Committee to Protest Journalists - The Pentagon has produced its first Department of Defense-wide Law of War Manual and the results are not encouraging for journalists who, the documents states, may be treated as "unprivileged belligerents." But the manual's justification for categorizing journalists this way is not based on any specific case, law or treaty. Instead, the relevant passages have footnotes referring to either other parts of the document or matters not germane to this legal assertion. And the language used to attempt to justify this categorization is weak at best.
This broad and poorly defined category gives U.S. military commanders across all services the purported right to at least detain journalists without charge, and without any apparent need to show evidence or bring a suspect to trial. The Obama administration's Defense Department appears to have taken the ill-defined practices begun under the Bush administration during the War on Terror and codified them to formally govern the way U.S. military forces treat journalists covering conflicts.
The manual's impact overseas, especially in the short run, may be even worse. The language used to justify treating journalists as "unprivileged belligerents" comes at a time when international law for conflict is being flouted by armed groups--including government, militia, and insurgent forces--from Ukraine and Iraq to Nigeria and the Congo--and during a time in which CPJ has documented record numbers of journalists being imprisoned and killed.
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