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Targeted Killings Symposium: John C. Dehn on Richard Meyer and Col. Maxwell on Status-Based Targeting

[John C. Dehn is a nonresident senior fellow in West Point's Center for the Rule of Law. The views presented here are his personal views.] This post is part of the Targeted Killings Book Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Let me first congratulate Claire Finkelstein, Jens Ohlin, and Andy Altman for compiling wonderfully...

Targeted Killings Symposium: Richard Meyer Comments on Col. Maxwell’s “Rebutting the Civilian Presumption: Playing Whack-A-Mole Without a Mallet?”

[Richard Meyer is Director, LLM Program, at the Mississippi College School of Law.] This post is part of the Targeted Killings Book Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. In his chapter in Targeted Killings, Col. Mark “Max” Maxwell sets out to solve the gaps left by the ICRC guidance concerning continuous combat function.  His proposal attempts to analogize the terrorist organization to the traditional state and, as a result, find that members of their military arm be treated just like those of the uniformed member of a state’s military.  Maxwell argues that the true message of the ICRC guidance is a return to status based rather than mere conduct based targeting of certain civilians.  Just like the uniformed military, if they are a member of the armed group engaging in hostilities, they can be targeted based on their membership in that group without ever having engaged in hostilities personally.  His three pronged test can be summed up as:  1) determine if a armed group that is engaging in hostilities exists; 2) Using a “totality of the circumstances” analysis, determine if the intended target is a member of this group; 3) Attacks must minimize civilian casualties.  This is certainly a more workable and pragmatic paradigm for the uniformed military than Melzer’s argument that only after an individual has engaged in hostilities (on multiple occasions?) can his continuous targetability be determined.  Further, Maxwell’s chapter serves as an excellent primer on the current confusing paradigm of targeted killing caused by the conflation of human rights law and international humanitarian law.  His desire to evolve IHL is certainly a step in the right direction.  I have one objection to his proposal. Following the bad example of the AUMF, Maxwell’s proposal conflates the entirely segregable legal realms of jus ad bellum and jus in bello.  During WWII, the US declared war on Germany, Japan & Italy.  Thus the armed forces of those three countries, and only those three countries, were targetable on sight by American military forces.  Hypothetically, even if Spanish uniformed military forces were actively providing combat support services to the German military or were proven to have actually sent planes and participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American Soldier, from Private Smith to General Eisenhower did not have legal authority to engage those forces except in self-defense.  Thus, only after the state’s jus ad bellum decision identifies the macro enemy can the combatant’s jus in bello determination identify the individual target.  This is a corollary to the long held principle of the law of war that the merits of a jus ad bellum decision do not alter the legal culpability of a jus in bello act in compliance with that decision.  Said another way, the otherwise eviscerated “following orders” defense is alive and well as it relates to the decision to go to war.  This is necessary, lest the members of a state’s military individually bear the legal culpability for a collective political decision. In an effort to facilitate a conflict with a nontraditional opponent, the AUMF did not identify a status based macro enemy, (e.g. the State of Germany) but instead identified a conduct based “…nations, organizations or persons the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11,2001.”  This declaration delegates to the President, in his role as the Commander-in-Chief and (by potential further delegation) the military commander the power and responsibility to make both the jus ad bellum and jus in bello decisions.  Constitutional separation of powers issues aside, if the soldier has any role (other than as a voter or advisor) in the jus ad bellum decision, this severely undercuts the legal and moral justification that soldiers should not be held accountable for collective jus ad bellum decisions.  The soldier is protected from liability because the choice to go to war was not his to make… until now.  Paralleling this error, Maxwell creates a three-pronged analysis that also intermixes jus ad bellum and jus in bello decisions.  The first prong of Maxwell’s analysis requires the finding that there is an organized armed group engaging in combat with the state.  At first blush, it appears that Maxwell presupposes the existence of an armed conflict.  Armed conflicts however, currently require two competing macro entities (be they states or non state groups).  Thus, if the first prong is answered in the negative and there is no such armed and organized group “combating the state,” then there is no armed conflict; IHL does not apply and we are locked into the law enforcement paradigm.  Conversely, if there is such a group, the state might have the option of engaging that group under IHL.  Thus, prong one appears to be within the legal realm of jus ad bellum.  Prongs two and three, however, are both the jus in bello determinations of verification of status (for a status-based attack) and minimizing collateral damage/deaths.  Maxwell could argue that this is parallel to the traditional paradigm.  As noted, in that, the state makes the jus ad bellum decision and individuals make the jus in bello decisions, providing the latter with protection from legal responsibility for the former.  However, Maxwell assigns all three decisions to the collective state and none to the individual combatant.  In theory, this would place the legal culpability for all three decisions on the collective state and none on the individual, which would be a return to a near full-fledged following orders defense. At first blush, this appears to be semantics… Perhaps Maxwell used the term “state” to refer to both the collective and to the individual determinations of its military.  This does not actually solve the conflation issue however, because the first prong also involves currently simultaneous jus ad bellum and  jus in bello determinations.  To illustrate this point, I will divide his first prong into what I believe are the appropriate four steps contained within it.

Targeted Killings Symposium: Jens David Ohlin Responds to Craig Martin

[Jens David Ohlin is an Associate Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; he blogs at LieberCode.]

This post is part of the Targeted Killings Book Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below.

In his comments to my chapter “Targeting Co-Belligerents,” Craig Martin asks a very pertinent question: Is the US really in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda?  Or, more abstractly, can a state ever be in an armed conflict with a non-state terrorist organization?  Martin is correct to assume that an affirmative answer to this question is necessary before any of the in bello linking principles are used in my analysis.

Although this is an issue that I largely cabined from my argument in the chapter, it is now a question that very much animates my current research.  Here is my thinking:  At least part of the skepticism regarding the existence of an armed conflict with AQ or other NSAs, stems from an uncertainty regarding classification.  The armed conflict allegedly cannot be a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) because it crosses international boundaries.  On the other hand, though, it cannot be an international armed conflict (IAC) because one of its parties is not a traditional state actor – presumably a condition-precedent for any IAC.  It not falling into either sub-category, it cannot be an armed conflict at all.

I find this argument suspicious, though my thinking on the issue is still evolving.  I am not quite clear on the supposed legal evidence for the proposition that IAC and NIAC occupy the entire field of the concept of armed conflict.  That’s only true when the concepts are defined in opposition to each other (where NIAC would simply refer to anything that is not a traditional IAC).  That was the style of analysis that the Supreme Court used in Hamdan, and that led them to conclude that the armed conflict against AQ was indeed a NIAC.  I found this argument persuasive.

Targeted Killings Symposium: Craig Martin Comments on “Targeting Co-Belligerents” by Jens David Ohlin

[Craig Martin is Associate Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law, and author of another of the chapters in Targeted Killings]

This post is part of the Targeted Killings Book Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Jens Ohlin’s chapter in Targeted Killings, “Targeting Co-Belligerents,” provides an important analysis of one of the key questions in the targeted killing debate, and makes a persuasive argument in favor of one possible response to it. In doing so, however, I wonder if it leaves another fundamental question hanging, which I lay out below for him to address. First, however, let me provide a sketch of his argument. Jens begins by noting how the US targeted killing policy, and the transnational terrorism against which it is directed, raises difficult questions regarding which legal regime should be controlling. Not only is there an ongoing debate as to whether responses to terrorism should be governed by domestic criminal law within a law enforcement paradigm, or public international law in the context of armed conflict, but even for those who accept the armed conflict paradigm there are debates over whether the principles of jus ad bellum or jus in bello are best suited to justify the targeted killing. Against that backdrop, and assuming for the sake of his analysis that some targeted killing will be permissible in some circumstances, Jens addresses the question: “who can be targeted and why?” His stated objective is to investigate “the tension between national security and civil liberties through a distinctive framework: what linking principle can be used to connect the targeted individual with the collective group that represents the security threat?” As he explains, regardless of whether one approaches the problem from a jus in bello or a jus ad bellum perspective, the problem of linking the individual targeted to some collective is an essential step in the justification process.