PMC Affirmative GDS 2010

PMC Affirmative GDS 2010

AnikJuniors

PMC Affirmative

***1AC***

1AC – Plan

1AC – Human Rights

1AC – Rape

1AC – COIN

***Topicality***

Noncombat Troops

Boots on Ground

Don’t Fly the Flag

PMC Definitions

PMCs defined

***Human Rights***

Human Rights – Prevents Extinction

Human Rights – Outweighs Security

Human Rights – Key to Policy

PMCs Effect Human Rights

***Patriarchy***

Patriarchy Comes First

Impact – Nuclear War

Impact – War

Impact – Environment

Impact – Extinction

Root Cause

***Terrorism***

Civilian Casualties Doom Afghanistan Efforts

Local Support is Key

Plan Popular/Unpopular***

Plan Popular

Plan Unpopular

***Addons***

Rape Addon

***Miscellaneous***

PMCs K2 Security Vacuum

List of PMC Services

***1AC***

1AC – Plan

Plan: The United States Federal Government should remove its Private Military Contractors from Afghanistan.

We’ll Clarify.

1AC – Human Rights

Contention 1 Human Rights

PMCs committing human rights violations now

Human Rights First, leading think tank on HR work, 5/18/10

(

The U.S. government has relied more on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than at any other time. With this increased reliance on contractors have come increased incidents of serious criminal violations. Yet, only a handful of U.S. contractors have been prosecuted for criminal misconduct. The most notorious incident—the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisoor Square in 2008 by Blackwater employees—symbolizes the “culture of impunity” that Human Rights First reported on in 2008. Contractors have been implicated in a range of abuses across theaters and in multiple capacities. They have been accused of participating in torture4 and of imposing wanton violence on local civilian populations.5 In an incident that eerily mirrors the Nisoor Square violence, Blackwater subcontractors are accused of the unprovoked murder of two Afghan men and injuring one other after firing at a nearby vehicle in a Kabul intersection.6 By failing to hold contractors accountable for acts of violence and abuse abroad, the United States has created a culture of impunity which has fostered great hostility among civilian populations towards the United States. This threatens the safety of U.S military personnel and contractors as well as undermines the U.S. mission.These abuses, and the accompanying lack of accountability, are inextricably linked with the tasks that we ask private security contractors to perform. In this testimony we focus on each aspect of that link and offer potential solutions to ensure that the United States’ use of contractor personnel, who often contribute to mission success in important ways, conforms to U.S. values and policy interests. In short, minimizing the likelihood that security contractors will be drawn into hostilities, while ensuring appropriate accountability and oversight, can restore America’sposition as a leader on human rights issues while strengthening our ability to accomplish important national security objectives.

Human rights responsibility key to prevent extinction

Copelan 99

(Rhonda Copelan, law professor, NYU, NEW YORK CITY LAW REVIEW, 1999, p. 71-2)

Inattention to the international framework of human rights as a measure of domestic policy is also bolstered by the myth that the U.S. Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, is the best and most effective guarantor of human rights in the world. This bias is further ensured by the lack of human rights education as part of educational curricula at all levels. Neither international law nor human rights are required courses in most law schools, let alone in other contexts. Accordingly, today there is little popular sense of entitlement to the full range of human rights or knowledge of the principle of governmental responsibility. The United States has also used the myth of constitutional superiority to hold itself above international scrutiny and continues to do so today in its refusal to ratify the ICESCR and the Women's and Child Rights Conventions and in the limits it imposes when it does ratify human rights treaties. In the international arena, the United States has consistently deprecated social and economic rights--the second-generation rights--as simply aspirations: they are not real rights to which states could be held accountable, and they involve too much intrusion into domestic policy. While the issues of definition and standard[*71] setting are indeed challenging, this deference to sovereignty or self-determination in regard to economic and social rights ironically evaporates when U.S. foreign aid or the assistance of the World Bank or International Monetary Fund are at issue. There, for example, extensive economic restructuring is demanded in return for debt relief and continuing international assistance.n35U.S. hostility to social and economic rights as mandated entitlements together with the myth of constitutional superiority has hindered popular knowledge as well as advocacy in the United States of the UDHR's indivisible framework. On the domestic level, neither the welfare rights movement of the 1960s nor its legal advocates made the UDHR or the ICESCR a theme or used them as a normative frame of reference. Major U.S.-based international human rights groups traditionally have excluded economic and social rights from their purview, although this is under review today. And significantly, grass roots movements have begun explicitly campaigning for human rights, including economic rights.n36 Until recently, it may have seemed that the New Deal social welfare programs of the 1930s and the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s were a permanent part of the legal landscape, albeit not by constitutional compulsion. Thus, just over a decade ago, a leading U.S. human rights scholar argued that the United States had become a welfare state and that "the welfare system and other rights granted by legislation (for example, laws against racial discrimination) are so deeply imbedded as to have near constitutional sturdiness."n37Given the recent stripping away of social welfare entitlements, the need for attention to the international framework as a normative basis for social and economic rights in the Constitution is pressing. The indivisible human rights framework survived the Cold War despite U.S. machinations to truncate it in the international arena.The framework is there to shatter the myth of the superiority[*72] of the U.S. version of rights, to rebuild popular expectations, and to help develop a culture and jurisprudence of indivisible human rights. Indeed, in the face of systemic inequality and crushing poverty, violence by official and private actors, globalization of the market economy, and military and environmental depredation, the human rights framework is gaining new force and new dimensions.It is being broadened today by the movements of people in different parts of the world, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere and significantly of women, who understand the protection of human rights as a matter of individual and collective human survival and betterment. Also emerging is a notion of third-generation rights, encompassing collective rights that cannot be solved on a state-by-state basis and that call for new mechanisms of accountability, particularly affecting Northern countries. The emerging rights include human-centered sustainable development, environmental protection, peace, and security. n38 Given the poverty and inequality in the United States as well as our role in the world, it is imperative that we bring the human rights framework to bear on both domestic and foreign policy.

Human rights impacts always outweigh impacts of “National Security”.

Smiley, Pulitzer Prize winner (essayist and writer), 07

(Jane, The Huffington Post, November 19, “Why Human Rights are More Important than National Security”,

On Friday, the morning after the Democratic debate, I was stunned to read in the War Room column over in Salon that Governor Bill Richardson had said the wrong thing about national security versus human rights. Tim Grieve wrote, "We're not sure which office Richardson is seeking these days, but he came pretty close to disqualifying himself from either of them last night when he insisted that human rights are more important than America's national security." I'm not sure what planet Tim Grieve is living on, but on our planet, it is human rights that are precious and rare and always to be preserved and "national security" that is ever and anon a cant boondoggle. I was not alone in my dismay. I read War Room almost everyday and have liked Grieve's posts in the past. When I first read what he was saying, I thought he was joking; so did other readers. The entry got 57 responses. Almost all of them were outraged, and several called on Tim to explain himself. He never did. Human rights are defined, most notably in the U.S. Bill of Rights. They are defined because the Founding Fathers realized that if they were not defined, they would be more likely to be abrogated or lost entirely. The Founding Fathers understood the temptation on the part of governments to give and remove human rights arbitrarily, because they had experienced such things before the Revolutionary War -- in the Stamp Act, in the quartering of British soldiers on American households, and in illegal searches and seizures, in no taxation without representation. They recognized that although British Law customarily acknowledged various human rights, it was essential to name, codify, and write them down to make it less likely that they could be taken away. humans rights theory, if someone is human, he or she has the same rights as every other human. The rights of American citizens as described in the Bill of Rights have been expanded and extrapolated around the world so that they apply not only to us but to everyone. While in the U.S. this idea is a bit controversial, in other countries it is standard, accepted, and cherished. The codification of human rights, and the widespread acknowledgment of this, is one of the things that makes the modern world modern. To roll back human rights, even for some individuals, is to return to a more primitive, hierarchical, and un-American theory of human relations. One example, of course, concerns women. Can women routinely be imprisoned, sold, mutilated, or killed by their relatives? U.S. law says they cannot; in practice, many are, but no one openly promotes what many secretly do. If a candidate, even a Republican, ran on a platform of reducing the legal rights of women, he wouldn't get far (ask me again in 10 years, though). Or consider lynching.The U.S. has a long tradition of lynching. It was only after the Second World War that the Federal Government and state governments began enforcing their own anti-lynching laws. This was a victory for human rights. Do you want to go back?The Republicans would like you to, in the name of: "national security." Guess what? There is no such thing as "national security"; it's a concept that not only hasn't been defined, it can't be defined. It is a psychological state. The very phrase describes an impossibility. All boundaries in the U.S. and in every other country are porous. Planes come and go, as do ships, trains, trucks, autos, information superhighways, human relationships, and human emotions. In addition, the smaller any threat becomes, the less safe we are against it. We no longer live in the world of Mutually Assured Destruction, where our thousands of warheads aimed at the Russians protected us, psychologically, from their thousands of warheads aimed at us.Since the end of the Cold War, threats have gotten smaller and more invisible. Where is that suitcase of nuclear material? Where is that vial of anthrax? But as they have gotten less easily detected, they have also gotten more local. 9/11 is what we always think of when we think of a breach of national security, but in fact, the destruction was not national, or even city-wide, or even district wide -- although the World Trade Center was less than a mile from the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE was only closed for six days after 9/11. The phrase "national security" cannot mean anything in a nation of almost 10 million square miles. The Bush administration and the corporatocracy knows this perfectly well. Witness how our chemical plants have not been secured from the possibility of terrorist attack -- there are too many of them, and the likelihood of any one getting attacked is too small to make it worthwhile for either the nation or the chemical industry to fortify them. The Dubai Ports deal of a couple of years ago demonstrated the same understanding on the part of the administration, that "national security" is merely rallying cry for fear. The Bush administration has spent some trillions of dollars (I shrink from naming a figure, since, as big as it is, it is surely a lie) to attack a nation of a mere 437,000 square miles. In doing so, they have chosen to ignore such items of U.S. national security as public health and infrastructure maintenance. The population of the U.S. is demonstrably poorer, hungrier, less healthy, more homeless, more likely to be injured in an infrastructure failure, and more likely to suffer from a weather related loss than it was before the Bush administration came into office. A huge debt means that the economy is more likely to fail. The prospects of our children for a peaceful and prosperous future are worse. Nothing that the Bush administration or the Republicans or the Military Industrial Complex has done in the last seven years of foolish incompetence and braggadoccio has benefited the nation as a whole, though it has benefited a small class of investors and government cronies. As a result of the Iraq War and the Bush attack on the Constitution, I can be afraid of the obliteration of the entire idea of the U.S. -- I am afraid of that, thanks to the tyrannies of the Bush administration and the professions of the current crop of Republican candidates -- but not of the obliteration of the U.S. itself. Indeed, the war in Iraq shows more than one thing about the idea of national security, because even though the Iraqis have been attacked by the largest military in the world, they have been damaged but not subdued. The same would be true of the U.S., no matter who attacked us. Liberals, progressives, and Democrats recognize, at least intuitively, that "national security" is a code word for tribalism, while "human rights" is a code word for the rule of law. Governor Richardson was straightforward in acknowledging this fact, and deserves praise rather than blame, especially from a writer for Salon.

1AC – Rape

Contention 2 Rape

PMCs implicated in rape now

Schulz andYeung, Director of policy at BAPSC and Strategic Analyst for Canadian National Defense, 2006

(Private Military and Security Companies and Gender, Both have PHDs in international politics)

There have been instances of private security personnel, both male and female, being implicated in GBV including the sexual abuse of women, men, boys and girls. At the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, a juvenile male detainee alleged that he was raped by a civilian interpreter working for the contract company Titan. At the same facility, allegations of sexually demeaning interrogation techniques have been made against a civilian employee of CACI Corporation. Neither cases have been prosecuted.22 (Also see Box 8). Reporting of such incidents remains poor, however. Instances of GBV and sexual abuse can discredit both an individual company and, potentially, an entire operation. _ There is a historical link between prostitution/sex work, the trafficking of women and children for the purposes of prostitution and the presence of regular armed forces.23 Because of the tendency by PMSCs to draw employees from regular armed forces, it is likely that these linkages and practices also apply to private contractors.24 The involvement of DynCorp personnel in illegal prostitution and trafficking in Bosnia (see Box 2) and the wrongful dismissal by DynCorp of one female employee and one male employee for implicating colleagues in forced prostitution served to tarnish the industry as a whole.25 In Afghanistan, there have been reports that security contractors have fuelled the emergence of numerous brothels and are involved in trafficking of arms and women. They are also widely perceived to have been the cause of the deterioration of relations between the international (Western) community and local Afghan communities.26 These examples starkly highlight the importance of addressing misconduct, including sexual exploitation and abuse by PMSC personnel, as well as the need for companies to have effective internal complaint procedures. _ If security operators are involved in sexual assault, abuse, or the exploition of local women, not only are they committing human rights violations, but they also cause increased security risks for their clients and for themselves. This poses a significant threat to operational success.

Rape is central to patriarchy- ending it key

Martin, Professor of Social Sciences, 1990

(Brian, University of Wollongong, Australia, Uprooting War)

Direct challenges to patriarchy also can have an indirect impact on the support provided by patriarchy to the war system. This occurs through the weakening of patriarchal domination at key points, such as the role of rape, violence and restrictions on abortion in keeping women dependent on men as protectors or providers. This reduces the value of patriarchy as a prop for other structures such as bureaucracy and the military. For example, challenging the treatment of women as sex objects reduces the potential for mobilisation of masculinity in military training. Another important challenge is to overcome the division of labour between home and workplace. The separation between 'productive' labour for corporations or state bureaucracies and 'reproductive' labour in the home and family is central to patriarchy. Challenging this separation is also a challenge to dominant structures within the sphere of 'production,' which is based on subordination and exploitation of women's labour within the family.