Assessing Damage, Urging Action objectives and, if captured, denied the status and protections afforded to lawful combatants. The war paradigm also posited that international human rights law does not apply extra-territorially and, most particularly, that during situations of armed conflict international humanitarian law is the lex specialis, to the exclusion of human rights law applicable to the treatment of captured “enemy combatants”.82 This interpretation meant that international human rights law, with its oversight mechanisms and remedies, would be unavailable to persons detained in this “war”. Moreover, by putting persons detained or captured in its “war on terror” in locations outside of the US, such as Guantánamo Bay, the administration sought to place them beyond the reach of the US Constitution and laws. The net effect of this war paradigm was to create a “legal black hole” in which individuals were supposedly placed beyond the protection of all law. No such black hole exists either in international human rights or humanitarian law.83 The Panel found no support in its Hearings or in its meetings with senior legal and governmental officials for the US interpretation of international law. Indeed, even close allies take a different approach. In the UK, for example, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald (with whom the Panel met in the course of its UK Hearing) publicly stated: “…London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war […]. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a “war on terror”, just as there can be no such thing as a “war on drugs”. […] The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.” 84 3. Conflating two legal regimes The Panel considers that the US has conflated two distinct legal regimes by treating “acts of terrorism” as “acts of war”. The conflation has had profoundly negative consequences: in the short term for human rights violations, and in the long term for core principles of international humanitarian and human rights law. In proclaiming its “war on terror”, the US failed to make the crucial distinction between terrorist acts which take place within a setting of armed conflict, and terrorist acts falling outside of armed conflict. Acts such as attacks against civilians 82 See, for a recent example, Opening Statement by Matthew Waxman on the Report Concerning the ICCPR to the UN Human Rights Committee, Head of US Delegation, Principal Deputy Director of Policy Planning, Department of State, 17 July 2006, see http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/70392.htm. 83 Lord Johan Steyn, “Guantánamo Bay: The legal black hole”, 27th F. A. Mann Lecture, 25 November 2003. 84 See Ken Macdonald QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, Crown Prosecution Service, “Security and Rights”, 23 January 2007, available at the CPS website at www.cps.gov.uk. 51