Good afternoon. So in the next half hour, I'm going to talk about targeted killing from a number of different perspectives.
But the three important ones are its legality, its morality and its effectiveness.
The background to the talk is not only that I teach of the idea of school of military law,
but during the course of my career, the idea of missile defence forces in particular,
while serving as a legal adviser to the Gaza Strip,
I was also involved in targeted killing decisions and I will during the course of talk in order to bring this home.
If you will give you a specific example, obviously with facts fudged as to how the decision making process actually works.
By way of background, in the mid-nineties, in response to growing Palestinian suicide bombing terrorist attacks,
the government of Israel was forced to make a decision how to respond to suicide bombers.
And there were a number of different theories put in place. I have to add one sorry, one disclaimer.
I don't represent anybody. I don't even represent my own wife.
And so this is my take on this entire situation.
But that's it. So there are a number of different theories put out there in terms of how to respond to the suicide bombings in Palestine terrorism.
And one of the decisions that was made was indeed to implement and articulate, implement targeted killing.
And during the course of the time, from 94 to 97 that I served as a legal adviser,
the Gaza Strip was the beginning of this process, which is why I was involved in it.
So definitions are important in this conversation. One What is targeted killing?
When I talk about it, we should define target. Killing is a decision made as a final course of action to prevent an imminent terrorist attack.
And because terms are important, I emphasise this idea of the imminent attack, meaning that the threat posed has to be now, not something amorphous.
It can't be something like, you know, yours. And by about to Oxford a year from now, that's too amorphous.
It has to be the sense of imminence. But on the assumption that many, if not all of you are lawyers, we could have a long discussion about imminence.
And for the first time, for the sake of this talk, an imminent threat is something that's about to occur.
So one of the important questions is how do you prevent that particular imminent threat?
And so that is, in essence, the ideology or philosophy behind targeted killing.
It is, if you will, pre-emptive self-defence or more correctly, aggressive pre-emptive self-defence in many ways in terms of its legal basis.
It's predicated on Article 51 of the U.N. charter.
But I need to add, obviously, an aggressive articulation of Article 51 of the UN Charter that there is a long discussion,
which we don't really have time for in terms of what's the legal paradigm that we're in today.
The post-9-11 world is as criminal. Is this international law, is this war?
Is it something in the middle? So the Israeli Supreme Court has defined this as armed conflict short of war.
We could also have a long conversation about what exactly armed conflict short of war means for the sake of this conversation,
what it means that it's neither criminal nor is it war between states.
It's somewhere in the middle. There's no doubt that targeted killing represents manifest, that armed conflict short of war,
probably more than any other operational counterterrorism measure in terms of its morality.
So we could have a long discussion about, first of all, what morality in armed conflict means.
And speaking, frankly, if I would have been invited to this great university 20 years ago, nobody wouldn't talk about morality.
It was not an inherent part of this force, not this terrorism paradigm.
So here's what morality means in this incredibly complicated paradigm of targeting.
It means that you need to define who's a legitimate target.
And in addition to that, you need to define what is a legitimate target, a legitimate target.
And the reason you do that from the perspective of morality and ethics is because I pardon the expression,
you don't want to engage in a paradigm where you kill them all, but they're all legitimate targets.
And the whole point of target killing from the perspective of morality is that you are engaged in in eliminating a specific person who,
based on intelligence information, poses an imminent threat.
No, I have no doubt whatsoever that there are X number of people who, when they think about targeted killing, they inherently view it as immoral.
And I respect that position. I understand that position.
On the other hand, with all due respect to that position, the nation state absolutely has the obligation, responsibility to protect its citizens.
On the other hand, it also has the obligation responsibility to do so in such a way that it respects the individual civil rights of the other side.
And so what you need to understand in the context of targeted killing is when done correctly,
it's predicated on specific action against a specific person who poses a specific threat.
And the importance of that is that minimises, hopefully, if done correctly, this idea of collective.
General damage right there, killing of innocent people. So when I talk about morality, ethics in the context of target killing,
it means that I soon accept the following Hey, the target killing is necessary under certain conditions.
B It's legal when conducted in the context of a very specific person, person and purpose, and its morality is predicated on both of those.
And the third issue, the third leg of it, if you will, is effectiveness.
So before undertaking a targeted killing, one needs to ask well and sells the following questions To what end are we killing this person?
And what are the ramifications of killing that specific person?
So one needs to think here, both tactically and strategically. So it's easy.
I mean, easy. I mean, these are all God awful decisions. But we need to ask ourselves, okay, if we prevent,
we kill this person and we've prevented a particular act of terrorism, does that have long term ramifications?
Maybe. Yes, maybe not. But because you always need to think worst case scenario,
it's always essential that you ask yourself why if you kill a person a bit, you also feel X number of innocent people.
What are the ramifications of extended or large scale collateral damage and what are the negative negative repercussions?
Do you have to take my word on this? I can show this to you empirically.
That X number of targeted killings, when there's widespread collateral damage,
invariably leads to second generation terrorism, leads to people to commit acts of terrorism.
So you always have to ask, so what's the blowback? So when done correctly, it's extremely specific.
And I need to put here in parentheses and this is to be very critical of, for instance,
of the Obama administration's articulation of drone policy, which is the Israeli version of targeted killing.
The Obama administration has come out with the following that there has been no
collateral damage during the Obama administration's implementation of drone policy.
And Professor Waldron's, facial response is exactly the correct one, which is like it can't be.
And they have come out with this for the following reason because they say that when they conduct a drone policy attack,
anybody in the milieu, whatever the [INAUDIBLE] milieu means, is a legitimate target because it is called guilt by association.
And so all people like me who've been involved in these decisions, when they hear that everybody in the milieu is legitimate target,
that, from my perspective, is not only immoral, but it's also illegal.
In the same vein, I don't know how many of you read blogs. That is an article this morning by Grant by Glenn Greenwald in Salon Essay on Homecoming,
which it turns out the minute the bomber administration is not only droning a target,
it's also doing a secondary drone on those who come to the rescue of the target.
And that it raises, again, from the perspective of international law, morality, effectiveness, widespread.
QUESTION But let me give an example of how this thing works.
3:00 in the morning, the phone rings and, you know, I answer it and Commander asks me, Are you awake?
And those of you, I don't know, maybe you've served in the military, but if a commander at 3:00 in the morning asks you, Are you awake?
The answer is yes. And he then tells you the following, that he's received a report from the intelligence community based on what the source told him,
that a person who's entering his zone of combat poses an extraordinary and immediate danger to Israeli national security.
So now let's work our way back with the most important person in this entire conversation is the intelligence community case officer.
He's the linchpin. Why is he or she the linchpin?
Because they're the ones who received information from a source. A source?
A human source is the one who provides information to the intelligence community saying that such
and such is going to occur and such and such person is going to be responsible for that act.
So you can't really discuss Target killing without asking yourselves, who is the source?
Who's providing this information?
So I don't know in real life how many of you have worked in law enforcement, how many, you know, have knowledge or actually have met with sources?
But it's a long conversation because you need to ask yourself four very important questions about the source.
One, How reliable is that source? And reliable as incredible to how time relevant is that information?
Did he give it a week ago? A month ago? A year ago? Three.
How viable is that information Bible is in terms of is it realistic what he's saying and for?
Is it corroborated because in the ideal, not always, but in the ideal, one wants to have two pieces of information.
I'd make the crossed out in the religious sense, but corroborated in the sense that you have two sources,
two independent sources who are providing you information.
It's always important to note that you need to ask yourself about sources, whether or not they have an agenda,
whether or not the person they're ratting on, you know, they have some kind of a personal grudge against them.
And whether or not they have a personal history, whether information they've provided in the past has been affected,
whether or not it was, you know, broad based or based on actuality and reality.
It's always obviously very important to ask, how does the source know what the source knows?
And I can tell you, having been on the receiving end of these kinds of conversations in various capacities, you always want to know A who's.
Sort of. I don't care about his name, but who is he? How does he know this?
And when did he find out?
And why did he find it that actual three questions tie in actually directly to this idea of morality, legality and effectiveness.
So he calls the intelligence officer. But note that here we're going to have at least three different levels of hearsay.
Right. Because the source calls the intelligence guy in Arabic.
But not only is he speaking Arabic, he's speaking source Arabic.
Again, I don't know if you have, you know, firsthand experience with sources, but sources don't talk the way we talk.
She's a whole different language. So Arabic and source Arabic calls the intelligence guy.
The intelligence guy. Like a better term. He's the lynchpin because he translate this translates this into operational language for the commander.
He obviously is acquainted with the source because the reason the source is calling this particular case officer,
and he needs to translate this into something that the commander can immediately act up.
And again, I need to emphasise in the context of targeted killing that we're talking about decisions that need to be made now.
So the commander gets all this information operationalised, it makes it relevant to his worldview, terms of his own paradigm.
And then according the idea of standing orders, the commander needs to call his legal adviser.
At the end of day, the call comes to me, his legal adviser, the Gaza Strip.
Now, the commander, when he calls me, he knows that he needs to answer he's going to answer a bunch of questions that I ask him.
And in terms of how it's structured in the IDF, if I say no, the guy's not going to be killed.
And if I say yes. More likely than not, the guy will be killed, but not it's the command commander's decision.
But again, in the context of how structure in the IDF, more likely than not,
[INAUDIBLE] obviously act in accordance with the legal advice, which is why he's calling.
So I had worked out in advance and this is important, this conversation, a criteria based approach to targeted killing.
One of the things that I think is important to take away from this is this idea of rational based decision making,
because the whole idea is to minimise, you know, a little bit of this.
The idea is to emphasise criteria based, if you will, a checklist, because if you have a checklist and you have your questions that are ready to go,
if you get answers that you know how to plug it in and then to ask the following questions.
So the questions that I had worked out in advance when I would get the phone call were the following one.
I want to know from the commander, Are you in the field? Are you at home?
Are you in your office? Are you there? And if you're there, are you the one who's going to be doing this?
Two, I want to know, when was the last time your unit had engaged in a Night-Time ambush?
I don't know how many of you have ever served in the military, but you don't have to take my word on this one.
Night-Time ambush is totally different from daytime. Next, I want to know when was the last time the unit had fired at night?
Night-Time firing. Shooting is way different from daytime for.
I wanted to know what exactly he was seeing, whether or not what he saw fit, what the intelligence community had said.
Next, I wanted to know what were the alternatives? Was it possible to detain the individual rather than to kill the individual?
Obviously it's much better to detain because you can detain. You can interrogate hard to interrogate somebody who's dead.
So I wanted to know, was he attainable? I wanted to know, perhaps most importantly of all, what was the collateral damage?
Could we see innocents, you know, innocent individuals in that zone of combat?
Because the great fear in the context of the targeted killings I mentioned earlier,
is that you're going to not only kill the individual who you targeted as legitimate, but also, you know, who else is out there.
I want to know what was his take on this conversation with the intelligence community case officer?
And he asked him these kinds of questions. Next, I want to know whether or not the unit had recently had disciplinary issues.
Why disciplinary issues? Because a unit that has disciplinary issues means that the commander is spending much of
his time disciplining rather than training disciplinary rather than actual engagement.
Also, a unit that has disciplinary issues means that, you know, in real time, you don't really know exactly how your soldiers will conduct themselves.
And last but not least, but essentially the conversation, it was important for me to get a sense from him,
the commander, how did he feel in terms of what he had been told versus what does he see?
So in this particular paradigm, this particular situation, which I again, I fudge the facts,
obviously the phone call was as follows that the intelligence community had
indicated to him that a person wearing blue jeans and blue pants this time,
you know, three in the morning, walking from area eight, Area B, carrying a bag in his right hand.
And what is in the bag and this is what's important, poses an immediate and grave danger to national security.
His early early. So three in the morning you have no one to call.
This is the reality. The. Situation. And so I just asked him, how much time do we have to make this decision?
The answer is we're talking here couple of minutes. By the time that I'm giving this talk right now, we will have decided.
And that's why this criteria based approach was so absolutely important in order to minimise the subjective and enhance the objective,
not objective, but then the, you know, the object but objective in terms of the rational based approach.
So we ran through the questions. I get the answers or what is important emphasise is my assessment of his assessment.
But now note the problems. One this is in the day before cell phones.
So I first of all am not seeing what he's saying too.
I'm not seeing his body language. It's all, you know, from phone to phone.
What I clearly hear in his voice, obviously, is enormous, you know, tension and operational anxiety.
I mean, there's, you know, inherent part of this entire conversation.
And I wanted to hear from him whether he was convinced, whatever that means, that this guy was that guy.
And if I was uncertain or if he indicated that he was uncertain, then I would say no.
Why would I say no? Let's work our way.
Back when I accepted the position to be the legal adviser for the Gaza Strip and my subsequent writings over the past few years in American academia,
I have suggested proposed the following one The targeted killings indeed are lawful.
But but here there are many buts. One that is predicated on a narrow articulation of self-defence.
To me that this idea of morality is not just some vague and amorphous aspect of the decision making,
but is meant that it's serious because if you don't believe in morality, in armed conflict, you obviously enhanced the number of innocent individuals.
Three that we were fully aware of who this individual was as much as we knew,
and always asking ourselves, how will it play out in that person's community?
And this idea, this I'm not sure this is the correct term are those who are more sensitive something.
They have another suggestion. It's what I call cultural anthropology.
It's essential in the decision making process that you take into account how the other side of will will respond to this,
what will be their understanding of it.
And you need to understand something about terrorism, the community from which terrorists come understand why targeted killings are conducted.
They understand why drone policy is in effect. They also understand it when you kill a terrorist, they get it.
But what they don't get is the collateral damage. And so that's why, in terms of the cultural anthropology,
it was really essential that we really understand exactly how important is that person in the larger context.
And four, absolutely have to be convinced that the individual posed against this sense of immediate, imminent danger.
And that's why this idea of alternatives in seeking alternatives is so essential.
The Conversation. There are, of course, two other aspects of international law that are relevant to this conversation.
One is proportionality, and the other is military necessity.
So by example, bless you. If we received an intelligence report that somebody tomorrow is planning on throwing a molotov
cocktail that under no circumstances would be justification for conducting a targeted killing.
And I put in parentheses having had Molotov cocktails thrown on me.
No, it's not particularly pleasant, but it's certainly not a reason to engage in a targeted killing.
So in the context of proportionality,
it's essential in the context of legality and morality that it be a significant enough threat to justify killing an individual.
And the other aspect of international law that's absolutely central this is this idea of military necessity,
that the threat is so significant to state security that it justifies making,
you know, asking ourselves whether or not that person is a justifiable candidate.
And if he doesn't pose such a threat in the context of military necessity, then, you know, you immediately say no.
So in this particular paradigm, this example, which obviously I'm fudging the facts, at the end of the day, I said no.
So now we need to ask ourselves, why did I say no? I said no because I had, you know, sufficient experience for this commander.
I don't think we were friends. We had a cordial working relationship in a professional relationship.
I felt that he was not convinced that this guy was that guy.
Based on that. And again, you know,
we've been through this a number of times based on that assessment and the fact that the way he was portraying what he was saying,
what we had what I had been told, I felt that I was could not be convinced.
I was not convinced that there was an absolute 1 to 1 relationship between individual indicated by the intelligence community,
his assessment of it and my interpretation of that statement.
So I stand before you and I say, I don't know if I spared the life of some guy who was wrong place,
wrong time, or some guy who was, you know, really bad terrorist or some guy just, you know, poor schmo.
Because for a variety of complicated reasons, which I don't want to get into at the time, we didn't do after action reports.
But now let's fast forward and ask ourselves the following questions What makes this so
complicated beyond the obvious complication of saying yes to the killing of somebody?
What makes it so complicated is the nation state that's engaged in targeted killing drone policy must undertake the following difficult,
quote unquote, assignments. One you have to narrowly defined self-defence is easy.
It's easy to say narrowly defined self-defence. Take my word for this one.
It's exceptionally difficult to you have to be locked in and married to the idea of morality in armed conflict.
Three You have to have a pretty narrow definition of what's a legitimate target and what is a legitimate target.
A legitimate target for you have to understand what it means to kill somebody.
I mean, in terms of how it plays itself out next, you have to always be sensitive to how the court of international opinion plays itself out.
You know, we're not operating in a vacuum. The world has things to say about all these kinds of things.
You always have to ask yourselves, impact local community.
You have to ask yourself, how will your own nation state respond to this?
And finally, you have to ask yourself from the from the perspective of the decision maker,
what I call the dilemma of the decision maker is the paradigm that you have created,
that you have articulated and implemented, whether indeed it is in conformity with domestic law, international law.
And again, I repeat myself deliberately this idea of morality in armed conflict.
Before I turn the podium over to Professor Waldren,
I want to finish with the following exactly in a half hour that it would be tried to say that these decisions are complicated.
That's an obvious. What complicates the complication is the fact that when you think long and hard about international law, not state,
state, but state non-state, because that's the paradigm in many of these terms have been insufficiently defined.
I don't want to say that we're making up as we go along, but we're breaking up as we go along.
And that means that those of us who in my former life who are engaged not in international law but in operational international law,
are confronted with the following difficulties. There are in many ways no pre-existing paradox.
There are no there are in many ways no existing pre-existing rules to the game.
So on the one hand, the state absolutely is engaged in combat, in conflict with the other side.
But it has to be must be done in such a way that you at all times, in terms of yourself, reflect respect for the law and for morality.
Because at the end of the day, if you don't do it that way, then you've lost your sense of morality,
you've lost your sense of law, and in many ways you've lost what you are fighting for.
On that note, Professor Walter. Thank you.
Professor Guiora That's hugely important in a discussion like this to have a sense of what is actually involved in the decision making
process and then the various nodes of review and accountability in the decision making process and to have it in a human sense.
And so I much appreciate what we have learned from Hamas today about the experience he has had and the experience
generally in Israel and the Israeli defence forces of working with this tactic in the war against terrorism.
I'm going to open things up just a little bit beyond the parameters of the presentation,
because I think there are quite significant differences between the use of targeted killing by the Israeli Defence Force,
particularly the kind of targeted and targeted killing that has just been spoken about,
and the use of targeted killing by the United States in its operations, particularly in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
It's partly a matter of numbers, and the numbers are very considerable, particularly under the Obama administration.
We estimates vary because there is no official accounting of numbers, but probably the best numbers.
I've seen an excellent article by my NYU colleague Philip Alston in the Harvard National Security Journal for 2001,
and he figures around 1500 militants targeted and killed by American drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004.
That's a very, very high number,
plus something like a collateral death rate of innocent civilians and non-combatants of around anything between five and 17% on top of that,
including under the Obama administration.
So the numbers are different. As far as we know, the process is a little bit different.
We have just been talking about an IDF unit.
Is the Israeli armed forces subject to military discipline but subject in addition to
consultation and definitive review by a legal officer working within the armed forces,
attacking somebody who has been identified as engaged in imminent participation in an attack.
Somewhat different when you imagine some of the US drone attacks where you have,
on the one hand the maintenance of a death list of operatives of al-Qaeda and some other organisations.
You have the attack itself being carried out sometimes by people who are not subject to military discipline,
like CIA operatives operating either as special forces or operating simply using a joystick in a in a trailer in Nevada or something like that.
And as far as I know,
with much less rigorous review by judge advocates or equivalent of the role that Professor Guiora played and that he outlined for us today.
So a different process.
We also have to worry about different criteria used in targeting and what he has written on this as well as in what he said today.
Hamas has spoken very, very emphatically about the importance of criteria, not just judging the reliability of source,
but using proper moral and legally respectable criteria for determining targeting the targeting decisions and then the scale.
In today's discussion, we talked mostly about people who are directly and immediately involved in the immediate preparation
or the immediate planning or the immediate carrying out of particular terrorist attacks.
Now,
that is somewhat different from an approach that also uses targeted killing as a way of decapitating the high structure of terrorist organisations,
the high command structures, the people who are involved in various capacities such as strategic planning as opposed to tactical planning,
people who are involved in financing, people who are involved in incitement.
The case I have in mind is the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki recently,
I think last September wasn't that he was a US citizen killed in in Yemen who was a preacher, but he certainly wasn't.
Evolved. He was a very bad person recently involved in al Qaeda operations, but he wasn't involved in the particular operation.
He was involved, as it were, in wholesale rather than retail planning and incitement of armed attacks.
Significant case. For another reason there was represented one entire instance in which judicial review of targeting
decisions was attempted by the man's father and by various organisations in the United States.
And it was dismissed both on grounds of that. This was a political question,
not subject to judicial review and on the rather astonishing ground that the
man's father had no standing to question his son's name on a CIA death list.
So when you were telling people like Anwar al Awlaki, you are not killing somebody who was immediately involved amongst you,
as it were, killing this man because of his status in general planning.
And so and I don't think that I must would disagree with me that Israel has engaged in such attacks as well,
occasionally against high operatives in Hamas.
And it does seem to me that in our thinking about this,
we should reflect on the differences in the criteria that will have to be used in cases
where you are killing somebody who is immediately involved in a particular operation,
in cases where you are killing somebody because of their background presence in in the structure, they raise some of the same issues.
They raise some different some different issues. The issue of collateral damage.
Of collateral damage, what we used to call killing innocent civilians.
The issue of killing innocent civilians is, of course, important.
And I don't want to denigrate that some the importance when I say that the primary issue,
the primary issue to be discussed is the legitimacy of targeted, targeted killing itself.
And that issue has to be, I think, understood in exactly the terms that Professor Guiora mentioned in terms of its necessity.
Notice of necessity is going to be playing two roles here.
Military necessity is a very narrow concept. It's a use in Bello concept.
It refers to particular armed operations, particular bombardments, particular killings.
If you have been engaged, for example, in in taking a defended position and you have seized the defensive position,
one of the reasons why you can't continue to fire on this is the firing has ceased to be militarily necessary.
Military necessity does not itself justify the the recourse to arms.
But in relation to self-defence, one might want to develop a notion of necessity, particularly when.
And Professor Guiora didn't exactly talk about this at length,
although he suggested that we could, if we like, have a long seminar on the meaning of imminence.
For these purposes, we could have a long seminar on the meaning of necessity,
particularly with regard to the decapitation version of targeted killing.
So the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki is necessary well, necessary for why?
Necessary as a sort of integral part of the only strategy we happen to be working with at the moment,
necessary because we can't think what else to do with these guys necessary.
If we were working within the confines of the particular person about to take part in the particular armed operation,
we could work with necessity, but necessity becomes a much more elastic concept.
It certainly doesn't mean absolutely indispensable. Everybody who is involved in large scale counter-terrorist operations will tell you that
the most necessary thing is disruption of finance and resources and communications.
Killing is really a small element of what's involved.
So necessary tends to waver in between something like an indispensable part of strategy and a rather good idea for the media.
And certainly the the law and the morality of armed conflict would from a little bit in the introduction of elasticity into the picture.
I think it is important to do exactly what Professor Guiora suggested,
which is as well as give us a sense of what is involved in these particular processes to help us,
help us as citizens of the countries that may be involved in this directly or in the.
Help us reflect upon the morality. And because the law is in flux on this and we are, as you said, making making it up as we go along.
Reflect a little bit on the morality and the legality of these operations in a way that just stands back a little bit from the particular
enthusiasm we might have felt for the killing of Osama bin Laden or the particular terrified response to an immediately imminent attack.
So I want to just to finish by referring to perhaps three areas where it is worth doing some reflection.
One is the sense that targeted killing is uncomfortably close, particularly in the decapitation model.
But I have mentioned uncomfortably close to assassination and to resort to assassination as a means.
I'm not an international lawyer, although I practice law about it a little bit.
But I'm not sure that when people talked about the conditions for self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations charter,
they had in mind assassination so that in these circumstances, assassination of leaders of opposing forces would be appropriate.
So certainly what the United States is conducting as part of a campaign of
assassination does not to use assassination necessarily with question begging,
negative associations, but it's a morally dubious practice.
And we should, as it were, sit back and think about as opposed to what you might think of either as the depersonalised
or indiscriminate killing involved in regular operations between rival armed forces,
where you don't know the name of the person that you're killing.
So that's one thing to reflect on whether we actually want to turn our soldiers into assassins, even well-reviewed and well disciplined,
remote controlled assassins, whether we want, in fact, to introduce assassination as a major policy into our law enforcement or military models.
And the second thing to reflect upon a little bit is the clash or the face off between a law
enforcement model of a response to terrorism and a military model of a response to terrorism.
Targeted killing is usually defended under the military model.
The persons who are killed are combatants. Unlawful combatants are usually or they are civilians who are taking a direct part in hostilities.
We use the logic of the military model,
but the naming of the person does sound and feel an awful lot like the law enforcement model and certainly some of the
criteria that we use that I know Israel has used since that remarkable decision in 2006 by five by the Israeli Supreme Court,
that the possibility of capturing the targeted person has to be has to be exhausted before or impossible before the targeting can take place.
That's not the sort of the giving quarter aspect of the capture that takes place in military operation, but it's a law enforcement model.
So are we in danger of blurring the law enforcement model?
And if we are,
we should be perhaps just a little bit more worried than some of us have been about the possibility of this infecting our law enforcement approach.
Jim, we know that in that in some United States killings in Afghanistan,
people have been targeted because they are involved both in terrorist operations and in the drug trade.
People have talked about the use of targeted killing in the drug trade on the Mexican-American border.
We are worried for some of us that there is a danger that something which is being
legitimised primarily with regard to the military model is sufficiently close,
nevertheless, to the to the law enforcement model that it might be in general become a last resort or maybe a not so last resort.
Intractable cases of intractable cases which probably fall within the law enforcement paradigm.
And the last thing to remember is we have to be very careful.
And I know there wasn't time for Professor Guiora to spend a lot of explanation on this.
We have to be very careful with the idea that each society or the state has an obligation to protect society
and this is primarily being carried out and undertaken in relation to that operation and that obligation.
The obligation to protect society is something which applies to the armed forces and to the police forces.
And to a certain extent, to the courts and to the law generally.
So we have to be very careful about not using that phrase in a very, very cavalier way,
because in certainly in law enforcement operations, even though there is apparent.
Obligation to protect society and members of society from attack.
It would be unthinkable. Or one hopes it would be unthinkable to say that this obligation justified killing.
Certainly,
it is true that occasionally police snipers in hostage situations and criminal situations do have to shoot a person for the defence of others.
But that is massively exceptional.
It is always accompanied by proper inquiry and both in Israel and and in the United Kingdom and in the United States.
And the controls that we have on the use of force in those circumstances indicate that we should take we should be very,
very uneasy, I think, about introducing this model into into ordinary law enforcement.
I mean, I say that this is the last thing I'll say. I say that without any confidence that we can actually draw bright lines here.
That's part of the difficulty. We are making it up as we go along. We are revising military doctrine, military law,
laws of armed conflict and the morality of armed conflict to reflect the different kinds of conflict that we're facing.
But I hope these things, these opportunities for reflection will be taken.
Thank you.