Not only did DOD take down the draft doctrine documents after I posted the Doctrine for Joint Nucler Operations, but the entire Joint Electronic Library (JEL).
Talk about overkill.
This totally encapsulates the Rumsfeld Defense Department: Be an idiot, get called on it, and then REINFORCE the judgment by over-reacting.
Anyway, it looks like Human Rights Watch gets most of the credit (or blame)—HRW released the draft Joint Doctrine on Detainee Operations and a letter to Rusmfeld warning the draft doctrine “will formalize the U.S. military’s illegal policy of holding ‘enemy combatants’ without protections under the Geneva Conventions.”
Steven Aftergood’s summary is better than mine.
[Here are links to drafts from September 2003 and March 2005, as well as first and second rounds of comments from the services and a contractor.]
Done in true DoD fashion of using a golden sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.
But what a loss for researchers, congressional staff and the media.
We have archived some documents relevant to the Draft Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations at the Western States Legal Foundation web site. Links to them can be found at http://www.wslfweb.org/whatsnew.htm They include the previous version of this document, the Doctrine for Joint Theater Nuclear Operations, and the Air Force Nuclear Operations doctrine document.
Thanks for all your work—
We downloaded most of the draft Joint Publications available in spring 2005. In case somebody needs a copy of another document available by then, we can provide it.