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Detter, Ingrid. The Law of War. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000. (2d ed.) 516pp. $39.95
This is the second edition of Ingrid Detter's sweeping survey of the law relating to the "modern state of war." The first edition, published in 1987, was then reviewed by, among others, Professors Howard Levie (American Journal of International Law, vol. 83 [1989], p. 194) and Leslie Green (Canadian Yearbook of International Law [1988], p. 473), two distinguished former holders of the Stockton Chair of International Law at the Naval War College. Both reviewers identified numerous inaccuracies and misreadings of source documents. The second edition is intended to explore the changing legal context of modern warfare since 1987. A reader interested in this edition should first read the earlier reviews. Regrettably, the representative deficiencies pointed out by Levie and Green still persist, and a fully balanced discussion of particularly important legal issues is lacking.
Typical errors left unchanged include Detter's erroneous position regarding the treatment of prisoners of war. She states that the 1949 "Geneva Convention III on Prisoners of War specifies [in Article 4] that there need be no fighting for the Convention to apply; it is sufficient for persons to be captured." There is no such provision in the convention. Detter also continues to assert that the convention provides that prisoners of war must not be subjected to interrogation, because Article 17 obliges prisoners to provide only their name, rank, date of birth, and serial number. Article 17, however, then continues, proscribing physical or mental torture, or any other form of coercion, to secure information from prisoners of war. Interrogation short of such prohibited actions is not prohibited by the convention. While a prisoner of war is required to give the identifying information, international law does not prohibit a prisoner from giving more than this, nor a captor from seeking more -so long as torture is not used.
Astonishingly, Detter continues to insist that the actions taken during the Korean War never had authorization from the United Nations. She states that the military operations were only "a collective security action of certain States, as there was no actual UN authorization for the action." She asserts further that "the troops operating under the aegis of the United Nations...