There are two sides to the strike, and both the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello are relevant to the legality of the operation. But only the JIB is relevant to the legality of killing bin Laden. The two areas of law protect different interests: the JAB protects a state’s sovereignty; the JIB protects (among other things) combatants and civilians in armed conflict. As I said the post, as long as IHL applies and the U.S. forces complied with the rules of IHL, the killing was not illegal. And it was not illegal even if the use of armed force against Pakistan violated the JAB.
Consider a hypothetical situation. Assume that Obama invades Mexico tomorrow and seizes its oil. During the invasion an American soldier shoots and kills a Mexican soldier guarding one of Mexico’s oil wells. That killing is not murder, nor is it a war crime, because IHL applies to the conflict (IHL is automatically triggered whenever one state attacks another state) and IHL does not prohibit one combatant from killing another. And that killing is not murder and not a war crime even though the U.S. attack clearly violated the jus ad bellum. That does not mean that the JAB violation is irrelevant; Mexico is entitled to protest the violation of its sovereignty, and Obama (and other U.S. political and military leaders) may be guilty of the crime of aggression under customary international law. But the illegality of the invasion does not affect the right of combatants in the resulting armed conflict to kill in ways permitted by IHL.
Does that help?
That's wrong. (What is your source for the illegality of the war in Afghanistan?) But even if it were correct, US soldiers could still legally kill OBL.
The difference being that claiming to win the Boston Marathon isn't gonna make you a target (except possibly of the real winner). It may not exactly be a moral argument but it's fair to say that claiming to be responsible for something like Sept 11th is going to make life pretty difficult for you in the future and isn't something to be done lightly. If he wasn't involved then it was ultimately a pretty stupid thing to do."Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement."
If he wasn't involved then it was ultimately a pretty stupid thing to do.
Regarding the recent actions in Pakistan, it does seem pretty clear that those guys went in with the express intention of killing OBL although I'd have thought Obama would want the propaganda coup of parading him on TV as a live prisoner. I suppose they must have had a good (I mean, militarily/politically justified) reason for wanting him dead ASAP.
No.
EDIT: OBL was a member of a group taking part in an armed conflict in Afghanistan, and arguably in Pakistan as well. Therefore, it was legal to kill him under the Laws of War (IHL).
In other words, extra-territorial jurisdiction in any such matters would normally be unlawful as a state's sovereignty is absolute - no other country's armed forces can enter or carry out a military operation without the local state's authorization. Using force against the territorial integrity and independence of a foreign state is strictly prohibited under the international law and, prima facie, with the way the operation was carried out, the U.S. government clearly violated the national security of Pakistan, and set a very dangerous precedence that greatly poses a threat to the international peace and security.
However, in this case the U.S. government is right in making the "self defense" justification because the al Qaeda is engaged in a continuous act of war against the U.S. and Pakistan, more or less, has allowed its territory to be used as a base of operation for future terrorist crimes against the United States and other countries.
Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/142...law-experts-lawyers-divided.htm#ixzz1LqRLfmPe
Yeah, good point. Maybe it would have been different if they'd captured him (much) sooner after 9/11.
According to Dworkin, it wasn't a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty. "I think there is a reasonable argument that this was not a violation of Pakistani sovereignty because there is a legitimate argument for self-defense for US action against bin Laden; Pakistan has also made it clear after the event that it does not object to US action in this case and that Pakistan has previously given at least tacit consent for US action against senior al-Qaeda members on its territory," Dworkin said.
Agrees John B. Bellinger III, who was the legal adviser to the State Department under the Bush administration. Bellinger acknowledges that under the United Nations Charter, the United States would normally be prohibited from using force inside Pakistan without obtaining Pakistan's consent. But there is one caveat: that the host country is both capable and willing to deal with problems itself.
And, this was a special circumstance that gave the U.S. government a legal justification for not doing so (obtaining consent).
"The U.S. was justified in concluding that Pakistan was unwilling or unable to stop the threat posed by Osama bin Laden, and that Pakistan's consent was not necessary because of past concerns about the close ties between Pakistan intelligence services and the Taliban," Bellinger said, "and the fact that bin Laden was in a house, on a street right down the road from a Pakistani military base."
It is okay to enter a country that is unable or unwilling to deal with the threat. See Pakistan’s Sovereignty and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden by Ashley Deeks, currently a fellow at Columbia Law School, but until recently, the Assistant Legal Adviser for Political and Military Affairs at the State Department.
The article droid links to also makes this clear:
There's no way in hell the US could have risked sharing this with Islamabad and getting permission before hand.
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
Weird how Chomsky is right and all the experts in the field of, you know, international law and the laws of war--the ones with the actual qualifications and letters after their names--are wrong. Perhaps they haven't read Chomsky's article yet and so don't realise he disagrees with them and hence the magnitude of their error.
I don't find the targeted killing of Bin Laden problematic. It seems like a textbook case of how to do something like this right.
If Pakistan is having sovereign territory violated by foreign special forces, it has brought this catastophe on by itself -- the military and ISI have always managed to maintain a fluid concept of a national border along the nominal FATA-Afghanistan division, thus maintaining a haven and corridor for the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda and Haqqani fighters they have been arming and shovelling back into Afghanistan. They have been happy to play this game for nearly ten years despite severe blowback, like massive suicide bombings and assissinatons inside Pakistan, the Red Mosque battle, etc. Frankly, the US spent too long trying to protect Musharraf by not violating NWFP and FATA "sovereignty".
This is what they said about the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia isnt it?
Sort of, although that was cleary a world-historic smear to justify actions of state terror, whereas in the case of Pakistan the self-destructive duplicty of its military and secret service is widely and deeply documented and has led directly to the near-destruction of the Pakistani and Afghan states without any need for US carpet-bombing or incompetence to do the job.