Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in Americas Post-9/11 Wars
Author: Neta Crawford File Type: pdf In May 2009, American B-1B bombers dropped 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs in the village of Garani, Afghanistan following a Taliban attack. The dead included anywhere from twenty five to over one hundred civilians. The U.S. military went into damage control mode, making numerous apologies to the Afghan government and the townspeople. Afterward, the military announced that it would modify its aerial support tactics. This episode was hardly an anomaly. As anyone who has followed the Afghanistan war knows, these types of incidents occur with depressing regularity. Indeed, as Neta Crawford shows in Accountability for Killing, they are intrinsic to the American way of warfare today. While the military has prioritized reducing civilian casualties, it has not come close to eliminating them despite significant progress in recent years, for a very simple reason American reliance on airpower and, increasingly, drone technology, which is intended to reduce American casualties. Yet the long distance from targets, the power of the explosives, and the frequency of attacks necessarily produces civilian casualties over the course of a long war. Working from these basic facts, Crawford offers a sophisticated and intellectually powerful analysis of culpability and moral responsibility in war. The dominant paradigm of legal and moral responsibility in war today stresses both intention and individual accountability. Deliberate killing of civilians is outlawed and international law blames individual soldiers and commanders for such killing. But also under international law, civilian killing may be forgiven if it was unintended and incidental to a militarily necessary operation. Given the nature of contemporary war, though, Crawford contends that this argument is no longer satisfactory. As she demonstrates, unintended deaths of civilians are too often dismissed as unavoidable, inevitable, and accidental. Yet essentially, the very law that protects noncombatants from deliberate killing allows unintended killing. An individual soldier may be sentenced life in prison or death for deliberately killing even a small number of civilians, but the large scale killing of dozens or even hundreds of civilians may be forgiven if it was unintentional-incidental to a military operation. She focuses on the causes of these many episodes of foreseeable collateral damage and the moral responsibility for them. Why was there so much unintended killing of civilians in the U.S. wars zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan? Is collateral damage simply an unavoidable consequence of all wars? Why, when the U.S. military tries so hard to limit collateral damage, does so much of it seem to occur? Trenchant, original, and ranging across security studies, international law, ethics, and international relations, Accountability for Killing will reshape our understanding of the ethics of contemporary war.
Author: Suzanne Staubach
File Type: pdf
More than a third of the houses in the world are made of clay. Clay vessels were instrumental in the invention of cooking, wine and beer making, and international trade. Our toilets are made of clay. The first spark plugs were thrown on the potters wheel. Clay has played a vital role in the health and beauty fields. Indeed, this humble material was key to many advances in civilization, including the development of agriculture and the invention of baking, architecture, religion, and even the space program. In Clay, Suzanne Staubach takes a lively look at the startling history of the mud beneath our feet. Told with verve and erudition, this story will ensure you wont see the world around you in quite the same way after reading the book.
Author: Alan Baragona
File Type: pdf
The rhetorical trope of irony is well-trod territory, with books and essays devoted to its use by a wide range of medieval and Renaissance writers, from the Beowulf-poet and Chaucer to Boccaccio and Shakespeare however, the use of sarcasm, the flesh tearing form of irony, in the same literature has seldom been studied at length or in depth. Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to pick out in a written text, since it relies so much on tone of voice and context. This is the first book-length study of medieval and Renaissance sarcasm. Its fourteen essays treat instances in a range of genres, both sacred and secular, and of cultures from Anglo-Saxon to Arabic, where the combination of circumstance and word choice makes it absolutely clear that the speaker, whether a character or a narrator, is being sarcastic. Essays address, among other things, the clues writers give that sarcasm is at work, how it conforms to or deviates from contemporary rhetorical theories, what role it plays in building character or theme, and how sarcasm conforms to the Christian milieu of medieval Europe, and beyond to medieval Arabic literature. The collection thus illuminates a half-hidden but surprisingly common early literary technique for modern readers. **
Author: Peter Kropotkin
File Type: pdf
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.
Author: Robert Harris
File Type: mobi
From the bestselling author of Fatherland and Imperium comes The Ghost, an extraordinarily auspicious thriller of power, politics, corruption, and murder. Dashing, captivating Adam Lang was Britains longest serving -- and most controversial -- prime minister of the last half century, whose career ended in tatters after he sided with America in an unpopular war on terror. Now, after stepping down in disgrace, Lang is hiding out in wintry Marthas Vineyard to finish his much sought-after, potentially explosive memoir, for which he accepted one of historys largest cash advances. But the project runs aground when his ghostwriter suddenly and mysteriously disappears and later washes up, dead, on the islands deserted shore.Enter our hero -- Langs new ghostwriter -- cynical, mercenary, and quick with a line of deadpan humor. Accustomed to working with fading rock stars and minor celebrities, he jumps at the chance to be the new ghost of Adam Langs memoirs, especially as it means a big payday. At once he flies to Langs remote location in America to finish the book in the seclusion of a luxurious estate, but it doesnt take him long to realize he has made a fatal error in judgment.The state of affairs is grim enough when the ghost begins to unearth the bone-chilling circumstances of his predecessors death. And before long, he discovers that the ex-prime minister is not just a charismatic politician who made a few mistakes. Hes a dark, tortured man with haunting secrets in his past -- secrets with the power to alter world politics. Secrets with the power to kill.Robert Harris is known the world over as a master of his trade. The Ghost is yet another signature, brilliant tour de force that will compel, captivate, and excite readers to the very last shocking page.
Author: Rebecca B. Rubin
File Type: pdf
Expanding and building on the measures included in the original 1994 volume, Communication Research Measures II A Sourcebook provides new measures in mass, interpersonal, instructional, and grouporganizational communication areas, and highlights work in newer subdisciplines in communication, including intercultural, family, and health. It also includes measures from outside the communication discipline that have been employed in communication research. The measures profiled here are the best of the best from the early 1990s through today. They are models for future scale development as well as tools for the trade, and they constitute the main tools that researchers can use for self-administered measurement of peoples attitudes, conceptions of themselves, and perceptions of others. The focus is on up-to-date measures and the most recent scales and indexes used to assess communication variables. Providing suggestions for measurement of concepts of interest to researchers inspiring students to consider research directions not considered previously and supplying models for scale developers to follow in terms of the work necessary to produce a valid and reliable measurement instrument in the discipline, the authors of this key resource have developed a significant contribution toward improving measurement and providing measures for better science. **
Author: Tory Vandeventer Pearman
File Type: pdf
This book serves as the first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, the study proposes a gendered model for exploring the processes by which differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant. About the AuthorTory Vandeventer Pearman is an Assistant Professor of English at Miami University Hamilton. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Essays in Medieval Studies and The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability.
Author: James Curtis
File Type: epub
The best goddamned actor Ive ever seen!George M. CohanHis full name was Spencer Bonaventure Tracy. He was called The Gray Fox by Frank Sinatra other actors called him the The Pope.Spencer Tracys image on-screen was that of a self-reliant man whose sense of rectitude toward others was matched by his sense of humor toward himself. Whether he was Father Flanagan of Boys Town, Clarence Darrow of Inherit the Wind, or the crippled war veteran in Bad Day at Black Rock, Tracy was forever seen as a pillar of strength.In his several comedy roles opposite Katharine Hepburn (Woman of the Year and Adams Rib among them) or in Father of the Bride with Elizabeth Taylor, Tracy was the sort of regular American guy one could depend on.Now James Curtis, acclaimed biographer of Preston Sturges (Definitive Variety), James Whale, and W. C. Fields (By far the fullest, fairest, and most touching account . . . we have yet had. Or are likely to have Richard Schickel, The New York Times Book Review, cover review), gives us the life of one of the most revered screen actors of his generation.Curtis writes of Tracys distinguished career, his deep Catholicism, his devoted relationship to his wife, his drinking that got him into so much trouble, and his twenty-six-year-long bond with his partner on-screen and off, Katharine Hepburn. Drawing on Tracys personal papers and writing with the full cooperation of Tracys daughter, Curtis tells the rich story of the brilliant but haunted man at the heart of the legend. We see him from his boyhood in Milwaukee given over to Dominican nuns (They drill that religion in you) his years struggling in regional shows and stock (Tracy had a photographic memory and an instinct for inhabiting a character from within) acting opposite his future wife, Louise Treadwell marrying and having two children, their son, John, born deaf.We see Tracys success on Broadway, his turning out mostly forgettable programmers with the Fox Film Corporation, and going to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and getting the kinds of roles that had eluded him in the pasta streetwise priest opposite Clark Gable in San Francisco a screwball comedy, Libeled Lady Kiplings classic of the sea, Captains Courageous. Three years after arriving at MGM, Tracy became Americas top male star.We see how Tracy embarked on a series of affairs with his costars . . . making Northwest Passage and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which brought Ingrid Bergman into his life. By the time the unhappy shoot was over, Tracy, looking to do a comedy, made Woman of the Year. Its unlikely costar Katharine Hepburn.We see Hepburn making Tracy her lifes projectprotecting and sustaining him in the difficult job of being a top-tier movie star.And we see Tracys wife, Louise, devoting herself to studying how deaf children could be taught to communicate orally with the hearing and speaking world.Curtis writes that Tracy was ready to retire when producer-director Stanley Kramer recruited him for Inherit the Winda collaboration that led to Judgment at Nuremberg, Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and Tracys final picture, Guess Whos Coming to Dinner . . . A rich, vibrant portraitthe most intimate and telling yet of this complex man considered by many to be the actors actor.From the Hardcover edition.