I must confess that I have only briefly looked at the convention. What I wrote was what our captain told us in 1984, quite officially, so that would be the Swedish official point of view.

To me, the finer points of the convention are the kind of stuff that lawyers and judges in peace time give a "sitting in my library" kind of interpretation. If they personally felt that vital interests were threatened, or felt to be threatened themselves, they would look at it in another way. That the US has several times as many lawyers per inhabitant than almost any other nation on earth is most likely also a reason.

In WWII, the soldiers were "us" to the US public, all 12 million of them. Now, ever since the Vietnam war, it is "them" to the left. It is a bit as if the Americans would support the Ukraine in the Hockey World championships.

The perspectives and interpretations of the finer points of laws also changes when you are faced with opponents that do not follow any conventions. My father was at the head of a small brewery. As such he had a role in civil defense (food industry). As with Swedish fighter pilots, our home was visited by Polish "art salesmen" trying to sell paintings. This was to have a look at the house so that in case of a war (where Sweden as we now know was a Soviet first strike target), key personnel could the assassinated by the Spetznas. This was in the early eighties.

The script that Bush I and II were following for Iraq was written by Churchill. "How to deal with a dictator before the threat becomes large". The Gathering Storm is highly recommended.

http://www.amazon.com/Second-World-War-Gathering-Storm/dp/039541055X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276066898&sr=1-3

And I will take time to look at the Geneva conventions.

I am quite impress with the restraint shown by the pilots. If one compares with normal behaviour from previous wars, WWI,WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the standard mode of operation would have been to assume that anyone stupid enough to stick their head out was a legitimate target. Today's Russians would have flattened the whole block.

What is sad is that the sense that the US soldiers are on our side (I am Swedish, and I am upset that there were no Swedish troops sharing the burden of Western civilization with the US).

US journalists were on the US side in WWII, something they were not in Vietnam according to Reagan. I can't remember reading any complaints about US journalists not being embedded with the Germans during WWII to get the true picture...

I did 15 months military service in the Swedish army, so I have no experience of an actual war. But I do know that if people are firing around you, it makes a hell of a racket. When you fire certain weapons, such as rocket propelled grenades, you keep your mouth open to avoid splitting your ear drums. With American troops embedded in bases all over Baghdad (this was 2007) and fighting going on regularly, the default attitude should be caution. We know from other reports, that fighting was going on in the vicinity of where the journalists, and their insurgent group were killed.

Based on this, if I lived in the neighbourhood, I would put my family in the most secure room of the house. If I had my young children in a car, I would stop and take shelter. I would not continue driving around.

As for fighting in built-up areas, well war is hell. In Caen, the allies flattened the whole town, beginning when there were 60 000 people living there. At the end there were still 17 000 people in the town. You have to fight the enemy where he happens to be. Do you suggest the US troops should have dropped leaflets and invited the insurgents to slug it out in the open? Please be so kind as to join us in a firefight on the shooting range...

Suppose, said our captain, that you are a civilian. You hear the Soviets approaching and you grab your hunting rifle, put a little yellow and blue armband on and attack them. In that case, as you are not in uniform and not part of a recognised military unit, according to the laws of war, the Soviets are in their full right to put you up against a wall and shoot you on the spot. Don't do it.

Yes. I assume that they drove up to collect the bodies to prevent intelligence gathering by the US. Anyone with the smallest brain would otherwise stay way clear. If they saw the bodies at a distance, if they had good intentions, they would have stopped the van and reversed the hell out of there.

No, alone. The guys in the apache, based on the video, did their job correctly. If you have ever been a soldier, or you simply use your imagination, you would understand. In a war, there are two sides trying to outwit one another. People do get killed on both sides, and innocent bystanders may also be killed.

Anyone who has good intentions knows to be very careful when there is a firefight in the neighbourhood, as part of an ongoing war.

Have a look at the wikipedia entry for the battle for Caen for a comparison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Caen

They finished rebuilding that town in 1962, 18 years after D-Day.

Amen to that.

For hiking with "insurgents" (the enemy) with something that at a distance looks like an RPG (it still looks like one to me), whilst other "insurgents" nearby are involved in a firefight with US troops, and with helicopter gunships above, these journalists should get Darwin awards for removing themselves from the gene pool.

The people who then decided to put two children in a van to collect the bodies should be shot if they survived. It should go without saying that the US troops would want to examine the bodies of the dead enemy, to see who they were, if there were any documents on them, etc. Every army in the world would do that. And anyone in the "insurgency" would be criminally stupid not to know that.

The Germans had no American embed journalists on D-Day in 1944. The Americans and the British bombed Caen to smithereens. Thousands of French died as "collateral damage". Should the Allied have refrained from going into France, against the express will of the Vichy government? Should they have refrained from invading Germany because it was "their country"? And should the New York Times have published the invasion plans for D-Day because "the public has the right to know"?

Amen to that. Go read Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister. They have some data on this. What one has to remember is that "feeling creative" is not the same as "being creative".

It takes 15 minutes to enter the creative state of flow. 10 five minute phone calls per day and people will have lost 200 minutes. Per day. Turn off the phone, msn, stop bothering people unnecessarily and get to work.

This is why people come in at 6 to get 3 hours of actual work done before the managers arrive to start prattling, and this is why some work until 11 at night.

I actually did a PhD in physics in an unrelated area. However, one does learn a few things. For example that a PhD is not a license to state that you are right. Appealing to authority is just about as anti-science as you can get.

"You have not published a paper in a peer reviewed journal" is not a valid argument.

Peer reviewing is there to help with weeding out as much BS as possible. However, good insights can come from anyone.

Finally, what you do hone as an Engineering student and a PhD is your BS detector, and that is all that it takes to make a valid contribution. All of these sites are criticizing what others have done. Of course, that is a lot easier than publishing original new work. However, getting proof that something isn't correct is also a worthwhile contribution. One single falsification (go and read your Popper) is all that it takes to invalidate a theory.

Steve McIntyre actually tried to go much further than this. He wanted to review the data and reanalyse it. Had he been allowed to do so, and actually reproduced the results, that would have been as scientific a contribution as I can think of.

Unfortunately, he was refused access to said data.

2500 scientists who worked over 6 years... It almost sounds like the Manhattan project. Here is analysis ot what was done:

http://climaterealist.blogspot.com/2008/09/ipcc-2500-scientists-myth.html

My experience is somewhat similar. I have always been skeptical in the sense that I cannot see what we can do about the problem other than adjust to it, at least for the next 100 years. However, the treatment I got at littlegreenfootballs reminds me of fundamentalist Christians wanting to "talk to me about Jesus". Wattsuppwiththat really rocks as a site, so do noconsensus, climateaudit and climateskeptic.

The comments are so bad you want to cry.

Unfortunately, the consequences of this scientific fraud is to double your fuel bill and make us all a lot poorer. Particularly bad for sub-Saharan Africa, where being a bit poorer could mean that you and your children die.

"Aerobic exercise" it says in the TA. Why not to the thing properly? 500 kCal per day, maximum 70% heart rate... Was this the "old ladies of both sexes" method of exercise?

For starters, they should have walked to the sports centre. It is unfortunately a sad world we live in. My father in-law once ran a major sports centre in the UK. He tells me that the most important aspect of success is to have the parking lot just in front of the entrance.

These people went from doing no exercise it would appear, to performing a tiny amount of exercise. I am certain that had they added:

"Walk 3 km (2 miles for part the world) to the sport centre, do your little thing, walk 3 km to get back home afterwards. Walk to work, walk back from work."

the results would have been more impressive.



Obligatory schooling was introduced in my native Sweden in 1842. It was then decided that school should start at 7. Not because of the maturity of the children, but because it was decided that a 7-year old can walk, alone, 3 km to school, and 3 km back. This would be too much for a 6-year old. Therefore, by starting school at 7, much fewer school buildings would need to be constructed.

Note to UK readers:
The frequency of paedophilia was most likely just as large as it is now. People, for some reason, decided not to introduce a police state at the same time though. Maybe their risk assessments were a bit more realistic in those times.