The authorities said the other day that Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, the Army's celebrity one star, will face a general court martial and could wind up doing life in prison.

My guess: A plea deal that winds up with him doing a year or two. Then again, I've been surprised before.

(HT to Attackerman)

By Will Rogers

Best Defense bureau of natural security

Washington is gearing up for another fight over the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) as the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepares to hold hearings in the coming weeks. But while the thirty year LOSC debate may start to sound like a broken record to some, the stakes of not ratifying the convention are the highest they have ever been for the United States.

Although the United States has safeguarded its interests at sea by relying on customary international law, this approach is becoming increasingly risky. Critics of LOSC routinely argue that the convention's most important provisions -- including maritime navigational rights -- are already accepted international norms, recognized by other countries as the rules of the road at sea. However, critics fail to appreciate that customary international law can change, as it appears to be doing today.

Rising maritime powers across the globe are reinterpreting customary international law to promote their own national interests -- including in ways that may conflict with longstanding maritime norms and American interests. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the South China Sea, where China's outsized claim to the entire region flies in the face of both traditional practices and LOSC. But China is not the only offender. Burma, Thailand, and others are joining China in more restrictive interpretations of maritime navigational rights, including anti-access norms that could constrain the U.S. Navy's ease of access in this crucial maritime domain.

Unfortunately, the United States is not in a position to rebuff these restrictive interpretations and protect the maritime norms that have been so beneficial to the global economy and U.S. security. U.S. failure to ratify the treaty has prevented the United States from taking a seat at the table to avail itself of the convention's established legal frameworks, such as the Law of the Sea Tribunal. And while the United States sits on the sidelines, other countries are engaging in discussions of maritime law, and in some places working toward consensus on issues that could have consequences for the United States for decades. Joining the treaty will allow the United States to lead these important discussions and, more importantly, enable the United States to negotiate with countries from a position of strength to protect the customary practices codified by the convention.

Ratifying LOSC will also strengthen a range of ongoing U.S. security activities. The U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard are our key instruments of power at sea and ratifying LOSC will strengthen their ability to do their job and work with others to protect U.S. interests, including areas such as counter proliferation and counter piracy. More importantly, ratifying the convention would give the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard the strongest legal footing for their actions, including in places like the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has threatened to close access to the international passageway in direct violation of the convention. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey recently said, "It validates the operations we conduct today and realizes our vision for a secure future."

For some, the most pressing reason to ratify LOSC is to acquire legal jurisdiction to the estimated trillion dollars of energy and mineral resources on the extended continental shelf, an area beyond the recognized 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Ratifying the treaty will allow the United States to submit a claim to the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, expanding U.S. sovereignty to critical energy and mineral resources on the extended continental shelf. "Not since we acquired the lands of the American west and Alaska have we had such an opportunity to expand U.S. sovereignty," Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently said. 

To date, many U.S. companies have been reluctant to operate beyond the U.S. EEZ due to the lack of U.S or international legal protections that significantly raise the risks for companies operating beyond any national jurisdiction. Securing sovereign rights to the extended continental shelf will provide U.S. businesses the recognized title and protection to resources there, expanding domestic production of oil and natural gas, strengthening our assured access to energy resources. What is more, U.S. businesses would be able to lay claim to mineral resources, including rare earth metals that are critical to defense technologies, helping to reduce risky U.S. reliance on Chinese rare earths by bolstering U.S. domestic production.

Ratifying LOSC will not address every challenge the United States will confront at sea, but it will substantially improve America's ability to protect its global interests by providing a stronger legal foundation for its own maritime activities and helping to shape and enforce international norms and legal authorities. Most importantly, it will restore U.S leadership at sea. The United States has always been a maritime power. Given the growing importance of the maritime domain to U.S. interests and the rapidly changing global security environment, the United States needs every tool at its disposal to ensure that America will remain a strong global leader at sea.

The U.S. Senate should ratify the Law of the Sea Convention today.   

Will Rogers is a research associate at the Center for a New American Security, a non-partisan national security and defense policy think tank in Washington. He is the author of Security at Sea: The Case for Ratifying the Law of the Sea Convention.

In February 1968, a U.S. soldier was court-martialed simply for holding down a Vietnamese man while two Vietnamese soldiers waterboarded him, according to Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam. (329)

I mention this because both George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney now have publicly admitted they were approving of waterboarding, a form of torture that once was a crime in the eyes of the U.S. government -- and still is under international laws.

The Washington Post reports that in his new memoir, My Pointy Head, President Bush's response to a request to waterboard 9/11 big nut Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, "Damn right." (Meanwhile, Cheney stated earlier this year that, "I was a big supporter of waterboarding.")

The Post quotes Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch: "Waterboarding is broadly seen by legal experts around the world as torture, and it is universally prosecutable as a crime. The fact that none of us expect any serious consequences from this admission is what is most interesting."

That said, it will be interesting to watch whether either of these guys, or their campaign-contributor ambassadors, ever travel in Europe. I suspect that one day we could see a lower-ranking type detained for questioning upon de-planing in EU territory.

Here is a comment in response to yesterday's item about Marine Lt. Col. Michael Mori, a defense counsel who believes he was penalized for defending his clients too vigorously. The note below, from a former Army JAG, looks under this rock a bit more.

By A Former JAG
Best Defense guest columnist

Payback against defense counsel in the military is nothing new. I was a young Captain (almost two decades ago) doing defense work as a prior-service enlisted just like Mori. My own experience and familiarity with the ways of the Army, when added to the relative inexperience of the fresh-out-of-law school prosecutors bringing marginal cases, meant that many of my clients walked scot free. After one E-4 of mine who was charged with a sexual assault was acquitted after a trial, my Regional Defense Counsel (LTC) brought me in and chastised me, observed that my client really was guilty, and used a quote from his mentor, the soon-to-be Judge Advocate General of the Army, that "you are an Army officer first, and a defense counsel second." He instructed me that from that point forward, I was going to urge my clients to plead out rather than for me to do all I could do to get them acquitted. He helpfully interjected that he would make sure the prosecutors would offer my clients more attractive plea bargains in the future. I'm sure my clients would have appreciated a little back room dealing amongst field grades to fix the results of their courts-martial in advance!

Of course I said nothing and promptly ignored him. I continued to get about a third of my clients acquitted, compared to the 95 percent conviction rate Army-wide. It got to the point that local Marines started putting in requests for me to represent them in USMC courts-martial, which was a surreal experience for a dogface.

As I should have expected, I eventually got a crap evaluation from the lieutenant colonel, which was accompanied with some oral comments about "not being a team player." I happily transitioned to civilian practice and have never looked back.

I don't know anything about Mori's case, but I do know that if you want a long and successful career as an Army lawyer, you'd better remember "you are an Army officer first, and a defense counsel second." In other words, don't rock the boat. In fact, I would never advise a JAG to accept a defense counsel post if they hoped for a long career. Too much institutional bias against the necessary work that they are forced to do on behalf of their accused.

So alleges the prosecutor down in Norfolk. My real problem is with the American officials who thought it was a good idea to put on the battlefield thousands of armed civilians not subject to military discipline or the UCMJ. I think this will be one of the major errors future historians hang around the necks of top Bush Administration officials and their senior military counterparts.

The Blackwater guys are on trial for the killing of two Afghans in Kabul in 2009. Their attorneys claim the shootings were in self-defense against a reckless driver. 

One of the role of political journals is to police their own side. For example, the Nation and the New York Review of Books should call out leftists who play fast and loose with the facts, or who cozy up to the likes of Castro. Likewise, the National Review and the Weekly Standard should blow the whistle on erring rightists who, for example, play footsie with fascists. (You listening, William Kristol?)

Unfortunately, this happens all too rarely. I mention it because the Wall Street Journal editorial page today carries a column that slaps down the talk that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was anti-military during her time as dean of the Harvard Law School. "Outside observers may disagree with the moral and policy judgments made by those at Harvard Law School," writes her predecessor as dean, Robert Clark. "But it would be very wrong to portray Elena Kagan as hostile to the U.S. military. Quite the opposite is true."

I've taken a few pops at the WSJ edit page in the past, so it is only right to congratulate them today.

Meanwhile, invoking the spirit of Roman Hruska (who in 1970 defended a Supreme Court nominee thusly: ''Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.''), David Brooks criticizes Kagan for not being more like an op-ed columnist.

Ol' Pat Lang likes peeing all over CNAS, but no worries, if that's what keeps him ticking. I do like his idea of trying the worst of the 9/11 guys on Governor's Island, smack dab in the New York harbor, not far from the World Trade Center site, and in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Like the Attackerman says, the city that gave the world gangsta rap and The Godfather shouldn't be afraid of a few dissolute middle class Arab wankers. "I swear, on the souls of my grandchildren...."

Oh yeah, gonna make you an offer . . . .

The U.S. embassy in Kabul says it is firing its frat boy security contractors. This brings to mind a recent news report that the British security guard charged with murdering two of his colleagues in the Green Zone early in August had a criminal record back in the UK. He actually left Britain despite being on probation for robbery and firearms offenses, the papers reported.

Wikimedia Commons

Finally, Americans may get the right to carry concealed loaded weapons in National Parks. How did we get so far without this privilege?

The irony is that the National Park Service doesn't even allow kayaks on the Yellowstone River in Yellowstone National Park. But now we can pack pistols with our picnics.  

Savannah Grandfather/Flickr

Call me a softie, but I don't understand why this murder case involving American troops hasn't gotten more media attention in this country. This seems to me worse than the tortures at Abu Ghraib. According to court testimony, the Army soldiers then dumped the bodies of the four murdered Iraqis in a Baghdad canal.

And Stars & Stripes -- yes, the Pentagon's newspaper -- deserves a shoutout for staying on the story.