Obama said that "There's no country on Earth that would
tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."
11/18/2012 How nice it is to have a hypocrite for a president.
November 24, 2012
Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON —
Facing the possibility that President
Obama might not win a
second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the
election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by
unmanned drones,
so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according
to two administration officials.
The matter
may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300
drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by theCentral Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first
took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and
resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action
is justified.
Mr. Obama
and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a
measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more
flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to
prevent militants from controlling territory.
Though
publicly the administration presents a united front on the use of drones,
behind the scenes there is longstanding tension. The Defense Department and the
C.I.A. continue to press for greater latitude to carry out strikes; Justice
Department and State Department officials, and the president’s counterterrorism
adviser, John O.
Brennan, have argued for restraint, officials involved in the
discussions say.
More
broadly, the administration’s legal reasoning has not persuaded many other
countries that the strikes are acceptable under international law. For years
before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States routinely condemned
targeted killings of suspected terrorists by Israel, and most countries still
object to such measures.
But since
the first targeted killing by the United States in 2002, two administrations
have taken the position that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its
allies and can legally defend itself by striking its enemies wherever they are
found.
Partly
because United Nations officials know that the United States is setting a legal
and ethical precedent for other countries developing armed drones, the U.N.
plans to open a unit in Geneva early next year to investigate American drone
strikes.
The attempt
to write a formal rule book for targeted killing began last summer after news
reports on the drone program, started under President George W. Bush
and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some details of the president’s role in the
shifting procedures for compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes. Though
national security officials insist that the process is meticulous and lawful,
the president and top aides believe it should be institutionalized, a course of
action that seemed particularly urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might
win the presidency.
“There was
concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official,
speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper
limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program
to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed
to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more
leisurely pace, the official said.
Mr. Obama
himself, in little-noticed remarks, has acknowledged that the legal governance
of drone strikes is still a work in progress.
“One of the
things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need
Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined
in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re
making,” Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 18.
In an
interview with Mark Bowden for a new book on the killing of Osama bin Laden, “The
Finish,” Mr. Obama said that “creating a legal structure, processes,
with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons, is going to be a
challenge for me and my successors for some time to come.”
The
president expressed wariness of the powerful temptation drones pose to policy
makers. “There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that
somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems,”
he said.
Despite
public remarks by Mr. Obama and his aides on the legal basis for targeted
killing, the program remains officially classified. In court, fighting lawsuits
filed by the American
Civil Liberties Union and
The New York Times seeking secret legal opinions on targeted killings, the
government has refused even to acknowledge the existence of the drone program
in Pakistan.
But by many
accounts, there has been a significant shift in the nature of the targets. In
the early years, most strikes were aimed at ranking leaders of Al Qaeda thought
to be plotting to attack the United States. That is the purpose Mr. Obama has
emphasized, saying in a CNN
interview in September that
drones were used to prevent “an operational plot against the United States” and
counter “terrorist networks that target the United States.”
But for at
least two years in Pakistan, partly because of the C.I.A.’s success in decimating
Al Qaeda’s top ranks, most strikes have been directed at militants whose main
battle is with the Pakistani authorities or who fight with the Taliban against
American troops inAfghanistan.
In Yemen,
some strikes apparently launched by the United States killed militants who were
preparing to attack Yemeni military forces. Some of those killed were wearing
suicide vests, according to Yemeni news reports.
“Unless they
were about to get on a flight to New York to conduct an attack, they were not
an imminent threat to the United States,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations who is a critic of the strikes. “We don’t say that we’re the
counterinsurgency air force of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, but we are.”
Then there
is the matter of strikes against people whose identities are unknown. In an online video chat in January, Mr. Obama spoke of the
strikes in Pakistan as “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list
of active terrorists.” But for several years, first in Pakistan and later in
Yemen, in addition to “personality strikes” against named terrorists, the
C.I.A. and the military have carried out “signature strikes” against groups of
suspected, unknown militants.
Originally
that term was used to suggest the specific “signature” of a known high-level
terrorist, such as his vehicle parked at a meeting place. But the word evolved
to mean the “signature” of militants in general — for instance, young men
toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have
prompted the greatest conflict inside the Obama administration, with some
officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally
justified or worth the local backlash.
Many people
inside and outside the government have argued for far greater candor about all
of the strikes, saying excessive secrecy has prevented public debate in
Congress or a full explanation of their rationale. Experts say the strikes are
deeply unpopular both in Pakistan and Yemen, in part because of allegations of
large numbers of civilian casualties, which American officials say are
exaggerated.
Gregory D.
Johnsen, author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al Qaeda and America’s War in
Arabia,” argues that the strike strategy is backfiring in Yemen. “In
Yemen, Al Qaeda is actually expanding,” Mr. Johnsen said in a recent talk at the Brookings Institution, in
part because of the backlash against the strikes.
Shuja
Nawaz, a Pakistan-born analyst now at the Atlantic Council in
Washington, said the United States should start making public a detailed
account of the results of each strike, including any collateral deaths, in part
to counter propaganda from jihadist groups. “This is a grand opportunity for
the Obama administration to take the drones out of the shadows and to be open
about their objectives,” he said.
But the
administration appears to be a long way from embracing such openness. The draft
rule book for drone strikes that has been passed among agencies over the last
several months is so highly classified, officials said, that it is hand-carried
from office to office rather than sent by e-mail.
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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