Recruiting for SWC members because....

[jmm99]

Most of the time, my posts on SWC deal with the "rules" and "reasons" for killing or capturing people. Their "literary genre" is more or less "book reviews", since I often link one or more books, articles or videos. Then I comment - briefly or verbosely.

There's an ulterior motive for doing what I do. It forces me to read the materials I cite; and therefore I learn. Whether others learn is their choice. Whether others elect a different presentation mode is also their choice. One thing I can say with complete assurance: SWC has no "party line" for "literary genres".

In basic mentality, I've been a practitioner and not an academic-scholar; though I was a law review editor for two years. So, I have a bit of experience there, having stayed at the Holiday Inn Express some 40+ years ago. Reduced to fundamentals, legal writing by practitioners and by academics-scholars is not that different: briefs vs articles. All are advocacy (albeit sometimes disguised, thickly or thinly); and should be well-sourced (personal opinions, generally, aren't worth much in the practitioners' world; probably, they are worth more in academia - "peer review", etc.). The formats are, however, quite different.

Here are two examples, as I would post them.

Michael C. Behenna v United States, Petition for a Writ of Certiorari (SCOTUS, 2 Jan 2013):

Introduction

Petitioner, Army First Lieutenant Michael Behenna, was serving as a platoon leader in Iraq in 2008 when an insurgent attack with an improvised explosive device ripped through his patrol, killing two soldiers and three Iraqi civilians. Lieutenant Behenna interrogated a suspected insurgent linked to the deadly attack by intelligence reports identifying him as a member of the local “Al-Qa’ida in Iraq IED Cell.” Because Lieutenant Behenna conducted the interrogation “without authority” and trained his handgun on the suspected terrorist during the encounter, a bare majority of the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF) ruled that Lieutenant Behenna “lost the right to act in self-defense as a matter of law.”
...
The AAF’s ruling is likely to be determinative of servicemembers’ right to self‐defense in combat zones unless this Court intervenes. ... The decision below should be reviewed, and reversed, now.

and Kevin Jon Heller, 'One Hell of a Killing Machine': Signature Strikes and International Law (to be published):

Abstract:

The vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the U.S. have been signature strikes – strikes that target “groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren’t known.” In 2010, for example, Reuters reported that of the 500 “militants” killed by drones between 2008 and 2010, only 8% were the kind “top-tier militant targets” or “mid-to-high-level organizers” whose identities could have been known prior to being killed. Similarly, in 2011, a U.S. official revealed that the U.S. had killed “twice as many ‘wanted terrorists’ in signature strikes than in personality strikes.”

Despite the U.S.’s intense reliance on signature strikes, scholars have paid almost no attention to their legality under international law. This article attempts to fill that lacuna. Section I explains why a signature strike must be justified under either international humanitarian law (IHL) or international human rights law (IHRL) even if the strike was a legitimate act of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Section II explores the legality of signature strikes under IHL. It concludes that although some signature strikes clearly comply with the principle of distinction, others either violate that principle as a matter of law or require evidence concerning the target that the U.S. is unlikely to have prior to the attack. Section III then provides a similar analysis for IHRL, concluding that most of the signature strikes permitted by IHL – though certainly not all – would violate IHRL’s insistence that individuals cannot be arbitrarily deprived of their right to life.

We at SWC have been paying attention to signature strikes and other droney things for quite a while - and to the rules for killing or capturing HVTs. Not being a scholar, though, I can't pass judgment on Kevin's bolded comment as it applies to scholars.

Thus, as I said before, different strokes for different folks.

Now, who wants to write up a nice little article arguing that Kevin's message is all wet.

Regards

Mike

[selil]

Now, who wants to write up a nice little article arguing that Kevin's message is all wet.



Mike

Me... I'd use the process laid out in the HVT Process document they declassified along with the process found in there.

99.9% of the military has zero idea how targeting is really done and the rest are wrong