Obama's drone wars and
the normalisation of extrajudicial murder
Michael Boyle, 11 June
2012
In his first campaign
for the presidency, Barack Obama promised
to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush administration's approach to
terrorism – such as the use of torture, the rendition of
terrorist suspects to CIA-run black sites around the
globe, and the denial of basic legal rights to prisoners in Guantánamo – and to
develop a counterterrorism policy that was consistent with the legal and moral
tradition of the United States. In
an address at the Woodrow Wilson Center in August 2007, Obama criticized
the Bush administration for putting forward a "false choice between the
liberties we cherish and the security we demand", and swore to provide
"our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to
track and take out the terrorists without undermining our constitution and our
freedom".
As a candidate, Obama
also promised to restore proper legislative and judicial oversight to
counterterrorism operations. Rather than treat counterterrorism policy as an
area of exception, operating without the normal safeguards that protect the
rights of the accused, Obama promised that his approach "will again set an
example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn
rulers, and that justice
is not arbitrary."
Four years later, it
is clear that President Obama has delivered a very different counterterrorism policy from that
which he promised on the campaign trail. (Full disclosure: I was an adviser on the Obama campaign's
counterterrorism expert group from July 2007-November 2008.) In fairness, he has delivered
on a few of his promises, including closing the CIA-run "black site"
prisons abroad and ordering that interrogations of all suspects be conducted
according to the US army field manual, which proscribes many
of the tactics widely considered torture. And some failures were not wholly
his own: Obama's inability to close Guantánamo Bay was
due more to congressional opposition and to an array of legal obstacles than to
his own lack of initiative.
Yet, contrary to his
campaign promises, Obama has left most of the foundations of Bush's
counterterrorism approach intact, including (i) its presumption of
executive privilege, (ii) its tolerance
of indefinite detention in Guantánamo and elsewhere and (iii) its refusal to grant prisoners in America's jails abroad habeas corpus rights.
While the language of the "war on terror" has been dropped, the
mindset of the Bush approach – that America is forever at war, constantly on
the offensive to kill "bad guys" before they get to the United States
– has crept into this administration and been translated into policy in new and
dangerous ways.
This fact is clearly
demonstrated in a recent New York Times article, which details how President Obama has
become personally involved in an elaborate internal process by which his administration
decides who will be the next victim of America's drone strikes. The article
itself – clearly written with the cooperation of the administration, as the
writers had unprecedented
access to three dozen counterterrorism advisers – was designed to
showcase Obama
as a warrior president, thoughtfully wrestling with the moral issues involved
in drone strikes, but forceful enough to pull the trigger when needed.
What it instead
revealed was that the president has
routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America's temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and
the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorizing murder on a weekly
basis, with a discussion of the guilt or innocence of candidates for the
"kill list" being resolved in secret on "Terror Tuesday" teleconferences with administration officials
and intelligence officials.
The creation of this
"kill list" – as well as the dramatic escalation in drone strikes,
which have now killed
at least 2,400 people in Pakistan alone, since 2004 – represents a betrayal of President Obama's promise to make
counterterrorism policies consistent with the US constitution. As Charles
Pierce has noted, there is nothing in the constitution that allows the
president to wage a private war on individuals outside the authorization of
Congress.
The spirit of the
constitution was quite the opposite: all of the founders were concerned, in
varying degrees, with the risk of allowing the president to exercise too much
discretion when declaring war or using force abroad. For this reason, the
constitution explicitly grants the right to declare war to the Congress in order
to restrain the president from chasing enemies around the world based solely on
his authority as commander-in-chief. The founders would be horrified, not
comforted, to know that the president has implicated himself in the killing of
foreign nationals in states against which the Congress has not passed a
declaration of war.
Beyond bypassing the
constitution and the War Powers Act, the Obama administration has
also adopted a dangerously broad interpretation of the legal right to use drone
strikes against terrorist suspects abroad. According to his counterterrorism
chief, John Brennan, the legal authority for the drone strikes derives from the
Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the Congress in
September 2001 to authorize the attack on Afghanistan. He notes that there is "nothing in the
AUMF that restricts the use of military force against al-Qa'ida to
Afghanistan".
This interpretation
treats the AUMF as a warrant to allow the president to use force against anyone
at any time in a war without a defined endpoint.
Together with the
bland assertion that the US has the right to self-defense against al-Qaida under
international law, these legal arguments have enabled the president to expand drone operations against terrorist organizations (quantitatively) to Yemen and Somalia, as well as to escalate
the campaign against militant networks in Pakistan. To date, Obama
has launched 278 drone strikes against targets in Pakistan. The use of
drone strikes is now so commonplace that some
critics have begun to wonder if the administration has adopted (qualitatively) a "kill, not capture" policy,
forsaking the intelligence gains of capturing suspects for an approach that
leaves no one alive to pose a threat.
This vast, expansive
interpretation of executive power to enable drone wars conducted in secret
around the globe has also set dangerous precedent, which the administration has not realized
or acknowledged. Once Obama leaves office, there is nothing stopping the next
president from launching his own drone strikes, perhaps against a different and
more controversial array of targets. The infrastructure and processes of
vetting the "kill list" will remain in place for the next president,
who may be less mindful of moral and legal implications of this action than
Obama supposedly is. (within the U.S., G.O.P
president) (beyond the U.S., China – what if China use its own
drones against minorities? Chinese leadership decides who to be on “the kill
list” )
For those Democrats
who are comforted by the fact that Obama has the final say in authorizing drone
strikes and so refuse to criticize the administration, ask yourself: would you
be as comfortable if the next decision on who is killed by a drone was left to
President Romney, or President Palin?
Also in contravention
of his campaign promises, the Obama administration has worked to expand its power of the executive and to resist oversight from the other branches of government. While candidate Obama insisted that even
terrorist suspects deserved their due process rights and a chance to defend
themselves in some kind of a court, his administration has now concluded that a review of the evidence by the executive
branch itself – even merely a hasty discussion during one of the
"Terror Tuesdays" – is equivalent
to granting a terrorist suspect due
process rights. With little fanfare, it has also concluded that American
citizens may now be killed abroad without
access to a "judicial process".
As the complexity and
consequences of the drone strikes have grown, the administration has insisted
that it alone should be trusted with the
decision about when drone strikes are permitted, and consequently provides
only the bare minimum of information to congressional
oversight committees about drone activities.
What is also striking
about Obama's embrace of drones and targeted killings is that he – who, during
his 2008 campaign, displayed awareness that America's reckless actions abroad
were damaging to its long-term interests – has become so indifferent to civilian casualties. According to statistics compiled by the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism, at least 551
civilians have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia,
though the figure could be much higher. Yet, the Obama administration has
consistently argued that almost no civilians are killed in these strikes,
despite independent assessments that put
the number of civilians killed as much higher.
This claim is only
possible because the administration has engaged in an Orwellian contortion of
language, which assumes that anyone in the area of a drone strike must be
"up to no good" and therefore a militant. This assumption of guilt by association, and the grotesque misuse
of definitions to cover up the deaths of innocents, including children, has
allowed the administration to inflate
the number of successful
"hits" it has, while playing
down the number of civilian
casualties.
Now emboldened by this
apparent success and the lack of an outcry over deaths caused by drone strikes,
the administration is proposing to (further) loosen the standards for targeting in Yemen even further by
approving so-called "signature
strikes", in which attacks are launched on patterns
of behavior rather than the known presence of a terrorist operative. These
signature strikes are almost guaranteed to increase the number of civilian
casualties, as they are far more likely to catch innocent people who happen to
be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
negative consequences
trump successful hits (distinction
to be made b/w strategic goal and tactical victory)
The drone strikes are
portrayed by the administration as successful because they are able to take out
high-ranking terrorist operatives, such
as Abu Yahya al-Libi . But such a portrayal conflates a tactical
victory (killing one al-Qaida commander) with a strategic success (that is,
dampening the growth of extremist
movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan). It also rarely looks at the other
side of the ledger and asks whether the drone strikes have jeopardized the stability of the governments of Pakistan and Yemen, possibly risking
more chaos if they are overthrown. (DO-
the very last line should be here – a young child in Pakistan … ; strategic
goal is to stabilize the “safe heaven.” However, the drone attack is likely to
encourage children in Pakistan to be extremists)
another negative
consequence = hurt the relationship with other governments
During his first
presidential campaign, Obama promised to control counterterrorism operations
and to put them in their proper place as one piece of a wider set of
relationships with other governments. But he has done the opposite, allowing
short-term tactical victories against terrorist networks to overwhelm America's
wider strategic priorities and leave its relations with key governments in a
parlous state. His embrace of drones and his willingness to shoot first may
also be policies that the
US comes to regret when its rivals, such as China begin to develop and
use their own drones. (DO – this last line seems out of place. This paragraph
is about the drone attack endangered the relationship with other gov.)
Beyond simply failing
to live up to campaign promises, the real tragedy of Obama's counterterrorism
policy is that he has squandered an unprecedented opportunity to redefine
the struggle against al-Qaida in a way that moves decisively beyond
the Bush administration's mindset. Instead, he has provided another iteration
of that approach, with a level of cold-blooded ruthlessness and a contempt for the
constitutional limits imposed on executive power that rivals his predecessor.
Instead of restoring
counterterrorism to its proper place among America's other foreign policy
priorities, President Obama has been seduced
by political expediency and the lure
of new technology into adopting a policy that kills first and asks
questions later. He may succeed in crippling al-Qaida and preventing some
attacks today, but it is now harder than ever to believe that a young child in
Pakistan hearing the whirring noises of drones above them will look up and see
Obama's America as "the
relentless opponent of terror and tyranny, and the light of hope to the
world".
