I have a very hard time understanding how the legal framework for anything could be classified, and I make no exception for drone strikes against American citizens. I am not satisfied with the system they have in place and believe that there must be judicial oversight of the program. But another thing that bothers me is that I am not at all convinced that we are making ourselves safer. When I open the Washington Post and see a headline that we have a secret drone airbase in Saudi Arabia, I am reminded that Usama bin-Laden’s main complaint was that we had U.S. troops stationed in that country, most of whom were at an airbase.
We know that stationing troops in Saudi Arabia invites violent backlash and offers a huge recruitment tool to terrorist organizations. I question the wisdom of thinking we could keep a drone base secret.
I am not, like many progressives, reflexively opposed to the use of drones. I can see the upside of having eyes on the target, limiting unintended casualties, and being able to strike in areas difficult to penetrate on the ground. Depending on alternatives, a drone program can be preferable to, say, paying the Pakistanis to police their border areas or putting our troops on the ground.
It’s not the drones that disturb me per se; it’s a combination of lack of transparency and oversight, and immense skepticism that what we’re doing is actually in our long-term national security interest. I know it is tremendously difficult to discuss sensitive intelligence operations with the public, but we need more information in order to have an informed debate in this country. One reason I can’t argue in favor of the administration’s policy is that they won’t tell me what it is. At least, they won’t explain it with enough specificity and supporting evidence to allow me to understand it, let alone agree with it. And it’s not just the legal justification that they won’t share, it’s the overarching philosophical vision. Where is this going? How does it end?
I periodically voice these concerns and then I go back to railing against the Republicans, who are certainly worse in every area pertaining to civil liberties and foreign policy. But it seems like a good time, with John Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA pending, to say that I can’t support his confirmation unless the administration is more forthcoming. If their allies can’t defend their actions, they have a problem.
Just a note. The white paper is not just about drones. And the key to the debate is what the doctrine of imminent threat has done since 1945 to the Constitutional separation of powers.
And the specific argument about drones is this. The sole superpower should not be in the business of discovering and implementing technologies that dramatically lower the cost of parity in weapons. That in itself contributes to instability.
I use “drones” here as shorthand for the whole debate over our foreign policy and our legal framework.
I just wanted to separate the issues a little because conflating them allows one to be played off against the other.
Yes, the discussion should be expanded. When FDR made the decision to bomb Dresden or not take out the train tracks to the death camps, were those not unilateral, executive decisions? War sucks and innocent people die. Let us not overlook the fact that far fewer innocents die using drones than any of the other methods available to us for taking out those people sworn to killing us.
As for secrecy, yes, I hate it. But the entire intelligence world has been in a black box for years. We don’t even know its budget. So why, all of a sudden, are we shocked, SHOCKED, to discover people are being killed without judicial oversight.
If one wants to make the case that this should not be happening, that there should be far more transparency, then include the complete breadth of espionage and special operations (and the complete historical context).
Those pointing out problems with the formation and execution of these policies are not Pollyannaish. At all.
Let’s begin with the fact that for the first time it is being acknowledged that American citizens are being killed by order of the Executive without due process. As seen below, though, it’s not being acknowledged in ways which allow for oversight, or a meaningful debate.
Illustrating the oversight problems the other branches are having, here’s a couple of statements hot off the presses this week. For the Legislative branch, Senator Ron Wyden:
“Every American has the right to know when their government believes that it is allowed to kill them. The Justice Department memo that was made public yesterday touches on a number of important issues, but it leaves many of the most important questions about the President’s lethal authorities unanswered. Questions like `how much evidence does the President need to decide that a particular American is part of a terrorist group?’, `does the President have to provide individual Americans with the opportunity to surrender?’ and `can the President order intelligence agencies or the military to kill an American who is inside the United States?’ need to be asked and answered in a way that is consistent with American laws and American values.”
And for the Judicial branch, Judge Colleen McMahon, in her rejection of requests from multiple complainants to enforce the FOIA in order to gain information about the program:
“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules-a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping reasons for their conclusion a secret.”
The apropriate oversight would be provided by appropriate Congressional Committees; they are the ones who gave the President the war powers his Administration and Agencies are reliant upon in their untested, novel, and quite Orwellian legal opinions. If the current dispute between the Executive and Legislative branches remains intractable, the Constitution decrees that the Judiciary would settle the dispute. Unfortunately, the DOJ is taking the position that the courts, not just in specific cases but IN ALL CASES, has no jurisdication.
All of this legal and Constitutional wrangling covers up a primary reason for the fight here: we need to know enough about the programs to help judge if this program, executed in our name and with our tax dollars, is effective policy. There is great reason to believe it will be counterproductive in the near- and long-term, but without more info, our we and representatives are unable to knowledgeably determine these things.
“Trust us” is an unacceptable way to execute such an important part of our foreign policy.
FDR did not make the decision about Dresden. He delegated targeting to his military staff. James Carroll, The House of War has an excellent history of that decision.
There are people sworn to killing us roaming around the US. Should we use drones on Idaho or Alabama?
The entire intelligence world has been a black box since 1949. We are shocked because in the 1970s the Congress discovered that the CIA had been carrying out assassination attempts of Fidel Catro, which at the time were seen as a possible motive for the assassination of JFK, and decided to impose a ban on assassinations as a tool of national policy. Dick Cheney was in the administration when that happened, resented the limitation, and worked to get around in in the W administration. Extrajudicial punishment is illegal under international law; that is one of the things that Amnesty International has been protesting since its inception.
We need to undo the monster that the Truman administration created, which included covert operations.
Whoa! Decision to bomb German cities and civilian population most likely taken at Yalta on Feb. 4 – 11, 1945 by FDR, Stalin and Churchill.
By chance my next door neighbours of 40 years lived through those decisions made to bomb Dresden. As is well known, Dresden was not necessarily a military target but was a “revenge” bombing to destroy a large German city. The consent came from British war hero Winston Churchill. The butler of the British Embassy in the Hague was from German descent. The embassy hid more than 100 refugees during the war and German occupation of The Netherlands. I have a first hand account of those 5 years inside the British embassy. I am familiar with the German people from Dresden and their experience of the massive bombing which led to a firestorm and destruction of the city.
FDR did not make the decision about Dresden. He delegated targeting to his military staff.
Question: Why is it supposed to be more problematic for such decisions to made higher-up the chain of command, and by democratically-accountable officeholders, instead of lower-down the chain, by career military?
Would anyone here be more comfortable with this program if people were added to the capture-or-kill list by two-star generals, instead of by an Oval Office- level review? I, for one, would be a great deal less comfortable with that.
Those were legitimate exercise of the powers of the Commander-in-Chief in the course of a war declared by Congress (and formally declared first by the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan). I’m not arguing for the military necessity or wisdom or morality of those actions, only for their legality under the Constitution.
This is different from the President arbitrarily and with no Congressional or Judicial review declaring individuals as Enemies of the State and summarily executing them along with collateral damage. To me, despite the utility or wisdom of such actions, they are prima facie premeditated murder.
This war is every bit as Congressionally-authorized as World War Two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists
But is it Constitutionally authorized? The internment of Americans of Japanese descent was also Congressionally authorized as were the HUAC witch-hunts.
Powers granted by the Constitution, such as the power to declare war, on limited only by 1) explicit language limiting that power in the section that grants it (for instance, the public taking power cannot be exercised without paying just compensation), 2) other sections of the Constitution that impose limits (for instance, a law regulating interstate commerce cannot abridge the First Amendment), or 3) limits that the empowered branch chooses to put on itself (for instance, Congress’s spending powers can be limited by Congress passing pay-go rules).
The only one that might apply here is the second – Congress cannot use its war powers to authorize actions that violate citizens’ rights. This brings us to the question of what rights someone has when they join a hostile fighting force during wartime. This question has been brought before the courts, which have found that such persons can be treated as the enemy when they are at large, but once captured, must be granted the due process of a criminal suspect.
And if this is war, are we not signatories to international Conventions that prohibit the targeting of individual leaders?
The conventions you refer to do not apply to the military chain of command during a war.
Otherwise, it would be legal to shoot at privates but not generals. Obviously, that’s not true.
Do not combatants in a war get treated according to the Geneva Conventions for prisoner-of-war?
My point is that the legalism being used of a global battlefield and treating terrorists with non-state status but not as private individuals fuzzes the legal jurisdiction to allow the administration (Bush administration set the pattern) to do whatever they want. Americans treated the same way by another country would likely cause that country to receive protests from the US.
My second point is that language in the memo about imminent threat is so vague and the notion of a global battlefield so expansive that it is not inconceivable that the CPD would have had the authority to shoot me instead of just arrest and hold me back in May. And it would have been completely legal. We are not just talking about drones in theater here.
Do not combatants in a war get treated according to the Geneva Conventions for prisoner-of-war?
When they are in custody. When they are at large, they are treated according to international conventions about the law and customs of war. As it turns out, you actually are allowed to shoot at people in wars.
My point is that the legalism being used of a global battlefield and treating terrorists with non-state status but not as private individuals fuzzes the legal jurisdiction to allow the administration (Bush administration set the pattern) to do whatever they want. Americans treated the same way by another country would likely cause that country to receive protests from the US.
You think the meaningful difference between how an American soldier fights and how al Qaeda terrorists fight is merely nationality? Hokay.
My second point is that language in the memo about imminent threat is so vague and the notion of a global battlefield so expansive that it is not inconceivable that the CPD would have had the authority to shoot me instead of just arrest and hold me back in May. And it would have been completely legal.
No, it wouldn’t. Did you read the memo? Every single mention of who it applied to used the phrase “operational commander of al Qaeda or associated groups.” Are you an operational commander of al Qaeda?
Can we please have a reality-based discussion here?
I am if the President says I am. Or maybe it’s just a faceless bureaucrat. Unless I am wearing a uniform (which can be just a shoulder patch or armband), I am not a soldier. Without a uniform I am possibly a terrorist or spy, but that is for a COURT AND JURY OF MY PEERS to determine, NOT anyone in the executive branch!
Right, because juries of your peers have always had the final say about what is, and isn’t, a target during wartime. Umwut?
THERE IS NO BLOODY WAR!!!
No matter how many times you say this, even if your caps lock key sticks (always a good way to make yourself look like a kook, btw), it will not be any more true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists
You don’t seem to hear unless I shout. It seems that you have confused the authorization to use military force with the declaration of war and nothing can bring you to your senses. Was Kent State an act of war? Military operations and war are not the same thing.
By the way, would you have been comfortable with J. Edgar Hoover deciding which Americans are terrorists and should be whacked? Dick Cheney?
Yes, Drones are fairly low tech and fairly cheap and easy to develop by less than super powers.
Connecting them to a satellite network to collect data in real time is much harder.
And a Hellfire missile is a pretty advanced weapon. Unless they are armed with a stand off weapon like a Hellfire where the drone can idle unseen at 50K feet and miles off a drone is pretty vulnerable to even very basic defenses.
Who needs a satellite network? And who needs a Hellfire missile?
There are hobbyists who have rigged a cellphone, GPS software, and a paintball gun to to a hobby quadcopter and flown it through a series of cardboard targets successfully hitting the majority of the targets with paint. And done this from an adjacent field.
You see. This sort of high-tech wowsy thinking is how we lost 3000 people to 19 people with airline tickets and box knives. And why we spend billions of dollars on security theater but fail to stop an Undiebomber.
It’s too much technological thinking and too little political thinking. The idea is for relationships to be such that drone weapons are confined to hobbyists firing paintballs.
And don’t think that it would not be that hard to use the internet as your satellite network if you had just a few more resources, something like a small corporation or insurgent group.
And a drone such as that (not stand off) can be take out with an even cheaper hand gun or rifle. Along with the guy in the adjacent field.
You are making the case that equivalency is now too easy but what you describe is nothing like equivalency.
I expect robotics to show up on battlefields and in the hands of bad guys but that will happen whether the US has drones, robots or whatever or not
That drone can be taken out with a cheaper hand gun or rifle only if it is expected.
I’m making the case that the United States should not be subsidizing the research into making equivalency easy but should be making equivalency more difficult. Or working to back off the arms race altogether; we once did have that idea.
Robotics will show up on battlefields only if there is a political reason to have battlefields.
If you are talking “bad guys”, you are talking criminality not politics. Wars are political military threats are political unless one wants a policy of continuing to encourage private transnational lawlessness.
The solutions to national security are not techno-military, they are political and legal. The elite used to know this. Too bad they now have forgotten.
Nation-states used to worry about an international independent arms market; now they use it as an instrument of policy. How does that make the world safer?
I appreciate your position but it is factually wrong.
The Preditor uses an engine basically the same as has been in a Piper Cub since the 40s. The avionics and controls are based on common model airplane RC stuff that’s been around since the 60s. Our developing them hasnt subsidized them or made them more accessible.
The optics and communication and weapons systems associated with them, and which make them survivable and effective are very exotic and an entirely different matter.
You are right that politics, the law and diplomacy are the best defense. I would add commerce.
But we have to be prepared to use the politics of last resort which is warfare. And if we are going to conduct warfare it damn well better work while costing us the least blood and treasure.
Technological hubris is a uniquely American vulnerability.
Just ask the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, and the Afghanis.
If you trying to fight and defeat an entire nation on their soil, yes.
If you are trying to take out only a few individuals without fighting, defeating and occupying an entire country, no.
You seem to be arguing two sides of the same argument. Are drones too technologically advanced or too little? 😉
I’m arguing that “taking out people” doesn’t constitute winning nor does it necessarily make us safer. And that the technological hubris or thinking that because we can kill more accurately and cheaply or more destructively and cheaply is a major vulnerability of thought in great powers.
Asymmetric power produces asymmetric warfare and in asymmetric warfare those defending their homes have an advantage. Unless the great power is willing to become genocidal. The United States national security establishment still doesn’t get this fundamental fact. Which is why we are getting set up to get slowly bled in one war after another.
Drones are inexpensive enough to increase the number of players involved in non-state military actions, even including corporations and defensive corporate security and organized criminal business enterprises. They become a danger when their interests cross those of the United States government and there is the opportunity to add to US costs. Trying to win that arms race will drive down the costs and increase the number of players. Vicious cycle.
Too advanced or too little misses the point. Technical complexity is only an asset when it raises the cost to the point that it shuts out actors entering that arms race. There was a one-time argument that Reagan’s phantom Star Wars project with huge wasteful real expenditures had that effect on the Soviet leadership. I doubt that that is the complete truth but it illustrates the idea.
Technical complexity that provides false security increases vulnerability.
But it doesn’t necessarily make us less safe either. The determining factor is how wisely it is used.
Wise use avoids asymmetric warfare but making a smaller footprint and not fight a whole nation or even parts of it on their own soil.
Wanna stop insurgents from planting IEDs? Station a drone over a problem area and survey for guys digging roadside holes. You can have one there scanning many dozens of square miles 24/7. If it spots a bad guy it can take him out or contact a sniper.
What you don’t want to do is but many boots on the street getting shot and blown up while knocking down doors and shooting back. Same holds true if you are after any bad guy not just those planting IEDs.
Nevertheless, and here we agree, we need to be clear and wise about applying this force… Even if it means never using it . Just like nuclear weapons, it might be hard to imagine how and why you would ever use them but that in itself is not reason to forego The capability
It is more than being wise about the application force. It is everything to do with being wise about our relationships with other nations.
Nuclear weapons are a totally different sort of problem. They really only work for deterrence in a mutually assured destruction framework, which is what the Cold War evolved to. The problem with that framework is that it is a metastable equilibrium with huge costs of failure. The reasonable national security strategy is to build down nuclear weapons through quickly occurring reduction agreements with the Russians until both countries reach parity with the next ranked nation, then negotiate a three-way build-down, moving as rapidly as possible to elimination. We have reasonably good non-proliferation controls as long as the first tool is diplomacy.
Where we need wisdom is in diplomacy. If Hillary Clinton has not and John Kerry is not pursuing the normalization of relations with Iran at the same time we walk back the nuclear issue, they should be. That gives the advantage of transparency into the politics of the country through having a resident embassy.
And the biggie is our diplomatic relationship with Israel. That is a huge destabilizing factor to our national security. Both on the nuclear weapons front and on blowback from our alliance as a result of the hypocrisy of looking the other way as Israel violates the Geneva Conventions (choose which one depending of what Israel claims its relationship to the occupied territories are today).
Or our relationship with Saudi Arabia that looks the other way as Saudi Arabia exports support for terrorists that can come back to entrap us in another war or have consequences wherever Americans travel.
Wanna stop insurgents from planting IEDs, stop creating insurgents.
We used to understand that. Back before video games and Rambo.
I don’t think anyone disagrees with putting a priority on not creating insurgents. That’s the wisdom part.
But what do you do when I insurgents happen anyway, and we have to assume they will happen because as I said even a single individual or small group can now do a whole lot of harm to an entire nation.
Drones and precision weapons provide the means to deal with them without taking on an entire country with bombs and boots and getting mired in asymmetrical warfare.
Also if you think corporations, terrorists or small nations will get drones because we drove down the price, they could do that with or without us making drones.
But the cost and complexity of hellfire missiles and optics is very high and the capabilities to make them still rare. The Koch Bros or the Chechens or whoever simply couldn’t compete in making anything as survivable and lethal.
Is the knowledge of the design of optics and Hellfire missiles held internally within the military or is it held within the assets of military contractors?
And are those contractors transnational corporations?
What foreign governments have gotten foreign military aid in the form of sales of drones with these optics and Hellfire missiles?
What are the technical capabilities of those governments when it comes to reverse engineering the technology in the optics and Hellfire missiles?
What arms dealers have cozy relationships with those governments and might also have non-governmental clients?
Those factors determine how rare the capabilities are. And the military aid packages that have been concluded for other weapons systems have not been terribly wise in considering these factors in the eagerness to push sales. At least in some previous administrations.
It is not that difficult to imagine scenarios in which the Koch Brothers or the Chechens obtain the technology or knockoffs of it.
Technology has become the new version of the “Two oceans keep us safe” illusion. It’s true as long as you haven’t pissed off someone so badly that they will commit suicide to strike back.
Sorry but the ability by the Koch Bros or Chechens to reverse engineer and manufacture the optics and guidance systems in question is about the same as their ability to reverse engineer and manufacture an F22. These are truly the tough stuff to make in all but a few shops.
If you are worried about the defense contractors who make them leaking or selling the know how to them, well they could just as easily sell them the know how to make an F22 or super quiet and stealthy sub. The same few multinational conglomerates make everything and they are also bound by law and treaty to NOT share a lot of this stuff. The fix here is to make sure the laws are applied and in force, not to pretend that if we don’t make them no one else will.
Yes the US has talked about selling drones, armed and unarmed, to our allies. But that is no different from the fact that we have shared systems of all sorts for decades. In fact, doing so would help with the diplomatic issue you are so concerned about. We shouldn’t be the only face or options to drone attacks or we will take too much heat in many cases. We should not be seen as a unilateral force go achieve our strategic security.
Yep they could peddle and F-22.
Your assertion is to set the bar high so it can’t be duplicated easily . Frankly, even Lockheed Martin and the USAF can barely make a F22.
And if they make one for the Koch Bros. they go (as they say in the trade) straight to Atlanta (as in Federal Prison)
Seriously, are there any examples of corporation weaponizing themselvess to impose there will on the US or any country? That’s as cooky as thinking the US Army will come to take your guns. Everyone knows corporations get the US military to fight their wars. 😉
Corporations weaponizing against the US? Not yet.
Corporations weaponizing against other countries? Well yes but often the use the US or other countries military or CIA assistance by arguing an “X country interest”. But Titan, Blackwater/Xe/Academi, and other security contractors have been around only for a couple of decades. The fact that they haven’t yet doesn’t close of the possibility. And it is not so farfetched anymore in that security contractors are becoming transnational and able to play legal jurisdictions off against each other.
Corporate-sponsored attack on the US would most likely be intended to provoke US intervention for reasons of some corporate interest. Would Halliburton contract mercenaries and weapons to attack a US installation in order to provoke a war that protects oil drilling contracts and oil services contracts? If they couldn’t place their people in the US decision-making structure, they likely would.
But yes, a corporate attack directly on the US is unlikely unless the US government starts nationalizing various industries.
And with the NDAA and the establishment of US Northern Command, the edges of posse comitatus laws are being eroded so that it might turn out to be that the US Army has the legal authority to take your guns if you somehow get classified as an “imminent threat” to “national security”. What was kooky because there were clear legal and procedural barriers is becoming less kooky as those barriers are eroded in the logic of “a new kind of war”.
It is unlikely that even the Koch Brothers can afford an F-22 if they have to pay for the reverse engineering costs totally themselves. More likely that they could afford to reverse engineer a drone optics system.
Corporations surely have been and can be evil
And they have used the US military to fight wars for them for more than 100 years.
And they greatly profit from the military industrial complex.
But there is zero evidence I know of that any corporation is or would plot to attack the US or US interests using weapons they bought and/or developed. And if they did they would quickly be overmatched by the size and capability of the US. Military
They prefer lawyers and bribes.
Sorry but your concern is pure fantasy.
There is always a political reason to have battlefields, “continuation of politics by other means”.
Did I get the quote right? It’s been a looong time since I read “The Prince” and “on War”.
The sole superpower should not be in the business of discovering and implementing technologies that dramatically lower the cost of parity in weapons.
This is a legitimate consideration, but I wonder how much it really matters.
The technology behind UAVs is not some ground-breaking advance, like the hydrogen bomb. If the U.S. had never invented that weapon, the Soviets would never have been able to build one. It was only by copying ours that they were able to build theirs.
How true is this of drone technology? Fly-by-wire planes are old news. Video streaming is already a widely-proliferated technology. What is it about American UAVs that other nations wouldn’t have been able to come up with on their own?
I thought this was a pretty good article on the subject of drone warfare:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lewis-defending-drones-20130205,0,435765.story
I agree with you that the political costs of the drone campaign may eventually (or may already) outweigh the military benefits.
I agree that there are important questions regarding aspects of drone warfare that make it unique; in particular, the ability to target individuals from a distance with great accuracy, as opposed to the indiscriminate use of firepower that was once necessary in an air war. We once thought it was OK to firebomb cities in order to defeat our enemies. Now we are (rightly) worrying about individual deaths. This is a step in the right direction, but war is inherently inhumane, and as far as I know we are still at war with the taliban and al queda.
There are also aspects of war against an insurgency that are very different from war against a nation state — e.g. difficulty in determining who is the enemy when the enemy does not wear uniforms. This is an especially thorny issue if your own citizens are involved on the other side, and requires oversight and great care, something the military may not be very good at (eg. the US in Vietnam, or the French in Algeria). I’m not sure if/when there should be judicial oversight though, especially if the operations are conducted out of the country. Must a judge be involved to oversee every decision to carry out a drone strike? Or did the war powers provided by congress to the executive allow broad latitude in the carrying out of military operations?
I would be very interested to see the administration lay out specific rules of engagement with respect to this unique form of warfare.
We’ve put spies on the ground and spy satellites in orbit for decades to keep tabs on our interests on almost every inch of the planet. Add us of U2 and SR71 flyovers. The use of drone for surveillance is no different and in many ways they do a better job for less money. The rationale and protocols in this use isn’t very novel or complicated.
Now strapping a hellfire missile on a drone is a little different. The primary justification is to act on intelligence gained before it perishes or becomes obsolete. In other words , drone or no drone we have made the decision to take someone out and now that the drone has found him we don’t want him to get away. So to your point, we need to be clear on the protocol and rationale for killing bad guys but that really is independent from whether we blow him up with a missile or a bomb from an F16 or a snipers bullet or a knife in a back alley.
We’ve done this since 1947. Spies on the ground were never so numerous, nor needed they to be before World War II.
The “better job for less money” also means lower cost of entry for adversaries, which now need not be limited to nation states considering the international arms markets and the sticker price for a drone. Not wise for superpower national security.
And you are making the same separation of issue that I raised in my first comment. And there still is a ban on assassination in US law that was passed for a reason; Congress at the time allowed the possibility that JFK was assassinated in retaliation for the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. And thought is was prudent not to encourage other countries to think that it was OK because the moral arbiter of the free world did it.
What declaring a global battlefield does is fuzzes the jurisdiction between international law and domestic law. It is the same fuzzing that was the reason that Guantanamo was selected for torture operations and the prisoners of war housed there were called “enemy combatants”.
Well, it might be argued that both WWI and WWII might have been avoided had there been better intelligence and actions (diplomatic and military) based on that intelligence and even precision weapons.
We have after all avoided WWIII is some part because of our intelligence.
And as I said above there is more to making effective use of a drone than building a big model airplane. That’s the easy part. And even if it was that easy, if the US restrains from building them that does not mean our enemies won’t.
But I completely agree with your points about the perils of the Bush doctrine of enemy combatants and a global battlefield with endless war. The emphasis and approach needs to make more friends than enemies. But we need to be realistic that there will always be enemies. And we need to be realistic that the price to eliminate all and every attack is too high.
We avoided World War III because our leaders had the intelligence not to play tough guy at critical points and because there were several lower-ranking officers and enlisted men on both sides who had the intelligence not to take apparent threats at face value. We seem to be losing that independence of thinking and prudence in trying to seem tough and realistic and the big guy on the block.
It is unlikely that US policy or capability could have avoided either World War I or World War II. The PTSD of Munich/Invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor have blinded US citizens to a lot of the history and propagandist in the Cold War and since have played on those fears. In fact there were American industrialists who worked to make sure those wars happened on the assumption that they would make the profits while the US wouldn’t be dragged into the wars.
Why exactly does the US assume now that it must have enemies? Can the US domestically not hold itself together without enemies? Is that why the culture wars became so divisive after the end of the Cold War? One has enemies when interests conflict to the point that one side or the other decides to use force as a trump card. When can we have a public discussion about what those interests are (and not this bullshit about freedom and American way of life) and how they conflict with the real (not projected) interests of other nations?
Will there always be enemies? Why?
You can’t possibly argue that uninformed decision making and leadership is better than informed. The decisions and actions that avoided WWIII were based on intelligence… And yes a good measure of a proper moral compass and sound judgement.
In the last 100 years the ability of even a single individual to do massive harm to his fellow man has increased exponentially. A handful of whackos can do a boatload of harm to an entire nation.
Unless we are prepared to be basically defenseless against these threats we need better and more precise tools to combat it. And a lot of wisdom to use them correctly – which it think is much your point.
Bush and the nation lost its mind after 9/11 and acted stupidly and surely made us less secure long term. But we can’t do nothing. There are and surely will be at least a handful of bad guys who can do very bad things and tools like drones can be highly effective in dealing with them if used wisely. If nothing else it avoids going to war with an entire country and killing countless innocents just because a few of their citizens can’t be dealt with by their own country.
We can’t do nothing, but we can start being less full of the hubris of our power and start back from the fundamentals of what exactly are the interests that we are pursuing in foreign policy. As best I can tell, the Obama administration has been struggling to get the national security apparatus off autopilot from the Bush years and still be an effective President.
A country with 310 million personal weapons is hardly defenseless. So we have to be clear about what exactly the threats are concretely and why they exist politically. Our government has not been leveling with us about what the threats are; those whose jobs benefit from having threats have been hyping those threats. We have been fear-crazy and war crazy for all of my 66 years. My parents remembered a different time.
As a result of that hype I was awakened in the middle of the night with a CPD automatic pistol in my face; the thought does occur to me today that under the legal protocols outlined in the white paper I might not have awakened at all. This is not an abstract and hypothetical argument to me.
At the moment, we don’t need more or better technological anything. We need to pause and stop being driven by the concept papers of defense contractors and the self-serving threat analyses of the private contractors in intelligence and national security.
We need to consider the basics and dismantle the albatross that Truman created and all the accretion of power and secrecy and bureaucratic bloat that hangs off of it. And recreate national security institutions that actual are geared to our long-term security instead of the short-term profits and current salaries of the national security establishment.
The nation lost its mind the year I was born (1946).
And as long as there is an international community that recognizes the legacy of Westphalia and national sovereignty as norms, nations will have to deal with their own bad actors. And surrounding nations will have to contain failed states on their own. There are already established institutions that can do that without the US bigfooting itself into their proceedings.
This is far afield of this diary but the necessity of talking about the fundamentals is urgent. It’s why I think that NATO and the Project for National Security Reform are going down the wrong path and could lead to as much disaster as we saw from the Bush follies.
I think I can agree with all that.
I can only stress there is nothing inherently bad ( or good) about technology, intelligence or espionage. Used wisely they can greatly serve our purpose.
But wisely is the operative word. I think that is your point and I agree.
That’s my point about why drones are destabilizing as well. See my comment above.
Glasnost showed that WWIII was also avoid by the Soviet Generals who decided their own “no first strike” policy. I recall one retired General relating a call from a drunken Premier (Andropov?) ordering a missile strike that was ignored. He forgot he had ordered it in the morning. We came that close.
You see. We’ve not had an honest public debate about foreign policy since 1945 and the deck was soon stacked on that discussion.
We don’t need a debate on drones and we don’t need a debate on the president’s authority, in a war authorized by congress, to target enemies who happen to be Americans without interference from US civilian courts.
And the idea of a war crime is absurd on its face.
The Geneval Conventions say otherwise. And most nations have ratified them, giving them the force of law domestically.
That is if you still believe there is such a thing as law.
I think he might have meant that war crime is an oxymoron.
I would go with redundancy.
You’re right!
Quote me the language of the Geneva Conventions that forbid these drone strikes.
Philo, where is the proof that past and future targeted-for-assassination AMERICAN CITIZENS are enemies in action with the “organization” for which Congress authorized the President’s war powers? You don’t know these things to be true. Neither do I, and neither does Congress.
Congress’ oversight precedes oversight from the courts. However, if the Executive refuses to comply with reasonable Legislative oversight, the Judiciary would have to be the arbiter of which political branch is on the most solid Constitutional grounds.
You’re behaving as if these specific powers the Administration is taking have a long tradition. They don’t.
Short version?
Sure.
Good on you, Booman!!!
Longer version? (It grew.)
Booman finally comes alive!!! (“We Need a Real Debate on Drones”)
Good on you!!!
AG
See what happens when you pick your fights carefully? 😉
Good to see.
Yeah, I do.
You win a few, lose a lot.
Eventually the losses will turn into a debacle, Booman. Faux right and faux left will go right down the center of the drain. Together in death as in life.
Are you really willing to risk that?
Not me.
I’d rather take my chances with the arc of moral justice, myself.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Center on, Booman.
Center on.
AG
.
Cross-posted from my diary – POTUS Names John Brennan and Chuck Hagel to Cabinet Posts
I’ve been holding off getting drawn into the specific question about drones. I don’t see them as any different than what we used to do with air strikes, cruise missiles, etc. The main difference is the amount we are using but then Af-Pak is an active war zone that was authorized by the AUMF whereas most of our use of previous technology was during “peace time”. Another difference I see from our previous weapons of choice is less collateral casualties which I think is a good thing. If we were doing air strikes like before instead of drones now the deaths would be much much higher.
I think that the real problem a lot of us have is the use of the military in this way at all. Should be sending missiles from plane, ships, or drones at all into foreign countries. This is now an active war zone and Congress has never sought targeting approval during other war situations before. If they want the war to end they have an easy way to do it by repealing the AUMF.
Americans have fought for our enemies in every one of our conflicts and once they did they lost all the protections that our government provides. These aren’t assassinations they are missile strikes that happen to be very accurate. If Congress and by extension us, want more oversight into where or who we are targeting in our active war zone, they have always had the ability to take and get it. I don’t see the political will to do it on either side because most people don’t see this as an affront on our liberties since we’ve been doing the exact same thing in many different countries basically since the end of WW2.
Article 3, Section 3 of the US Constitution says that this is incorrect.
it might say that but it’s never been true in practice
If you are on the other side of a war we’re not going to not shoot at you just because you’re an American citizen.
The slippery language in all of this is the word “war”. The US Civil War clearly was a case in which there was definite treason; there were indictments but Andrew Johnson pardoned all of them in the name of national union.
What we’ve had since World War II, outside of actual wars in Korea, Vietnam, and so on up through Afghanistan are not really war in that there is no defined geography of time span. In that situation, there is no physical other side to provide absolute identification. That means that you need some better means than shoot now and let God sort it out.
And even in a war theater, the mere presence a person there does not constitute evidence of treason.
The Alien and Sedition Acts did not work out that well. And the Espionage Act of 1917 is what Bradley Manning is charged with violating even though the government cannot specify an enemy. (Well, they had this tortured logic that Osama bin Laden’s computer contained a file that came from the Wikileaks release without specifying how that necessarily advantaged al Quaeda.)
Finally, it’s kinda hard to make a case for treason outside of a state of war with a specified enemy. The presumption is that the US of necessity has permanent enemies. George Washington would be appalled at that failure of diplomacy.
We can split hairs about what is or isn’t war and the fact that Korea, Vietnam, and all the others since haven’t been declared is the fault of Congress and I don’t think most people see a difference. People saw Congress vote for the AUMF and right or wrong most people see that as Congress authorizing the war. It really doesn’t matter that it was a “true declaration” they passed it and the war started afterwards. Perception became reality.
That all being said, it really doesn’t change the original point I was trying to make.
Article 3, Section 3 of the US Constitution says that this is incorrect.
Shooting at the enemy, including American citizens, in a shooting war is not a punishment for treason, and does not rely on criminal law for its authorization. It is an execution of the war-declaring powers available to Congress and the war-making powers available to the President.
Just because a military strike is precise doesn’t turn it into a criminal sanction.
Similarly, the authority to shoot at foreign troops during a shooting war does not come from criminal laws against murder and attempted murder.
War-making and law-enforcement are two different powers, and as the white paper makes clear, none of the authority for these strikes is found in the police power.
Well, what was 9/11? A matter for international law enforcement for murder? Or an act of war?
Because we treated it as an act of war, we have 3,257 allied soldiers killed because of an event that killed 3000 people. And we apparently are not done because all of these other dangerous areas are springing up as the results of each next action.
The fuzzing of jurisdictions and police/military powers involved in the “global war on terror” and “homeland security” guarantees war without end everywhere.
And it is a convenient excuse to consider al Qua’ida “foreign troops” unless you are going to consider them foreign troops for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In which case we know what must be done, don’t we by the conventional logic. Don’t attack Iran; attack Saudi Arabia, the source of wahabist Islam. (Not that I’m recommending that approach.)
I would say that destroying much of Lower Manhattan, striking the Pentagon, and attempting to hit Congress or the White House were clearly acts or war. But, by whom?
Any response needed to consider a wide range of issues. There was simple justice. Finding accomplices and neutralizing them. There was deterrence. How do you frighten individuals into not replicating such attacks? Is a disproportionate response called for? Who, besides the culprits, needs to be deterred? Autocrats who allow militants to train, plot, and move freely in their country? How do we prevent a repeat of that specific method of attack? How do we keep bad guys off airplanes? How do we secure cockpits? What were the motivations of the attackers? Are there any things we can do consistent with our national interests that will alleviate some of their grievances? What did they want to accomplish? How do we avoid giving them what they want?
What large scale international and cultural conflicts fed the attack? Did the bases in Saudi Arabia and the sanctions in Iraq significantly contribute to the motivation? Are we prepared to continue a containment policy of Saddam and a concomitant presence in Saudi Arabia in perpetuity after being abandoned by our allies?
And, of course, the settlers in the West Bank. To what degree did they contribute to the climate of conflict, and how long are we prepared to take blowback on their account?
You cannot look at 9/11 as a simple law enforcement issue. It forced is to look at a situation that we thought was tolerable but clearly was not. Unfortunately, we didn’t ask half the questions I raised, we answered half the questions we did ask incorrectly, and we never were honest with the American people or willing to treat them as adults.
So, we fucked up, royally.
But the flip side of fucking up wasn’t sending the FBI to Kandahar.
Well, what was 9/11? A matter for international law enforcement for murder? Or an act of war?
Both. What makes you think that “military” and “criminal” are mutually-exclusive categories? Have you never heard of the Nuremberg tribunals?
There are certain practices that are sometimes used to prosecute wars that are illegal under international conventions, such as the deliberate killing of civilians. Those who use such means to fight a war can be shot at in battle, and when captured, can be charged with crimes.
Think about the SS guards of death camps. It would have been perfectly legal for American and Russian troops to attack them, and once captured, it would have been perfectly legal to put them on trial for crimes.
This time we are 100% in agreement. That ought to scare you, Boo!
I’m strongly in favor of the use of drone strikes to take out high level al Qaeda commanders (how good is it for our long-term security if we just let al Qaeda fester whenever they set up shop somewhere outside the reach of the law? Isn’t that the situation we had on September 10?), but I agree that we need more openness and more oversight.
I don’t think bringing the judiciary into a role that it has never before taken, is wholly unsuited for, and has no interest in taking on, is the right answer, but Congress should be exercising close oversight, and the administration should be cooperating with Congress when they exercise their oversight prerogatives.
Ironically, John Brennan himself (the Great Satan) looks like he might well your ally on this point. He seems to be advocate for moving the air component of the war against al Qaeda from the CIA to the real military, and making it more transparent.
I might agree if Congress declared War formally on the supra-national organization called Al-Queda. Yet declaring war on an organization, not a State, is dicey too. Maybe they could be declared pirates? But then they need to be caught in the act of piracy.
The fact is, until the late 20th Century there were no international organizations with the powers of a State, so this is uncharted ground.
Congress did declare war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists
As for novelty, what about the Civil War? Was the CSA a sovereign government? If not, then it was just a sub-state level organization falsely claiming the right to exercise state-like war powers – just like al Qaeda.
How about the Vietnam War. Was there not a state of war between the U.S.A. and the Viet Cong? Not the NVA, the Viet Cong.
Not formally. It was another “police action”. That was one of the things the war protesters objected to.
Regarding CSA, civil wars are rebellions not wars. They always have their own (and vicious) rules. Who is the traitorous rebel and who is the lawful patriot? The winner gets to decide that. If DeGrasse had lost at the Chesapeake, George Washington might be remembered today as an executed traitor.
A Force Authorization is exactly the same, legally and constitutionally, as an old-fashioned war declaration. The only difference is that it leaves the go/no go decision in the President’s hands (like how the Clean Air Act authorizes the EPA to decide whether or not to regulate specific chemicals).
Regarding CSA, civil wars are rebellions not wars. They always have their own (and vicious) rules. Who is the traitorous rebel and who is the lawful patriot? The winner gets to decide that. If DeGrasse had lost at the Chesapeake, George Washington might be remembered today as an executed traitor.
Nonetheless, putting down rebellions is an exercise in the war powers.
“If we just let al Quaeda fester whenever they set up shop…”
Do you not understand that their strategy is to bleed us with whack-a-mole that injures more civilians and increases recruits?
The judiciary’s role should have been supervising the trials in Article III courts of those people who planned and assisted the hijackers on 9/11 based on evidence. If the evidence were really there, they would be in the same location as the Blind Sheikh. Every single one of them.
At the same time we could defuse the recruiting by (1) seeking justice for the Palestinians, (2) easing out of our cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia, (3) normalizing relationships with Iran. And stopping our military bigfooting around the world.
Our “get tough” approach has increased the attractiveness of the al-Quaeda brand, strengthened their networks, and provided evolutionary pressure that strengthens their tactical understanding of how the US military thinks. More of the same is as huge a mistake as Vietnam and the drug war.
Do you not understand that their strategy is to bleed us with whack-a-mole that injures more civilians and increases recruits?
I understand their desire to draw us into wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan just fine. I also understand that the use of drones has nothing whatsoever to do with those quagmires. The drone war doesn’t “bleed” us, either in blood or treasure, to any meaningful degree. The number of civilians killed in over a decade of drone strikes is lower than the deaths from September 11, and far lower than the number of people that al Qaeda has killed in those countries.
I understand the quagmire strategy just fine; that’s exactly what I support the drone operations instead of the Iraq War. They are the answer to the question you asked.
If the evidence were really there, they would be in the same location as the Blind Sheikh. Every single one of them.
We were able to get our hands on the the Blind Sheik. The people being targeted by the drone strikes are outside of the reach of the law.
I’m all for changing foreign policy to reduce al Qaeda’s appeal – in fact, our response to Arab Spring has been exactly that – but don’t kid yourself: that is a way to limit al Qaeda’s ability to grow and attract support from the broader Muslim world, but it’s meaningless for the core, fanatical ideologues like bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Atta. That core would still have to be dealt with. Didn’t we already learn was a small, motivated cadre can do on September 11?
Our “get tough” approach has increased the attractiveness of the al-Quaeda brand, strengthened their networks, and provided evolutionary pressure that strengthens their tactical understanding of how the US military thinks. More of the same is as huge a mistake as Vietnam and the drug war.
That’s a fine argument against the Iraq War, but not the drone strikes.
Also, thanks for writing this, BooMan. The debate about drones to date has been so appallingly stupid, full of complete, uninformed bullshit, that a reality-based critique like this is most welcome.
“It’s a war crime to shoot people with drones!”
“It’s against international law, because DRONES!”
Just like your posts about the Libya operation, you do a good job articulating the real, non-bullshit issues that we need to think about.
For instance, Juan Cole has a post up with his top five objections to the drone strikes.
The first four of are based on the misapprehension that the use of military forces is based on the police powers.
facepalm
If you’ve not done so recently, read the Geneva conventions, of which the US has ratified two and is a signatory to two others.
And Executive Order 12333
You keep name-checking the Geneva Conventions, but despite numerous inquiries, you steadfastly refuse to identify any language or sections that the drone strikes violate. As far as I can tell, you don’t understand the difference between their rules for the treatment of prisoners and the laws that apply to active combat.
Any time you want to start doing more than name-dropping, go right ahead. I am quite familiar with the Conventions, and am quite confident in saying that there zilch zero nada therein that would forbid using UAVs to blow up al Qaeda commanders.
You similarly name-drop Executive Order 12333, without making any sort of argument about anything therein.
Here is the issue. A US official is deciding who is and is not a civilian. A US official is deciding who is and is not related to al Quaeda. A US official is deciding who is or is not an al Quaeda commander. A US official is deciding whether to ignore, detain, or kill (by drone or other means) the person identified as an al Quaeda military commander and all persons who might be “collateral damage”. And no one not predisposed to accepting the information as valid is in the decision loop to validate and check that claims that the person identified is indeed an al Quaeda military commander.
And the US is asserting its right to violate the sovereignty of a nation to pre-emptively kill an al-Quaeda military commander identified so who poses an “imminent threat” without that nation examining the evidence against the person or the evidence of the threat. Under most circumstances, that would be treated as an act of aggression.
What we have seen in fact are thousands of drone strike, too high a proportion being purely civilians–which the US avoids admitting by classifying any male of military age as a “militant”. We are seeing governmental protests from allies because we are killing the wrong people.
But you will argue, “there is no geographically defined batttlefield”. And that in my opinion is what makes it not applicable to the laws of war. By what reasoning is al Quaeda in Maghreb considered an imminent threat to the US just because it uses the words “al Quaeda” to brand itself?
Where are the limits in this conflict? Where is the US actually bound by its own executive order against assassination and the Geneva conventions? I see nothing but claims to be able to target anyone anywhere, including US citizens, on the basis of suspicion that they are non-civilian al Qua’eda military commanders and the suspicion that the provide an “imminent danger” to the US or US interests sometime in the next century.
The definition of “al Quaeda military commander” is vague in practice. The definition of “imminent” is vague. The definition of “battlefield” is vague. The definition of “US interest” is vague.
What is left is an assertion of the legal right to kill anyone anywhere in the world for the next indefinite period of time with impunity.
What could be the problem with that?
Will US officials actually do due diligence? I hope so but there is no way of providing checks, balances, or post-operation review in a way that prevents the actual commission of war crimes or violations of the US ban on assassinations.
But the military is so damn omniscient they know exactly who they are killing and the are so perfect they never make mistakes. And so pure of motive that the world dare not ever hold them to the same standards that the United States holds other countries.
Here is the issue. A US official is deciding who is and is not a civilian. A US official is deciding who is and is not related to al Quaeda. A US official is deciding who is or is not an al Quaeda commander. A US official is deciding whether to ignore, detain, or kill (by drone or other means) the person identified as an al Quaeda military commander and all persons who might be “collateral damage”. And no one not predisposed to accepting the information as valid is in the decision loop to validate and check that claims that the person identified is indeed an al Quaeda military commander.
So what you’re saying is that, just like in every other war, it is the military chain of command that is identifying targets, without review of their determinations by the judiciary of legislature.
But you will argue, “there is no geographically defined batttlefield”.
No, I will not. These strikes are only being carried out in places that outside of the reach of responsible local law enforcement – the rural, milita-controlled areas of Pakistan and Yemen, and the lawless areas of Somalia. Paris, Cairo, heck in Sanaa and Islamabad are not the battlefield.
Where is the US actually bound by its own executive order against assassination and the Geneva conventions? Everywhere, when not in the midst of an ongoing shooting war. You name-dropped the Geneva Conventions again, without any actual language or argument, btw.
What is left is an assertion of the legal right to kill anyone anywhere in the world for the next indefinite period of time with impunity.
False. I’ve already answered this. I guess we can’t have a reality-based discussion.
Joe, we have zero evidence that the military chain of command is deciding these things. In fact, my understanding is that the CIA has been executing these killings, and that Brennan believes that should be changed, that the killing program should be segregated as a military responsibility.
Nor do we know if the Administration has restrained itself in conducting killing operations, drone or otherwise, in the constricted set of territories you list here. Due to the extreme secrecy the Executive has shrouded around the program, we don’t have the information which would prove your assertion.
I have no idea on Earth why you argue these things out as if you are certain of your facts, when members of the appropriate Congressional committees are saying that THEY don’t have the facts you claim.
Which is Booman’s point in his original post. He would like to join you in being supportive of the policy, but he cannot when the contours of the policy are so thoroughly kept from him, and from appropriate Congressional representatives of his.
From a constitutional basis – remember, this all began as a claim that ordering such strikes in unconstitutional – there is no difference between one national-security bureaucracy in the executive branch and another. What we also know is that the decisions are ultimately made at the Presidential level, not by the CIA. I notice you sort of wiggled from “decided” to “executed” in your argument.
As a policy matter, I think Brennan makes a good point – it would be better for these strikes to migrate from CIA to DoD, so there would be a more normal chain of command.
Nor do we know if the Administration has restrained itself in conducting killing operations, drone or otherwise, in the constricted set of territories you list here.
Yes, we do. You should avail yourself of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s web site. That organization, which is strongly critical of the use of drones, has been maintaining an excellent database of all known and suspected drone strikes, both those done as part of the Af-Pak war and as part of the counter-terrorism program. They are taking place in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. That’s it.
I have to say, asserting ignorance about things that actually are known, or quite easily found if you make the effort, such as where the strikes are happening, who the target of the strike that killed Awlaki’s son was, seems to play an outsized role the opponents’ arguments.
I have no idea on Earth why you argue these things out as if you are certain of your facts, when members of the appropriate Congressional committees are saying that THEY don’t have the facts you claim.
You don’t even seem to be familiar with what the Congressional committees are complaining about.
Well, I heard Senator Wyden ask Brennan today if the Committee members will be provided a list of all the countries where at least one targeted killing has taken place. His response, as I recall, was that if he gained the CIA post he would try to see to it that the Committee members would get that information. So, despite your assertion, THEY aren’t assured they have the information you claim to have, and Brennan doesn’t believe they or the public have the information either.
Regarding which part of the Administration is executing this program, I’m not the one who claimed that the Executive is exercising the same war powers in the same ways that have been executed in other wars. You’re now conceding that the CIA is executing the kills, unlike past wars. Where do you get your “knowledge” that the decision to make a kill is made at the “Presidential level”? The White Paper released this week claims that it would be legal for an Administration official to be the one to decide that someone should be killed.
BTW, not all of our concerns here are about whether the program is legal and/or Constitutional. I am interested in that, but I am also interested in knowing more about the program, and seeing to it that Congress knows even more about it, so that we can collectively decide if this is good policy.
You’re now conceding that the CIA is executing the kills, unlike past wars.
Umwut? The CIA has been “executing kills” since it was called the OSS in the early 1940s. What am I supposed to have conceded again?
Where do you get your “knowledge” that the decision to make a kill is made at the “Presidential level”?
From the NYT story that set off this entire discussion – which was linked to and discussed extensively on this site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&
;_r=0
You haven’t heard of this?
Seriously, if you’re going to try to discuss this issue, you need to do a little homework. You need to have minimum level of familiarity with the information that is in the public record already. You can’t just insulate yourself from widely-available information, and then cite your own ignorance as an argument.
And I agree with you about oversight and public debate. I’m glad the administration has agreed to turn over more information to the committee, and I like that Brennan wants to move things over to the DoD, where operations are more transparent and Congressional oversight is stronger.
We can have this discussion in ways that turn down the vitriol; the sarcastic patronizing is unhelpful.
On some basic levels, we’re in substantial agreement. However, you’re the one who laid claim that “just like in every other war, it is the military chain of command that is identifying targets…”, when in fact even the Times’ story goes to great lengths to display that the military chain is explicitly excluded from the Pakistani border drone operations. Wiggling was done, all right, but I don’t see it coming from me in this instance.
I am well aware that the Adminstration has helped the New York Times and other outlets produce stories which, as of the middle of last year, present the President as requiring all killings from this program to gain his personal approval. However, I also note the publication last week of a White Paper to Congress which states that the Adminstration believes it would be legal for a single official in the Administration to order killings without the need to go through the President. Why would they bother to make the legal argument, even secondhand as the White Paper is, for the ability for someone lower than the President to issue the kill order unless this is considered to be a potential action?
Also, you’ve admitted that there remains within this Administration a sympathy for the unitary executive position infamously held by the W. Bush administration. In fact, you seem to agree that the Constitution vouches for the unitary executive. Surely you understand that there are many scholars who disagree. And here’s the thing: regardless of the legal and Constitutional arguments, which I do not concede, the supposition in the White Paper that a single non-military official under the President could order one of these kills sounds like bad policy to me.
Finally, if I “cite my own ignorance as an argument”, then why did Committee members ask questions which support my understandings and push against “facts” you claim here? For example, today Brennan was asked by the Committee to provide the names of countries where these killing operations have been executed. They are not assured that these killings have been limited to Somalia, Yemen and the Paki/Afghani border. So, that is among the “facts” you claim which are just not proven to be so.
even the Times’ story goes to great lengths to display that the military chain is explicitly excluded from the Pakistani border drone operations
Once again, you weasel your way from the question of decision-making to the actual execution of the strikes. I will continue to call you out for doing this, even if you try to hide behind a water-muddying exercise in projecting your mistake onto me.
Why would they bother to make the legal argument, even secondhand as the White Paper is, for the ability for someone lower than the President to issue the kill order unless this is considered to be a potential action?
Because the paper does not, in fact, draw the distinction between “a single official” and the executive branch as a whole. You made that up.
Under our constitutional system, executive power derives from the President, and arguments about what “the executive” can do are commonly phrased in terms of an individual. There is no constitutional difference between what one executive-branch official can do on his own, and what three of fifty or a 100,000 of them can do collaboratively.
I’ve see so many misunderstandings of what “unitary executive theory” means, and what assertions from the Bush administration amount to something novel, that I’d need you go into a little more detail about my alleged sin in order to know what you mean.
regardless of the legal and Constitutional arguments, which I do not concede, the supposition in the White Paper that a single non-military official under the President could order one of these kills sounds like bad policy to me.
Then argue policy. Don’t try to dress up your policy position as a constitutional objection just because you think it sounds better. I’ve been discussing the legal and constitutional issues here.
Finally, if I “cite my own ignorance as an argument”, then why did Committee members ask questions which support my understandings and push against “facts” you claim here?
Because the administration and CIA have refused to officially acknowledge that the strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are happening. Wyden isn’t asking for countries beyond those three; he’s asking for the administration to acknowledge those three countries. Once again, the official refusal to acknowledge that drone strikes are happening in those three countries is widely-known, widely-reported information that you should already be aware of.
joe, you have significant agreement with us on oversight and related policy questions; let’s not overstate our dispute. Booman began this discussion by talking about both legal and policy questions he had about the program. I mentioned a number of posts ago that I am also concerned about both categories, as have others on this thread. This makes it puzzling as to why you are agitated about limiting the discussion to the legal and Constitutional questions.
That said, some responses:
What are your bottom lines on this? You say that the Times article presents the President as signing off on every single kill order; that seems important to you. Are there any other single people within the Administration you believe are legally authorized to order a kill within this policy, whether by drone or other means? Do you differentiate between which official positions you believe are legally permitted to have sole authority to make the order and which positions should be restricted from making the order based on the best policy?
– Your last point gives voice to a description of a truly bizarre set of policies and claims. You claim that the Executive has not conceded a fact to Congress that they have conceded to the public, and that and nothing else is what directs Congressional questions on the question of what countries’ grounds have had our kill operations conducted on them. You claim to know what information Wyden is asking for by giving an interpretation of his question which is not supported by the language of his question or anything Wyden or other Committee members have said recently.
If Wyden’s concern is restrained to official oversight confirmation that the program these lands in the three regions mentioned in the Times story, why did Wyden not simply ask Brennan “the Administration has admitted publicly that Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan are where kill actions under this policy have taken place. That is no longer classified, so can you confirm to Congress that those regions have seen past kill operations?” Instead, the Senator asked a broader question, and in all statements both before and after Wyden is expressing what are clearly wider concerns about the range of the policy than whether he can get the Administration on the record about prior killings in three countries. Your chastising tone at the end is based on claims unsupported by the facts.
– Finally, you are generally in full defense of the Executive’s Constitutional latitude here, and ridicule those raising legal questions about it. Do you consider Senator Leahy some yahoo without his facts straight when he sends a letter to the President yesterday which states in part, “The deliberate killing of a United States citizen pursuant to a targeted operation authorized or aided by our Government raises significant constitutional and legal concerns that fall squarely within the jurisdiction of the Committee. Indeed, the analysis in the Department’s White Paper centers on core constitutional questions about the scope and application of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as the possible violation of federal criminal statutes”?
To play devil’s advocate (pretty literally), if it comes to a choice between drones and air or ground war, the calculus changes rather dramatically.
For example, Bush was going to go to war with Iraq and couldn’t be stopped. Hundreds of thousands of innocents died and zillions of dollars were squandered and war-profiteered away.
Just before the war started, Bush gave Hussein a sort of BS ultimatum and then proceeded with “shock & awe”. What if he had instead assassinated Hussein and his “deck of cards” inner circle with drone strikes? Iraq would have been thrown into turmoil and many of the same horrific results of that stupid war would still have occurred, but no Americans would have died and no “collateral damage” Iraqis would have been killed or given cancer by the American military. And we’re talking hundreds of thousands. Comparing the unwarranted collateral deaths caused by the American air war to the collateral deaths resulting from drone assassinations … there’s no comparison. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have YET to die from cancer from what Bush did.
Now, let’s take Hitler – a war that many on the left feel was necessary. And yet, the human costs of that war were absolutely staggering. We today have lost the ability to grasp the full horror of war. What I’m saying is that if war is going to happen anyway, drones are the least unfair and least horrible way to carry it out. Cutting off the head of a snake is a far better choice that destroying the entire eco-system in which that snake lives.
Of course, the Orwellian implications – that a drone could take me out as I type this having traced my IP … now I’m playing double devil’s advocate.
And the precedent being set – such that a foreign power might one day launch drone strikes against the US … ugh.
Well,you asked for a real debate – I’m having one with myself.