Shake & Bake: Dual-Use Chemicals, Contexts, and the Illegality of American White Phosphorus Attacks in Iraq

[Excerpt] “On November 29, 2005, in a Department of Defense press conference with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Pace stated that white phosphorus “is a legitimate tool of the military,” and can be used for illumination, smoke, and incendiary purposes. Incredibly, the Department of Defense released an addendum to the press conference clarifying that white phosphorus was not used as an incendiary weapon. According to General Pace, “it was well within the law of war to use white phosphorus . . . for marking and screening.” This was the last official statement on white phosphorus. The chemical’s legality as an anti-personnel weapon within the laws of war or the Chemical Weapons Convention was not discussed. Despite the Pentagon’s claim that white phosphorus has only been used for legitimate purposes (illumination and smoke) in Iraq, there have been numerous allegations and accounts by members of the U.S. military, war correspondents, and Iraqi civilians that white phosphorus has been used as an anti-personnel weapon against Iraqi combatants and civilians within urban areas. This note examines: (1) “Shake & Bake”: the use of white phosphorus to flush out combatants from fortified positions so they can be killed with conventional munitions; (2) the direct use of white phosphorus illumination mortars against human targets; and (3) the use of improvised phosphorus bombs to clear insurgents out of buildings. White phosphorus is an example of a “dual-use” chemical. As with most dual-use chemicals, there are lawful and prohibited purposes. It is an especially legally precarious chemical because there are both legitimate and potentially improper military purposes. Peter Kaiser, spokesman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) (the international body responsible for implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention) has described the prohibited uses of white phosphorus as those military purposes that are dependent on the chemical’s toxicity. Thus, the central question of this article asks whether the legality of the United States’ intended use of anti-personnel white phosphorus depends on the chemical’s toxic properties. This note analyzes the legal implications of the cited examples of white phosphorus use by looking at the following: (1) general principles of international humanitarian law and the necessity defense, (2) the Zyklon B case, and (3) the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998.

Non-Linearities, Model Uncertainty, and Macro Stress Testing

A distinguishing feature of macro stress testing exercises is the use of macroeconomic models in scenario design and implementation. It is widely agreed that scenarios should be based on "rare but plausible" events that have either resulted in vulnerabilities in the past or could do so in the future. This requirement, however, raises a number of difficult statistical and methodological problems. Economic models, as well as the statistical models of the relationships among economic variables, generally focus on capturing the average rather than the extreme behaviour, and frequently rely on the assumption of linearity. In this paper we show that these models are particularly ill-suited for stress-testing as they do not adequately capture past behaviour in extreme events, nor do they generate plausible responses to shocks under stress. Whereas one might argue that the use of these models is still preferable to no having no models, since they at least impose the consistency restrictions on the paths generated under the scenario, failing to deal with a large extent of uncertainty of these paths may lead to results that are non-informative, and potentially misleading. The paper illustrates both of these problems by a series of examples, but our conclusions have broader implications for the types of models that would be useful in these exercises.Financial stability

GHOST: experimenting countermeasures for conflicts in the pilot's activity

An approach for designing countermeasures to cure conflict in aircraft pilots’ activities is presented, both based on Artificial Intelligence and Human Factors concepts. The first step is to track the pilot’s activity, i.e. to reconstruct what he has actually done thanks to the flight parameters and reference models describing the mission and procedures. The second step is to detect conflict in the pilot’s activity, and this is linked to what really matters to the achievement of the mission. The third step is to design accu- rate countermeasures which are likely to do bet- ter than the existing onboard devices. The three steps are presented and supported by experimental results obtained from private and professional pi- lots

Towards declarative diagnosis of constraint programs over finite domains

The paper proposes a theoretical approach of the debugging of constraint programs based on a notion of explanation tree. The proposed approach is an attempt to adapt algorithmic debugging to constraint programming. In this theoretical framework for domain reduction, explanations are proof trees explaining value removals. These proof trees are defined by inductive definitions which express the removals of values as consequences of other value removals. Explanations may be considered as the essence of constraint programming. They are a declarative view of the computation trace. The diagnosis consists in locating an error in an explanation rooted by a symptom.Comment: In M. Ronsse, K. De Bosschere (eds), proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Automated Debugging (AADEBUG 2003), September 2003, Ghent. cs.SE/030902