50 Report of the Eminent Jurists Panel on terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights defeated.” 78 The nature and legal framework of this “war” has since been refined.79 In the Panel’s meetings with key Pentagon officials, including the legal adviser to the Secretary of State, John B. Bellinger III, the administration’s position was enunciated consistent with the following:“[t]he United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces…”.80 So it was that the US opted, in implementing its post-September 11 counter-terrorism strategy, to downgrade the law enforcement framework as the primary means to tackle terrorism, at least terrorism of a transnational character. Traditional law enforcement methods were seen as not offering the necessary flexibility or preventive capacity to address the threat posed by these transnational terrorist groups. In order to prevent future catastrophic attacks, what was supposedly needed was an intelligence-based approach grounded in a military strategy; hence, the “war on terror”. While maintaining a law enforcement dimension,81 the “war on terror” would be governed by the laws of war (international humanitarian law or IHL), but only to the extent the US considered such law to apply. For the US administration, it seems that this was a new kind of war, against a new kind of enemy, which was not contemplated by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. As non-state actors engaged in self–proclaimed warfare against the US and its allies, members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, by virtue of their terrorist acts and links, would be treated as “illegal or unlawful enemy combatants”, who were, in the view of the US, not entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. In this war – whose battlefield was the world at large – the US could claim for itself all of the rights and privileges of a belligerent party under the laws of war, but could deny its adversaries equivalent rights or privileges under the laws of war. Thus, the US could claim the right to target these “enemy combatants” anywhere, but, their adversaries, even if participating in a recognised situation of armed conflict, would be denied the right to engage in permissible acts of violence against US military personnel and 78 According to legal advice provided at the time by then Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, the “method, timing and nature of the response” was the President’s to determine and such response did not have to be limited to “those individuals, groups, or states that participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon”, see The President’s constitutional authority to conduct military operations against terrorists and nations supporting them, Memorandum opinion for Timothy Flanigan, The Deputy Counsel to the President from John Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, US Department of Justice, Office of the Legal Counsel, 25 September 2001 available at www/usdoj.gov/olc/warpowers925.htm. 79 See Summary of the EJP United States Hearing; see also for a view on the US administration perspective of the evolution of the paradigm, oral submission of Bradford A Berenson, Partner Sidley Austin LLP, former Associate Counsel to the US president. 80 John B Bellinger III, “Address at the London School of Economics, Legal Issues in the War on Terrorism”, 31 October 2006. See Section 1, Executive Order of President Bush, Interpretation of the Geneva Conventions Common Article 3 as Applied to a Program of Detention and Interrogation Operated by the CIA, 20 July 2007, determining that the US is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces. 81 On the use of the ordinary justice system to counter terrorism, see statistical information provided by the US Department of Justice, Counterterrorism Section, Counterterrorism White Paper, 22 June 2006, available at: http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/terrorism/169/include/terrorism.whitepaper.pdf.