[Intelforum] (1) Intelligence and International Law

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Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2006 12:10:11 -0500
To: intelforum at lists101.his.com
From: "Anthony D'Amato" <a-damato at northwestern.edu>
Subject: Re: (1) Intelligence and International Law

In partial reply to Rocco Rosano:

In the recent Israeli attack on the apartment house in Qana
that resulted in the killing of 60 civilians the majority of whom
were children, Israel called a temporary halt to its air strikes
and investigated what went wrong.  Israel's conclusion was
that the missiles were fired at the house as the result of
faulty intelligence.

Taking that conclusion as true, the only blame that could be
attributed to the pilots of the F-16s that fired the missiles
was that they should have been more skeptical about the
intelligence.

But that matter aside, the intelligence agents who
provided the false information might themselves be
guilty of a war crime.  If they approved the house as a
military target without investigating the situation, their
wanton and reckless negligence could be tantamount
to the intentional causation of a war crime.  After all,
it was their job to check out the situation.

Sketchy reports have come in that, in fact, the
intelligence agents did not check out the situation,
but rather just assumed that all the civilians in Qana
had left town as a result of Israeli leaflets warning
them to get out.  Yet other factors should have been
assessed by the intelligence agents, including the
inability of the elderly, sick, and infirm to leave, the
lack of carriages or autos to transport infants out of
town, and most of all, the reports that the Israeli
air force targeted columns of fleeing civilians.  Whether
these reports were accurate is less important than
the fact that they were widely believed, resulting in
the decision by many families to seek shelter at
home rather than taking a chance on being killed
in an exodus column.

For those interested, I touched on some of these
considerations in a recent editorial in JURIST, and
I'm in the process of writing another editorial for
JURIST that will deal more explicitly with the
problem of guerrillas who hide among civilians. See
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/07/qana-war-crimes-and-pending-un.php ,

or if that hyperlink doesn't work, go to
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/ and click around.

Anthony D'Amato
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