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Mark Adams is [in no particular order] a Lawyer, Restauranteur, Husband, Father, Grandfather, Landlord, Singer, Guitarist, Political Scientist, Amateur Historian and Rhetorician with no sense of reverence for anything except the freedom to speak one's mind. To visit Mark's Family Law Website
NewsMax.com: Inside Cover Story has a decent treatment of whether the Fallujah Four are more properly called mercenaries or security forces. This question is heating up in Blogdomania, but the "normal" news is still behind on the question.
Should have known from the start that there was a problem with their status. 1st stories talked of "foreign" contractors, possibly involving Americans, then on to "American contractors," next "US private security personnel." History (and this blog) will call them merc's, not that there's anything wrong with that.
From NewsMax:
According to the Progressive Review, the international convention against the recruitment, use, financing and training of mercenaries defines a mercenary as any person who:
* Is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict; * Is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar rank and functions in the armed forces of that party. ...
A mercenary is also any person who, in any other situation:
* Is specially recruited locally or abroad for the purpose of participating in a concerted act of violence aimed at * Overthrowing a Government or otherwise undermining the constitutional order of a State; or * Undermining the territorial integrity of a State; * Is motivated to take part therein essentially by the desire for significant private gain and is prompted by the promise or payment of material compensation. ...
The bottom line of the rule of war: "A mercenary, as defined in article 1 of the present Convention, who participates directly in hostilities or in a concerted act of violence, as the case may be, commits an offence for the purposes of the Convention."
Paid? they better be. Merc's? debatable. Illegal merc's? Nah, not these guys anyway. Doesn't fit the UN Convetion's definition, and the US didn't sign the thing. nor was it ratified by the UN. It's not good law.
