DRONE
WARFARE
Obama’s Messy Hunt for a Clean Kill
By DAVID WOOD
WITHOUT WARNING in the dead
of night of Jan. 3, on a dirt road in
a remote region of Pakistan, two
missiles slammed into a doublecab pickup truck and blew it to
smithereens along with the six
men inside. It’s safe to say the victims never heard the U.S. drone
circling far overhead.
One of the dead was a known
bad guy, Mullah Nazir, a Taliban warlord who boasted of his
ties with al Qaeda and recently
banned polio vaccinations for local children. The other men killed
were said to be lower-ranking Taliban commanders.
A clean kill, demonstrating the
increasing ability of the United
States to identify, track, target
and eliminate dangerous threats
to American security? Perhaps. A
majority of Americans think so —
by 59 to 18, Americans approve of
using drones to kill high-level terrorist suspects overseas, according
to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.
But a growing number of military
and civilian experts in war and law
say that President Barack Obama’s
drone war is counterproductive
and unsustainable, perhaps violating the Constitution as well.
That puts the expanding American fleet of 375 armed drones
— which gives the White House
a seductively simple, inexpen-