Human Rights and the Military

The term ‘chemical soldier’ is taken from ABC Radio National, ‘The Rise of the Chemical Soldier’, All in the Mind, 30 March 2003 <www/abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/s817005.htm> at 22 March 2005.

Doran Jamie , SBS Television, ‘The Need for Speed’, The Cutting Edge, 12 August 2003.

The principal author, Bird Jo , is writing a book on Technologies of the Body.

Michel Foucault has spoken of man as a purely philosophical construct, an unstable entity able to be ‘washed away’. See Foucault Michel , The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (trans 1989).

The administration of drugs to soldiers may infringe existing protocols such as the Nuremberg code and the Helsinki declaration. See Leaning Jennifer , ‘War Crimes and Medical Science: Not Unique to One Place or Time; They Could Happen Here’, (1996) 313(7070) British Medical Journal.

For a discussion of the complicated genetic and chemical brain mechanisms involved in fear and memory formation see Brown Phyllida , ‘In the Shadow of Fear’, New Scientist, 6 September 2003, 30.

Baard Eric , ‘The Guilt Free Soldier: New Science Raises the Specter of a World Without Regrets’, The Village Voice, 22–28 January 2003, <www.villagevoice.com/news/0304,baard,41331,1.html> accessed 23 March, 2005. Note that Dr Kass is speaking here in his personal capacity and not on behalf of the council.

Society of Professional Journalists, A Brief History of the Laws of War, <www.globalissuesgroup.com/geneva/history.html> at 23 March 2005.

See for example the Defence Force Discipline Act 1982 (Cth).

Lewis Anthony , ‘The Road to Abu Ghraib’, The American Prospect, October 2004.

Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1950, No 82, Principles of International Law Recognised in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal. Adopted by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, 1950.

See Reuters , ‘Vietnam Disabled Take Case to the US’, The Australian (Sydney) 26–27 February 2005. The article discusses ‘a 1984 agreement by Dow and Monsanto to pay $US180 million to US veterans’ to compensate for illnesses arising from exposure to dioxin in Vietnam.

For a discussion of the transhumanist movement <www.transhumanism.org> at 23 March 2005.

The evidence we have of authorised amphetamine use by the military comes from the United States.

CBS News, ‘No Trial for Friendly Fire Pilots’, <http://cbsnews.cbs.com/stories/2003/06/25/attack/main560422.shtml>. Noting that the charges were dropped and the pilots faced only internal air force discipline. Also CBS News, ‘Lawyer Blames Bombing Mistake on Pills’ <http://cbsnews.cbs.com/stories/2003/01/16/attack/main536802.shtml> at 23 March 2005.

SBS Television, The Cutting Edge: The Need for Speed, 12 August 2003.

See Milad Mohamed Quirk Gregory , ‘Electrical Stimulation of Medial Prefrontal Cortex Reduces Conditioned Fear in a Temporally Specific Manner’, (2004) 118(2) Behavioural Neuroscience 389–94; Milad Mohammad R Quirk Gregory , ‘Neurons in Medial Prefrontal Cortex Signal Memory for Fear Extinction,’ Nature, Vol 420, 7 November 2002, 70–74.

Zivcic Amanda , ‘The Ongoing Casualties of War,’ Green Left Weekly, 23 April 2003.

Schulte Elizabeth , United States: War Crimes Revealed: ‘We Killed Anything that Walked’, Green Left Weekly, 19 November 2003, 17 and Clark Ramsey , War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Enquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, <http://deoxy.org/wc/wctoc.htm> at 23 March 2005. Also see Vietnam, Vol 12, August 1999, 24 about the massacre of hundreds of unresisting civilians by US soldiers in the village of My Lai in Vietnam on 16 March 1968.

For a discussion of the subject's relationship to ‘the other’ see Levinas Emmanuel , Ethics and Infinity, 1985, 95. Levinas speaks of ‘responsibility as the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity’.

For a discussion of research into the anti-remorse pill see Baard Eric , ‘The Guilt-Free Soldier: Anti-Remorse Pill’, The Village Voice, 22–28 January 2003 <www.villagevoice.com/news/0304,baard,41331,1.html> at 23 March, 2005. Dr Gregory Quirk is a scientist concerned about the possible military applications of the brain altering techniques that he is researching at Ponce College at the University of Puerto Rico. His study involves experiments to help the brain to ‘unlearn fear’ through stimulation with magnets.

The principal writers we have drawn on in our conception of the ethical self and ‘the other’ are Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.

Haraway Donna , ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ in Kirkup Gil . (eds), The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (2000) 50–7.

Mitchell Natasha , Radio National, above n 1.

Ibid.

Ibid.

The American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed, 1994) 645.

See eg, Cixous Helene Clement Catherine , The Newly Born Woman (1986).

Bourke Joanna , An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (1999) 72.

Ibid 83.

Ehernreich Barbara , ‘The Making of McVeigh’, The Progressive, July 2001, 15.

Grossman David , On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995).

Conde Victor H , A Handbook of International Human Rights Terminology (1999) 27–8.

Annas George , ‘The Man on the Moon and Other Millennial Myths: The Prospects and Perils of Human Genetic Engineering’, (2000) 49 Emory LJ 753.

Ibid 771.

Kazarooni Homayoon ‘anticipates that exoskeletons of the future will be “invasive” not just worn, but partially implanted within a person's musculature and nervous system’. Weiss Peter , Science News, 30 June 2001, 408.

Grossman , above n 32, xvi.