IDENTIFYING THE START OF CONFLICT: CONFLICT RECOGNITION, OPERATIONAL REALITIES AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE POST-9/11 WORLD

The Cole bombing was routinely called a "terrorist attack" and the U.S. response involved numerous parallel investigations into, inter alia: identifying and finding those responsible for the attack; reviewing the actions of the commanding officer and crew of the U.S.S. Cole; and examining the vulnerabilities of U.S. forces abroad.2 And yet, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. military response to those attacks, many- including the U.S. government before the military commissions-argued that the Cole bombing was "one of the opening salvos of the terrorist war on Americans"3 and therefore part of the U.S. conflict with al-Qaeda. Earlier than that? A complicated web of operational authority, prosecutorial decisions, and legal analysis has left this question unanswered and significantly murkier than might be expected. Since the fall of 2001, the United States has asserted that it is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda and associated forces.