No Mercy

When the military learns that taking prisoners only leads to hassle, bad publicity, and lawsuits, how do they respond? Well, like this, for starters:

Caught in the middle of the Helmand river, the fleeing Taliban were paddling their boat back to shore for dear life.

...

As the boat reached the shore, Captain Larry Staley tilted the nose of the lead Apache gunship downwards into a dive. One of the men turned to face the helicopter and sank to his knees. Capt Staley's gunner pressed the trigger and the man disappeared in a cloud of smoke and dust.

By the time the gunships had finished, 21 minutes later, military officials say 14 Taliban were confirmed dead, including one of their key commanders in Helmand.

The mission is typical of a new, aggressive, approach adopted by American forces in southern Afghanistan...

Aircrews say they have been told to show no mercy, but to press home their advantage until all their targets have been destroyed.

It's hard to file habeus corpus when the corpus is just a cloud of dust.