Obama places new restrictions on drone strikes

[Orphia Nay]

In a speech at the National Defense University, Washington DC, Barack Obama has set out new rules for US drone strikes.

A summary of the rules:


* Lethal force will not be used as punishment but "only to prevent or stop attacks against US persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible and no other reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat effectively."
* Resorting to force must have a legal basis and "only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to US persons. It is simply not the case that all terrorists pose a continuing, imminent threat to US persons; if a terrorist does not pose such a threat, the United States will not use lethal force."
* Before ordering lethal strikes, there must be: "near certainty" that the target is present; that civilian non-combatants will not be injured or killed; an assessment that capture is not feasible; an assessment the local government "cannot or will not effectively address the threat"; and an assessment that no other "reasonable alternatives exist" to address the threat.
* The US will respect "sovereignty and international law". The laws of war and international legal principles will "impose important constraints on the ability of the United States to act unilaterally - and on the way in which the United States can use force".
* If a terror suspect being targeted is identified as a US national, "the Department of Justice will conduct an additional legal analysis to ensure that such action may be conducted against the individual consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States".
* The administration asserts a "reservation of authority". The new procedures for lethal strikes "do not limit the President's authority to take action in extraordinary circumstances when doing so is both lawful and necessary to protect the United States or its allies".


Is this fair and reasonable?

 

[This is The End]

Very fair and very reasonable.

And that is, I assume, why this was almost on Page 2 with 0 responses.

 

[Orphia Nay]

Very fair and very reasonable.

And that is, I assume, why this was almost on Page 2 with 0 responses.

Yes. I'm smiling as I sigh.

Nothing there to shake your fist at.

 

[theprestige]

I think it's extremely reasonable. I am gratified to learn that Congress has been briefed on each such strike carried out by the Obama administration. This kind of Congressional oversight is something I have long argued is both necessary and sufficient for Presidential authority to carry out these strikes.

However, I think the President is being a little disingenuous here.

I believed these precepts should have been articulated by President Bush when he first began the program of drone strikes. They should have been articulated by President Obama on his first day in office, before he ever authorized even a single strike as part of that program. It's not like he didn't know the program existed well before he opened his bid for the presidency. It's not like his staff didn't have plenty of time to formulate a policy around this controversial and important issue, long before he was elected.

Instead, it seems to have suited him just fine to exercise this power however he saw fit, for almost six years, without ever suggesting that maybe his actions should be constrained by the Legislature, or by the Judiciary.

Now that reelection is behind him, and he must look forward to burnishing his legacy, he suddenly finds it necessary to urge Congress, and the public, to restrict this power, not so much for him as for whoever comes after him. He wants to be remembered not as the President who continued an aggressive program of targeted killing using drones, but as the President who laid the groundwork for ending that aggressive program. This is an attempt to whitewash the fact that for the majority of his administration, he was blatantly and unabashedly the former, not the latter.

It's ironic that he would announce his new thinking on drone policy on the same day that he announced a drawdown in "the war on terror". It smacks of a convenient, self-serving stratagem: "Someone stop me before I kill again!... Oh, and I'm pretty much done with killing anyway."

What would have been a good and wise policy announcement in the first year of his administration, seems like a cynical propaganda ploy in the sixth year of his administration. If these principles of Congressional and Judiciary restraint were so important to him, why was he content to operate without them for so long? Why did he order the assassination of American citizens, free of the constraints which he outlined this week, if he really believed that he, President Barack Obama, should be so constrained?

 

[Delvo]

There's no there there. These rules don't describe anything that doesn't already apply, not only to drones, but to all weapon systems. That's not exactly a complaint, since I don't see any reason to give drones special restrictions that don't apply to the rest in the first place, but the best response to people saying there's a drone problem isn't to play along with it by pretending to solve it; it's to challenge their claim that there's even really a problem to solve at all.

Worse yet, not only is this a pile of nothing, it's even watered-down nothing, with that bit about how the President can break the rules at any time if... some restrictions apply which happen to be the same as the rules themselves anyway.