Order of the Phoenix

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 7695

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Dinah" <betty_belladonna at f...> 
wrote:

> I always suspected [James, Sirius, and Lily] worked as some sort of
> (snip) *special squad* for intelligence or something. Some sort of
> Auror, but in a more action-like way, working with spies and secret
> missions. (snip) The work sort of ties in with the Aurors who come
> and finish the dark wizards officially off, once their guilt is
> discovered. 

In my Lily story (this egroup/Files/Fanfic/Fanfic by Catlady), they 
(James and Sirius on the payroll, Lily and Remus unofficially) are 
indeed acting as that sort of 'special squad'.  But there is little 
connection between their missions and the assignments given to 
Aurors.

I got the impression from 'Mad-Eye Moody' that Aurors are 
investigators. When he told Harry to think of becoming an Auror and 
when he told Hermione to think of becoming an Auror, that was at 
times when Harry and Hermione were trying to think out solutions to 
puzzles. And in the Pensieve memory of Karkaroff's second trial, 
Moody tells Dumbledore 'it took me six months to track him down.' I 
get the impression that Aurors start with a crime and search 
backwards to find out who did it (and to get evidence for the trial, 
except after Crouch gave them permission to execute as well as 
investigate). 

While the 'special squad' is pretty much trying to find out what the 
bad guys are planning to do, and then prevent them from doing it. I 
suppose there could be an incident in which Our Heroes kill a bad guy 
in the course of preventing his bad deed, and then the Aurors find 
the corpse and investigate it as a murder and discover who did it 
and try Our Heroes as murderers, but I haven't written one. If Our 
Heroes did kill a bad guy, it would have been by accident or an 
extremity of self-defense, because James is quite unbearably 
sanctimomious about We can't kill people without trial or we would be 
no different from the bad guys. This much irritates me, because they 
know who so many of the bad guys are, and so many lives (including 
their own) would have been saved if they had just assassinated the 
major known bad guys instead of trying to find evidence of specific 
crimes against them to turn over to the Aurors.