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Free-fire Zone
A free-fire zone is an area in which any person present is deemed an enemy combatant who can be targeted by opposing military forces. The concept of a free-fire zone does not exist in international law, and failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians is a war crime. World War II General Chuck Yeager in his autobiography describes his (and his associates') disapproval of shoot-anything-that-moves low level strafing missions during World War II (although they were not necessarily called "free-fire zone" missions). He described his feeling that, had the U.S. lost the war, it might have been considered a criminal activity. Vietnam War Returning veterans, affected civilians and others have said that U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam ( MACV), based on the assumption that all friendly forces had been cleared from the area, established a policy designating "free-fire zones" as areas in which: *Anyone unidentified is considered an enemy combatant *Soldiers were to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
War Crime
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings (including genocide or ethnic cleansing), the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military, and flouting the legal Indiscriminate attack, distinctions of Proportionality (law), proportionality and military necessity. The formal concept of war crimes emerged from the codification of the customary international law that applied to warfare between sovereign states, such as the Lieber Code (1863) of the Union Army in the American Civil War and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 for int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bantam Books
Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by parent company Random House, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine, with funding from Grosset & Dunlap and Curtis Publishing Company. It has since been purchased several times by companies including National General, Carl Lindner's American Financial and, most recently, Bertelsmann, which in 1986 purchased what had grown to become the Bantam Doubleday Dell publishing group. Bertelsmann purchased Random House in 1998, and in 1999 merged the Bantam and Dell imprints (amongst other mergers within the sprawling publishing house) to become the Bantam Dell publishing imprint. In 2010, the Bantam Dell division was consolidated with Ballantine Books (founded in 1952 by Bantam co-founders Ian and Betty Ballantine) to form the Ballantine Bantam Dell group within Random Hous ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Basic Books
Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1950 and located in New York City, now an imprint of Hachette Book Group. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and history. History Basic Books originated as a small Greenwich Village-based book club marketed to psychoanalysts. Arthur Rosenthal took over the book club in 1950, and under his ownership it soon began producing original books, mostly in the behavioral sciences. Early successes included Ernest Jones's ''The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud'', as well as works by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. Irving Kristol joined Basic Books in 1960, and helped Basic to expand into the social sciences. Harper & Row purchased the company in 1969. In 1997, HarperCollins announced that it would merge Basic Books into its trade publishing program, effectively closing the imprint and ending its publishing of serious academic books. That sam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deborah Nelson
Deborah Nelson is a Pulitzer prize-winning freelance journalist at Reuters and the Associate Professor of Investigative Reporting at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Nelson earned her B.S. in Journalism from Northern Illinois University and her J.D. from the DePaul University College of Law in 1987. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland in 2006, she was the Washington investigations editor for the ''Los Angeles Times'', the national investigative team reporter for ''The Washington Post'', and a reporter for the ''Chicago Sun-Times''. In 1997, Nelson won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative ReportingBurns, Hilliary"The 1997 Pulitzer Prize Winners Investigative Reporting" ''pulitzerprize.org'' for her investigative work for the Seattle Times, exposing “widespread corruption and inequities in the federally-sponsored housing program for Native Americans, which inspired much-needed reforms.” In 2008, she received critica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Search And Destroy
Seek and destroy (also known as search and destroy, or S&D) is a military strategy which consists of inserting infantry forces into hostile territory and directing them to search and then attack enemy targets before immediately withdrawing. First used as part of counterinsurgency operations during military conflicts in Southeast Asia such as the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War, the strategy was developed to take advantage of new technological capabilities available to Western militaries such as the helicopter, which allowed for the adoption of new tactics like the air assault. Primarily used in jungle warfare, the strategy was developed with asymmetric tactics in mind rather than conventional warfare. A related strategy known as clear and hold, which entailed military forces clearing an area of enemy personnel and then keeping the area clear of enemies while winning the local population's support, was developed around the same period and used alongside the search and de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Strategic Hamlet Program
The Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP; ) was implemented in 1962 by the government of South Vietnam, with advice and financing from the United States, during the Vietnam War to combat the communist insurgency. The strategy was to isolate the rural population from contact with and influence by the National Liberation Front (NLF), more commonly known as the Viet Cong. The Strategic Hamlet Program, along with its predecessor, the Rural Community Development Program, attempted to create new communities of "protected hamlets". The rural peasants would be provided protection, economic support, and aid by the government, thereby strengthening ties with the South Vietnamese government (GVN) which was hoped would lead to increased loyalty by the peasantry towards the government.Tucker, Spencer, ''The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History'', ABC-CLIO, 2011, p. 1070. Most hamlets involved restructuring existing villages with a defensible perimeter. This led t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Area Bombing
In military aviation, area bombardment or area bombing is a type of aerial bombardment in which bombs are dropped over the general area of a target. The term "area bombing" came into prominence during World War II. Area bombing is a form of strategic bombing. It can serve several intertwined purposes: to disrupt the production of military materiel, to disrupt lines of communications, to divert the enemy's industrial and military resources from the primary battlefield to air defence and infrastructure repair, and to demoralise the enemy's population (See terror bombing). "Carpet bombing",An early example of this use of "carpet bombing" is from 1942: also known as "saturation bombing", and "obliteration bombing", refers to a type of area bombing that aims to effect complete destruction of the target area by exploding bombs in every part of it. Area bombing is contrasted with precision bombing. The latter is directed at a selected target – not necessarily a small, and not nec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lawrence Wilkerson
Lawrence B. Wilkerson (born June 15, 1945) is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since the end of his military career, Wilkerson has criticized many aspects of the Iraq War, including his own preparation of Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council, as well as other aspects of American policy in the Middle East, as well as criticizing Israel. As of 2024, he is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Education and early military service Wilkerson was born in Gaffney, South Carolina. After three years of studying philosophy and English literature at Bucknell University, Wilkerson dropped out in 1966 and volunteered to serve in the Vietnam War. He told ''The Washington Post'': "I felt an obligation because my dad had fought, and I thought that was kind of your duty." Wilkerson arrived as an Army officer piloting an OH-6A Cayuse observation helicopter and logged a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Committee Of The Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a humanitarian organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, and is a three-time Nobel Prize laureate. The organization has played an instrumental role in the development of rules of war and promoting humanitarian norms. State parties (signatories) to the Geneva Convention of 1949 and its Additional Protocols of 1977 ( Protocol I, Protocol II) and 2005 have given the ICRC a mandate to protect victims of international and internal armed conflicts. Such victims include war wounded persons, prisoners, refugees, civilians, and other non-combatants. The ICRC is part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, along with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and 191 National Societies. It is the oldest and most honoured organization within the movement and one of the most widely recognized organizations in the world, having won three Nobel Peace Prizes (in 1917, 1944, and 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Citizens Commission Of Inquiry
The National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam (CCI) was founded in New York in November 1969 by Ralph Schoenman. The purpose was to document American wartime atrocities throughout Indochina. The founding of the organization was prompted by Seymour Hersh's disclosure on November 13, 1969 in ''The St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' concerning the March 1968 My Lai massacre. CCI was the first organization to bring to public attention the testimony of Vietnam War veterans who had witnessed or participated in atrocities. Origins Schoenman had previously worked on the International War Crimes Tribunal founded by Bertrand Russell. CCI had a policy‐making board that included Schoenman, Noam Chomsky, Dick Gregory, Melvin L. Wulf, director of the Legal Department, American Civil Liberties Union, Eric Seitz, executive secretary, National Lawyers Guild and Andy Stapp. Schoenman soon left CCI in the hands of two New Left anti-war activists, Tod Ensign ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ron Dellums
Ronald Vernie Dellums (November 24, 1935 – July 30, 2018) was an American politician who served as Mayor of Oakland from 2007 to 2011. He had previously served thirteen terms as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California's 9th congressional district, in office from 1971 to 1998, after which he worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Dellums was born into a family of labor organizers, and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps before serving on the Berkeley, California, City Council. He was the first African American elected to Congress from Northern California and the first successful openly socialist non-incumbent Congressional candidate after World War II. His politics earned him a place on President Nixon's enemies list. During his career in Congress, he fought the MX Missile project and opposed expansion of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber program. When President Ronald Reagan vetoed Dellums's Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, a Democra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
