Legitimate use of military force against state-sponsored - Air University

By its nature, the taking of hostages entails the seizure of an individual,
the deprivation of his liberty, and a threat to his life, coupled with an ultimatum
that some third party comply with the demands of the perpetrators. It always
involves demands on a third party. The person or persons held are not held for
reasons relating to themselves but to the demands on a third party; they are thus
by definition innocent in the context of the act in question… hostages are human
beings held for what ransom they may bring. Held for what ransom they may
bring, not for them or their acts. It would be at the least redundant and at most
dangerously confining to add an inherently irrelevant adjectival qualifier to the
term hostage.
Department of State, Office of the Legal Adviser, Digest of United States Practice in
international Law, 1976, ed. Eleanor C. McDowell (Washington, D.C.: 1977), 158-59, State
Department, 8908.
38. Kerr, 122.
39. Terrell E. Arnold, “Rewriting the Rules of Engagement,” in Fighting Back, ed.
Livingstone and Arnold, 188. See also Dobson and Payne, 186; Gayle Rivers, The War against
the Terrorists: How to Win It (New York: Stein and Day, 1986), 36-37 and 210; and Paul
Wilkinson, ed., Political Terrorism (London: Macmillan Co., 1974), 150.
40. Dobson and Payne, 186. See also Bart de Schutter and Christine van de Wyngaert,
“Coping with Non-International Armed Conflicts: The Borderline between National and
International Law,” Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 13, supp. (1983):
280; and British Perspectives on Terrorism, ed. Paul Wilkinson (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1981), 17-71.
41. See Noemi Gal-Or, International Cooperation to Suppress Terrorism (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1985), 142-43.
42. Alan F. Sewell, “Political Crime: A Psychologist’s Perspective,” in Bassiouni, 20-21.
43. See Ronald D. Crelinsten, Danielle Laberge-Altmejd, and Denis Szabo, Terrorism
and Criminal Justice: An international Perspective (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Co.,
1978), 35-38; and Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings before the Committee on
Foreign Relations, S.2236, “Legal Aspects of International Terrorism: The Trees and the Forest,”
by Alona E. Evans and John F. Murphy, 95th Cong., 2d sess., 8 June 1978, 91.
44. See John B. Wolf, Fear of Fear: A Survey of Terrorist Operations and Controls in
Open Societies (New York: Plenum Press, 1981). 60-65.
45. See ILA, “Third Interim Report,” 352; Tom J. Farer, “Law and War,” in The Future
of the International Legal Order, ed. Cyril E. Black and Richard A. Falk, vol. 3, Conflict
Management (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Center for International Studies,
1971), 15.
46. See Farer, 17; Lt Comdr Bruce Harlow, USN, “The Legal Use of Force… Short of
War,” US Naval Institute, Proceedings 92, no. 11 (November 1966): 89; and Jeffrey A. Sheehan,
“The Entebbe Raid: The Principle of Self-Help in International Law as Justification for State Use
of Armed Force,” Fletcher Forum 1 (Spring 1977): 135. In 1880 international jurist William E.
Hall could write: “International law has no alternative but to accept war, independently of the
justice of its origin, as a relation which the parties to it may set up, if they choose, and to busy
itself only in regulating the effects of the relation,” Quoted by J. L. Brierly, The Law of Nations,
6th ed., ed. Sir Humphrey Waldock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 398. Since