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
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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