evil of ISIS with legally questionable means.     

 

Is Islamic State Nothing More Than A Nihilistic Death Cult?

Given the brutality of the execution of their hostages is Islamic State / ISIS / ISIL nothing more than a nihilistic death cult? 

By: Ringo Bones 

The terrorist organization has already executed scores of hostages with extreme brutality and they seem to not offer anything in terms of economic security – never mind an economically viable health plan - of the people under their control, it seems that Islamic State / Islamic State of Iraq and Syria / Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is for all intents and purposes nothing more than a nihilistic death cult. Even the group’s claims of advancing the cause of Islam, an overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims consider them not apart of the officially accepted form of Islam. And the straw that finally broke the camel’s back is the imholation of Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot first lieutenant Muath al Kasasbeh.  

Islamic State as of late tend to not to stick to their word given that after they shot down the F-16 flown by the Jordanian pilot back in Christmas Eve and planned to swap him for a failed female Iraqi suicide bomber captured by the Jordanian authorities they burned the pilot alive anyway. During the course of this tragic ordeal, pilot Kasasbeh’s father used to hang on the opinion that the war against Islamic State is not Jordan’s war, but after seeing the gruesome video of the imholation of his own son under the hands of ISIS, his views changed. Jordan’s King Abdullah has recently launched extensive air operations against Islamic State to avenge the gruesome execution of 26 year old first lieutenant Muath al Kasasbeh. 

Now that the majority of Jordanians are now against Daesh – the Arabic name of Islamic State – it seems that the cycle of violence in the region could perpetuate for years to come. With Islamic State’s penchant for dissembling, the two Japanese hostages executed earlier before the prisoner swap was arranged only strengthen the resolve of the international community against Islamic State. The terror group even recently claimed that their female American aid worker - now identified as 26 year old Kayla Mueller - taken hostage by them was a recent casualty of recent Jordanian Air Force operations against them. 

President Obama Not Attending The French Anti-Terror Unity March: A Sign of Respect?

Is U.S. President Barack Obama not attending the French Anti-Terror Unity March / Parade his own way of showing respect to the victims of the tragedy?

By: Ringo Bones 

Statistically, the more than 1-million people attending the French Ant-Terror Unity Parade / March back in Sunday, January 11, 2015 is a historic event mainly because more people attended the event in comparison to the total who greeted the Allies during the Liberation of Paris back in 1944, not to mention the 40 heads-of-state showing their unity against radical Islamism. Many criticize the President Obama and the U.S. government not sending a high-level official (higher than U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder?) during the French Anti-Terror Unity Parade / March as a “missed opportunity” for the Obama administration. But is this just a way that President Obama sympathize with the oft ignored demographic of this tragic event – as in the moderate Muslims who are also for all intents and purposes victimized by the murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and the Kosher supermarket shoppers by radical Islamists? 

Given that he spent a significant portion of his childhood in Muslim societies – i.e. in Indonesia, President Obama has a “unique perspective” on how to interact with the Muslim world that is sadly lacking in a majority of Western statesmen and captains-of-industry. President Obama could be, in a way, meeting halfway moderate Muslims with a conservative leaning outlook who are deeply offended by cheap, hackneyed renderings of the Prophet Mohammad. Even though the Paris-based political satire magazine Charlie Hebdo remains largely unknown outside of France, never mind the rest of the Francophone world, the radical Islamists who murdered those cartoonists may just have been doing their cause a disservice by inadvertently raising the satirical Parisian cartoonists to “martyrdom”. 

Sony Picture’s The Interview: Triumph Over Despotism?

Even though the risk-averse powers-that-be at Sony shelved its Christmas Day release, does the eventual Yuletide screening of Sony’s The Interview a “triumph over despotism”?

By: Ringo Bones

Thanks to the urging of US President Barack Obama to Sony Pictures Entertainment’s risk-averse CEO Michael Lynton to not bow down to the despotism of North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un and to go ahead as planned the Yuletide screening of the controversial political satire titled The Interview that stars Seth Rogen and James Franco, it seems that free speech has triumph again in America. Despite the boasts of the hacktivist group Guardians of Peace to unleash a 9/11 style terror attack if Sony chooses to release the film, everyone curious and brave enough to see what the hubbub is all about manages to express their right to free expression incident free. It might be a rather unprecedented uproar over a controversial work of political satire to the young folks out there, but it seems that the “politics” over satirical films preventing its screening in the name of censorship has happened before.

As a reaction to the rather brutal crackdown of Germany’s Jewish community during the late 1930s, iconic comedian Charlie Chaplain – who had gained enough clout in Hollywood from the brilliant success of his previous works in the box-office managed to convince top Hollywood producers to help make his then latest project a reality – a film satirizing a sitting head-of-state the then German Chancellor Adolf Hitler titled The Great Dictator. The then Prime Minister of Britain Neville Chamberlain blocked the screening of the film on British theaters in the hopes of appeasing Hitler and preventing an all-out war with Germany. But when the Hitler appeasing Chamberlin was voted out and replaced by Winston Churchill and by then Germany is already at war with Britain and the then new British PM Churchill allowed the screening of Charlie Chaplain’s The Great Dictator on British movie theaters as an act of defiance against Adolf Hitler. Given how controversial Chaplain’s The Great Dictator is to “German sensibilities”, it wasn’t until 1998 that The Great Dictator was screened in German cinemas.

Fast forward to 2014, the “political controversy” generated by Sony’s The Interview may be partly due to the film’s subject matter - i.e. the assassination of a sitting head-of-state of a deeply repressive and racist regime who deeply believes that their race of people are the sole inheritors of the planet – at least that’s what their megalomaniacal “Dear Leader” has constantly reassured them. Even though the North Korean Bureau 121 cyber-warfare team had managed to recruit hackers who are sympathetic to their rather repressive politics and “belief-system”, one wonders if the recent cyber-attacks at Sony Entertainment was due in part to their past sins committed in the past and the recent release of the rather unflattering racist e-mains are just the tip of the iceberg of “Sony’s sins”.

President Obama’s Unilateral Immigration Reform: A Politically Contentious Move?

Even though the U.S. Republican Party has criticized him for acting like a king, does president Barack Obama’s executive order to unilaterally reform America’s current immigration system a “politically contentious move”?

By: Ringo Bones

For all intents and purposes, America’s current immigration system has been broken since the days of Ronald Reagan and for over 30 years has longing for a badly-needed reform. And yet when the U.S. President Barack Obama has recently made an executive order to unilaterally reform America’s broken immigration system, the U.S. Republican Party immediately voiced their “howls of derision” and calling president Obama’s action as akin to those of a king or an emperor as opposed to a democratically elected head-of-state. Given that for all intents and purposes any discussion of reforming the existing American immigration system is a politically contentious issue in itself, does President Obama’s recent move to unilaterally reform it do more good than harm despite of the contentious nature of the action?

Mexicans and other Hispanic groups in the United States had been unfairly bearing the full brunt of America’s dysfunctional immigration system. Not only Mexicans who are sneaking illegally across the border to America in the Arizona and Texas regions being harassed and murdered by white supremacists militias patrolling in that relatively lawless area but also “conservative” American’s are the main exploiters of illegal migrant labor by subjecting them to working conditions in violation of existing U.S. labor wage and safety laws due to their desperation to seek a better life that can’t be found in their native countries. 

“For over 200 years, America is a country of immigrants” – has been the salient theme of President Barack Obama’s speech on his executive action to prevent the deportation of up to 5-million undocumented immigrants, a majority of which are of Mexican and other Latin American ethnicity. Under the new reformed immigration law, if these undocumented immigrants pass the mandatory criminal background checks and qualify to the new reformed ruling then they will be eligible on the path to become fully naturalized American citizens. The immigration reform is primarily meant to benefit science and technology students and migrant workers with temporary visas to ease their path to become legalized American citizens. A semi legal Mexican immigrant and college student named Astrid Silva had become a recent – albeit according to her as an unwilling “cause célèbre” - on President Obama’s latest executive action to reform America’s broken immigration system.

Is President Obama A Closeted Conservative?

Despite being criticized by the U.S. Republican Party for being a left-leaning radical liberal, is President Obama, in truth, is actually a closeted conservative?

By: Ringo Bones

Maybe we should be thanking Bruce Bartlett – that former domestic policy advisor for both former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush - for raising such a premise that the incumbent U.S. President Barack Obama is actually a “closeted conservative” – as in President Obama’s policies are more akin to Ronald Reagan’s than of any other U.S. Democratic Party president of the last 50 years. If there’s a kernel of truth on Bruce Bartlett’s premise, the only difference between President Barack Obama and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan is that Ronald Reagan was the only one who was rumoured to have starred in his very own porno movie. But is there any truth to this? 

According to Bruce Bartlett, President Obama didn’t govern further towards the right in comparison to the way President Reagan did back in the 1980s. The way I see it, Obamacare is basically a U.S. Republican Party based idea and even Bartlett agrees that Obamacare is not that much different to the universal healthcare first proposed by President Eisenhower near the end of the 1950s. 

As a conservative leaning economist, Bruce Bartlett’s assessment of President Obama being a Reagan-era conservative might apply to the way Obama handled the 2008 Credit Crunch – as in bailing out the “too big to fail” banks and other Wall Street financial institutions reminiscent of Bartlett’s advice to then President Reagan about the merits of “supply-side economics”. But compared to “radical right” U.S. Republican Party politicians that run riot during the 2012 U.S. Presidential Elections that ran on the platform of legalizing rape and banning pornography in America – like Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin, Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and Pennsylvania Republican state Senator Rick Santorum – President Barack Obama’s alleged conservatism is much saner in comparison to the G.O.P. stalwarts recently mentioned.

Fall of the Berlin Wall: Unlikeliest Cold War Ending?

Given the prevailing thermonuclear Cold War endgame prediction of the 1980s, was the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” back in November 9, 1989 the unlikeliest Cold War conclusion ever? 

By: Ringo Bones

Even though when Francis Fukuyama published his essay “The End of History” during the summer of 1989, it was primarily inspired by the passing of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, rather than the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” which has still a few months left before falling, most people at this point back in 1989 still harbour the notion that a full-scale thermonuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union is still possible. I mean during the time I heard of the news that the Berlin Wall fell back in November 9, 1989 - I was both still listening and composing heavy metal songs about a post thermonuclear war world circa 1999 as seen from late 1980s era Cold War. The Fall of the Berlin Wall may seem an anti-climactic ending for those old enough to have lived through the Cold War and did their respective military service – both compulsory and voluntary – but at least it’s a peaceful one. 

 Back then, a “peaceful” transition of totalitarian style Marxist-Leninist-Socialism to a more democratic system in the then East-Bloc countries is still inconceivable to the most of us during the middle of 1989 due to the recent brutal crackdown of peaceful student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square back in June 4, 1989. To tell everyone the truth, I’m still surprised that when the Berlin Wall crumbled, it was largely a peaceful, almost routine passing of power in light of the recent Tiananmen Square Massacre back then. Does this mean that – then and now - the “Slavic People” have a better grasp of what Marxist-Leninist-Socialism is all about in comparison to the Mainland Chinese? 

After seeing the recent 25^th Anniversary fanfare of the Fall of the Berlin Wall – with the releasing of the white LED illuminated balloons marking where the Berlin Wall used to be and the musical extravaganza that featured Daniel Barenboim conducting Beethoven’s Ninth which has since become the “theme song” of post Cold War German reunification and Renée Fleming singing. The Fall of the Berlin Wall is probably one of the historically significant event of Generation X’ers.