Who Is the US Killing With Drones?
Global Research, March 11,
2016
As the news broke on March
7, 2016, that US drone strikes had killed 150 people in Somalia, the White
House announced it will reveal, for the first time, the number of people killed
by drones and manned airstrikes “outside areas of active hostilities” since
2009. The tallies will include civilian deaths. This is a critical first step
toward much-needed transparency. But it will not go far enough.
The Obama administration has
been lying for years about how many deaths result from its drone strikes and
manned bombings. In 2011, John Brennan, the former counterterrorism adviser,
now CIA director, falsely claimed that no civilians had been killed in drone
strikes in nearly a year.
The Bureau of Investigative
Journalism and other nongovernmental organizations that calculate drone deaths
put the lie to Brennan’s claim. It is believed that of the estimated 5,000
people killed on Obama’s watch, approximately 1,000 were civilians. But the
administration has never released complete casualty figures.
Plus, the numbers by
themselves are not sufficient. Even if the White House makes good on its
promise to publicize death tallies, it must also publish the Presidential
Policy Guidance, which has provided the legal justification for the US targeted
killing program.
In May 2013, responding to
international criticism about his drone policy, Obama delivered a speech at the
National Defense University. He proclaimed, “America does not take strikes when
we have the ability to capture individual terrorists — our preference is always
to detain, interrogate and prosecute them.” Then why has Obama added only one
man to the Guantánamo roster?
As
he gave his 2013 speech, the White House released a fact sheet that purported
to contain preconditions for the use of lethal force “outside areas of active
hostilities.” But the Presidential Policy Guidance, on which the fact sheet was
based, remains classified.
Here is a quick summary of
the fact sheet’s main points, including some direct quotations from it:
-
There must be a “legal basis” for the use of lethal force. It does not define
whether “legal basis” means complying with ratified treaties. They include the
UN Charter, which prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense or
when approved by the UN Security Council; the Geneva Conventions, which
prohibit the targeting of civilians; and the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, which guarantees due process and the right to life.
-
The target must pose a “continuing, imminent threat to US persons.” The fact
sheet does not define “continuing” or “imminent.” But a US Department of
Justice white paper leaked in 2013 says that a US citizen can be killed even
when there is no “clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and
interests will take place in the immediate future.” Presumably the
administration sets an even lower bar for non-citizens.
-
There must be “near certainty that the terrorist target is present.” The fact
sheet does not address “signature strikes” (known as crowd killings), which
don’t target individuals but rather areas of suspicious activity.
-
There must be “near certainty that noncombatants will not be injured or
killed.” But the administration defines combatants as all men of military age
in a strike zone “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving
them innocent.”
-
There must be “an assessment that capture is not feasible at the time of the
operation.” It is unclear what feasibility means. It was feasible to capture
Osama bin Laden, as none of the men at the compound were armed at the time the
US military assassinated him.
-
There must be “an assessment that relevant governmental authorities in the
country where action is contemplated cannot or will not effectively address the
threat to US persons,” which is left undefined.
- There must be “an
assessment that no other reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat to
US persons,” also left undefined.
Finally,
the fact sheet would excuse those preconditions when the president takes action
“in extraordinary circumstances,” which are “both lawful and necessary to
protect the United States or its allies.” There is no definition of
“extraordinary circumstances” or what would be “lawful.”
Releasing the Presidential Policy Guidance would clarify the gaps in the
guidelines for the use of lethal force listed in the fact sheet.
In February 2016, the bipartisan Stimson Task Force on US Drone Policy gave the
Obama administration an “F” in three areas the task force had flagged for
improvement in its June 2014 report. The first area is focused on progress in
releasing information on drone strikes. The second involves explaining the
legal basis under US and international law for the drone program. The third is
about developing more robust oversight and accountability mechanisms for
targeted strikes outside of traditional battlefields.
Regarding the first area (about releasing information), Stimson concluded the
administration has made almost no information public about the approximate
number, location or death tolls of lethal drone attacks, which agency is
responsible for what strikes, the organizational affiliation of people known to
have been killed by strikes, and the number and identities of civilians who are
known to have been killed.
Speaking about the second area of focus (about the legal basis for the drone
program), Stimson mentioned that a few official government documents have been
made public that relate to the US lethal drone program, primarily through court
orders. One was a redacted memo from the Department of Justice about the
legality of the 2011 targeted killing of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki “without
due process of law,” following a successful ACLU-New York Times Freedom of
Information Act request. The only other released document was the
Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual, with three short sections on the use
of “remotely piloted aircraft” in war. The only qualifications it contained was
that the weapons cannot be “inherently indiscriminate” or “calculated to cause
superfluous injury.” But the Geneva Conventions prohibit the targeting of
civilians in all instances.
Regarding the third area (about oversight and accountability), Stimson said the
administration continues to oppose the release of any public information on the
lethal drone program, which has obstructed mechanisms for greater oversight and
accountability. “The lack of action reinforces the culture of secrecy
surrounding the use of armed drones,” according to the report.
The Stimson report noted that the administration has “as a rule, been reluctant
to publicly acknowledge the use of lethal force by unmanned aerial vehicles in
foreign countries.” Stimson identified one “notable exception,” however. After
the discovery that two Western civilians held by al-Qaeda were killed by a US
drone strike in January 2015, the administration admitted the deaths, but
provided few specific details.
Lethal drone strikes have been reported in Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Afghanistan
and Somalia, and against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Stimson also identified 12
countries believed to host US drone bases: Afghanistan, Djibouti, Ethiopia,
Kuwait, Niger, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Seychelles, Turkey, the
United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden mounted a full-throated defense of the US
drone program in a February 2016 New York Times op-ed. He claimed, “The
targeted killing program has been the most precise and effective application of
firepower in the history of armed conflict,” annihilating the ranks of
al-Qaeda. But his claims are impossible to verify without documentation.
Hayden has also
said, “We kill people based on metadata.” But Ars Technica recently revealed
that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) SKYNET program, which uses an
algorithm to gather metadata in order to identify and target terrorist suspects
in Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan, would result in 99,000 false positives.
The Obama
administration has resisted transparency. We will see what it publicizes in the
coming period. Regardless of the data the administration releases, we must
demand full disclosure in order to attain real accountability.
Marjorie
Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former
president of the National Lawyers Guild. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal,
Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. Follow her on twitter at
@marjoriecohn.
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"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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