Military Law Books

This book casts more light on Patrick McDonald's personality disorders than it does the the subject of interrogation. In the course of my 22 year career in law enforcement and corrections, I have never seen an instance where Patrick McDonald's loosely formed ideas would be relevant to an interrogation practitioner. Mr. McDonald comes off in this book more like a person who would more likely find himself in the position of being interrogated by a policeman rather than conducting an interrogation! From an academic point of view, Make'em Talk is not to be taken seriously. This is nothing but a venue for McDonald to validate his improverished ego and self-image by making himself out to be much more than he is. I deal with this same genera of pathological behavior in my work in counseling youth offenders.

As a former US Army Officer and US Air Force NCO, I have to say that this is an incredibly bad manuscript. The author touches little on any substanative military or psychological theory that might be of use to any professional member the military or law enforcement. This book is nothing more than a collection of the infantile ramblings and anecdotal, "war stories," of an ego-inflated right-wing extremist. The content, organization and basic writing craft exhibited by the author, falls well below what is to be expected from a professional writer, not to mention a professional soldier. This book is not for the serious student or practitioner of interrogation. The book reads like the pure trash and tripe that comes out of a publication such as,"Soldier of Fortune," Magazine. As far as Mr. McDonald is concerned, I have this to say, you are an embarassment to both the US Military and intelligence profession. I want my money back!

This guy is/was a torturer. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib shouldn't be a surprise if an army employs people like McDonald. If you're accused of torture and human rights abuses, "deny everything, admit nothing - and make counter-accusations." Sounds like Rummy and the Pentagon brass read this book!

I believe in free speech, but this is too much.

This book casts more light on Patrick McDonald's personality disorders than it does the the subject of interrogation. In the course of my 22 year career in law enforcement and corrections, I have never seen an instance where Patrick McDonald's loosely formed ideas would be relevant to an interrogation practitioner. Mr. McDonald comes off in this book more like a person who would more likely find himself in the position of being interrogated by a policeman rather than conducting an interrogation! From an academic point of view, Make'em Talk is not to be taken seriously. This is nothing but a venue for McDonald to validate his improverished ego and self-image by making himself out to be much more than he is. I deal with this same genera of pathological behavior in my work in counseling youth offenders.

I agree with the other reviewers. This book is vague and was not worth my time. I couldn't wait to get to the last page just so that I would know, without a doubt, that there was nothing in this book of value.

Whether or not the author got the facts (mostly) right, the grammar is so bad as to make the book almost unreadable. This guy is a professor? Bad news for academia! The writing is so bad that it makes you wonder if his reporting of facts and opinions is as badly flawed. The maps and graphics are obviously poorly reproduced copies of military briefing slides. They are so poorly rendered that they are almost illegible. This is a really bad book!

The most distorted view of the trials ever compiled. How does the editor live with himself?

This is a rare instance where you're better off just buying the Nutshell. The full casebook is mostly filler: page after page of statutes. There's very little helpful commentary or analysis. You can get pretty much the same material in the Nutshell for a lot less money.

This book is horrible. The murders are hardly mentioned. Did anybody edit this? It's full of typos, so much so that it was hard to read. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.

This article is about a fantasy world, in which fantasy rules are claimed to exist. In the real world, there are real nations, and there are real laws which govern them. In the fantasy world, there is a special nation called Israel, which has its own set of rules that it must follow. By definition, Israel breaks all these rules in the fantasy world. And this article is a little like Alice in Wonderland, where we traipse into some rabbit warren to find truth turned upside down.

Dundas claims that he wants to discuss the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And he thinks that the reason the conflict continues is primarily that America and the European Union have acquiesced "to an unregulated occupation." Well, I think that a bigger problem is that America and the European Union have acquiesced to a bunch of untruths, the acceptance of which has precluded peace.

We see some language about Israel's conduct being regulated by various articles. But does this argument make any sense?

No, it doesn't. Dundas says that the Israeli West Bank settlements are drastic alterations to the law and administration of the West Bank and are thus a systematic violation of international humanitarian law. If that is false, Dundas should say something else. And if it is true, then international humanitarian law is no better than nonsensical taunts spewed by thugs. After all, the West Bank is disputed land. If Arabs are to be allowed to live there, then Jews need to be allowed to live there as well.

If we decide to make arbitrary rules against the rights of Israelis or Jews to live in the West Bank, there's an absence of law, all right. And it will probably be resolved by violence: what goes around can come around. I suspect that most people will not be happy with the eventual outcome, especially the Arabs and Jews.

If Israel were truly guilty of some minor infractions in the West Bank, being legally entitled to allow the presence of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and hundreds of thousands of Jews there, then Dundas ought to say so. He ought to say how Israel can legally permit such settlements, and how it can legally build its separation barrier (to reduce instances of suicide bombings). But he does not do that. Instead, he says that were Israel to follow his rules, there would be "reduced popular support for illegitimate actions such as suicide bombings against Israeli citizens." But this is preposterous. Following such rules is unlikely to reduce popular support for such actions. Truth, not untruth, is more likely to produce such results. In addition, it is a very bad precedent to imply that a "law-based process" would make sure that tiny Israel would be reduced in size to something more appropriate! Such a process, if applied to all nations, would leave most of this planet uninhabited.

The National Socialist Germans passed all sorts of laws. But some of the more arbitrary of these laws cast doubt not on the validity of the claims of some "untermenschen" to be actual human beings so much as they cast doubt on the validity of German law. If we truly do pass laws of the sort that Dundas claims already exist, then we'll cast great doubt on the validity of international law. And that would not benefit human society at all.

I do not recommend this article.

This is the most poorly written legal text I have ever read. If you are a student, don't buy this book and purchase a supplement on med mal tort instead.

Jeff Halper uses this article to tell us two things. First, that Israel is very important! He implies that it holds the key to human happiness in the Middle East, and that war and peace are up to it! Second, that Israel is very wrong. He implies that it steals land from Arabs and that it always has, as if unarmed Jews just waltzed into someone else's land, starting in the 1870s, and swiped that land from the hapless heavily armed nation that it really belonged to.

But Israel is neither an important key to peace in the region nor an outlaw that steals land.

Halper says that Israel has to figure out how to retain control over the West Bank while ridding itself of their 3.6 million Arabs. Well, this land is disputed. Jews and Arabs live there. It would appear to me that a border could be drawn giving Israel some of that land. Some Jews would be on the Arab side, and some Arabs would be on the Israeli side. But the Jews on the Arab side could keep Israeli citizenship while the Arabs on the Jewish side could have citizenship in an Arab state. That's one method. Of course, there would need to be peace in the region for this to work, as well as genuine agreement on allowing everyone to have some basic human rights. Otherwise, as things now stand, I suspect the Arab side would expel or slaughter its Jews.

That means that Israel needs to have military control over Jewish areas to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homes and the theft of Jewish land by the Arabs.

Halper leaves out all this, and instead implies that Israel is trying to get away with stealing land from the Arabs, with the presumably illegal support of the United States.

Halper moans about the fact that the Nobel Prize winning thug Arafat was not applauded more for giving up on 78% of "the country." That's outrageous. Arabs have 5,500,000 square miles. The British Mandate was originally over what is now Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan. Jews were allowed by the League of Nations to settle there. That was roughly 45,000 square miles. But 34,000 square miles were soon split off by Great Britain and banned to Jewish settlement. That left 11,000 square miles for the Jewish bantustan, part of which became Israel. The Israel of 1966 was indeed almost 8000 square miles. That's about 78% of something. But of what? It's of what the Jews still were allowed to settle on! That is what Halper claims Arafat conceded! He's implying that it is unfair for Jews to be allowed to live in the Levant at all. And that it is particularly outrageous for them to live in the disputed West Bank. Basically, Halper is demanding that Arabs be given a right to steal West Bank land from the land-poor Jews. All in the name of "human rights" and "international law."

What Halper is in fact arguing for is a tyranny that will preclude peace and outlaw human rights, justice, and truth. He argues that the conflict "has assumed significance far beyond a localized spat between two Middle Eastern tribes." It sure has. The international information supply has become badly contaminated by anti-Zionist misinformation such as his.

Halper says that if we "lose this struggle" we'll "lose all hope in the ability of civil society to bring into being a truly better world." And he asks "what is a world worth in which human rights and justice - based on the fundamental dignity of human beings, rooted in religious tradition or secular values - is rendered irrelevant, a laughingstock of neo-cons and oppressors?" Well, I'm not a conservative, neo, or otherwise. But he's the one siding with the oppressors. He's the one who is making a mockery of human rights and justice. He's the one who is proposing to bring into being a truly worse world.

Right now, there is no room for dialog with some of the tyrants. But that in no way means that the only answer is constant war. Halper implies that if we fight against the tyrants, we'll have to commit ourselves to a genocidal solution. But that's nonsense. Tyrants have been defeated in the past, and genocide has not been needed to accomplish that.

Let's reject what Halper says and demand truth, justice, human rights, and peace.

The above book by PJ Weindling was given a very favorable review in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
I bought the book several months ago and have read only 185 pages so far.
Very tedious reading. Author mentions lots of names and gives loads of info about the various MDs investigated for medical war crimes. However, he tells us very little about the actual experiments conducted by these physicians and other scientists. We are told that there were experiments in high altitude physiology, cold water tolerance, and infectious diseases.No details about the experiments are presented , at least in the first 185 pages. Some details about the actual experiments and results would be very interesting. Other than the fact that concentration camp inmates obviously did not give consent and most likely suffered greatly from these experiments, there are few other details.

The writing style often makes it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time. Often particular phrases and words are repeated unnecessarily.

A more interesting book about Nazi doctors is "The Nazi Doctors" by Psychiatrist Robert Lifton. He actually interviewed a number of German physicians who were assigned to the concentration camps and other killing centers such as the Psychiatric hospitals.

I gave this book 1 star not for content but for misleading me. I purchased this book published by MBI publishing thinking I was getting a new title in reality all it was, was a repackaging of 3 older titles (U.S. Army Special Forces, DELTA: Americas Elite Counter terrorist Force and U.S. Elite Counter terrorist Forces. All part of the "Power Series") under one cover and title, now called U.S. Counter terrorist Forces. It would have been nice to have known this prior to my purchase, but the company failed to give an accurate description of the content or in particular that the content is a reissue of prior titles. This is the second time (U.S. Special Forces, this title had three older tiltes also; Airborne Rangers, U.S. Navy SEALs, and again DELTA, which now I have this title three times.) I fell for this ploy by MBI. It does not say much for me to have been taken twice, but it will not happen a third time! Ever!