A question for my American friends.

[Alex]

The particular part of the rules here is that once someone surrenders to you, you are not allowed to mistreat or misuse them in any way, even if they have just gunned down all your friends laughing while doing it. You still have to protect them from harm, so yeah technically he committed a war crime. However I do wonder about the people who write these rules and what experiences they have had of this kind of environment.

In his position I am pretty damn sure I'd have done the exact same thing.

Veering slightly off into a detour, we have also been told if we kill someone we have to use proportionate force to do it, so no using a cruise missile to take out one person.

Pretty sure regardless of how you achieve it, if you kill someone then the level of force used to achieve this is something of a moot point (unless you have collateral damage to consider).

I once wrote the outline for a near future sci fi story, where squads of soldiers in the field would be accompanied by a combat lawyer to advise them on the legality of their actions. Maybe I should dig it out and finish it off.

[Svengoolie 3]

Back on topic...

The wikipedia article will show up if you add a period to the end of the link once you've loaded it (the forum software thinks it's punctuation but it's actually part of the link).

I'd never heard the story in the link you gave, but it seems pretty uncontroversial to me. I don't know the "rules of war," but I'm sure they're not a suicide pact. He was under fire, so using enemy soldiers as a shield was an act of self-preservation. The only objections to using "human shields" I've ever heard of involve civilians. I doubt anyone could make a serious case that Carter did something wrong, unless there are some facts we're not privy to.

I believe the main fact remains this guy was awarded the MoH under president Clinton and the right wants to spitefully undo anything he did that they can.

[Alex]

I'd be interested in reading more on this. Can you post up a link to where you got your info on the group(s) that are trying to have the medal removed from him?