Huffington Magazine Issue 33 | Page 76

OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE Obama has ducked questions about whether or not he personally reviews each strike package. The legal basis for drone strikes is said to reside in a June 2010 memo from the White House Office of Legal Counsel used to justify killing Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and extremist firebrand, in Yemen in September 2011. That memo remains secret after New York District Court Judge Colleen McMahon ruled in frustration on Jan. 2 that the law shields those White House decisions. That effectively allows “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 the reasons for its conclusions a secret,” she wrote. Nor is there much congressional oversight of the drone strikes. After being blocked for years, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally won permission in 2009 to send a delegation to the CIA once a month to peek at strike videos and scan some of the intelligence justifying the strikes, a committee official confirmed. But congressional committees charged with oversight of the armed services and foreign HUFFINGTON 01.27.13 relations have never managed to hold even closed-door classified briefings on the drone strikes. “Assertions by Obama administration officials as well as by scholars, that these operations comply with international standards are undermined by the total absence of any forms of credible transparency or verifiable accountability,” concludes Philip Alston, NYU professor of law and the former United Nations adviser on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. A second deep concern is the “The recent use of ‘signature strikes’ or ‘crowd killings,’ which are said to target a group of unidentified suspects, appears to violate international law egregiously.” civilian death toll from drone strikes. In the enormous violence unleashed in war, civilians always suffer. After more than a decade of war, military targeters have gotten pretty good at designing attacks to minimize or eliminate civilian casualties. But not perfect. Drone operators can watch a proposed target for days or weeks to establish patterns of life, augmented by spies and cultural experts. Targeting software like Bugsplat, w