[Vision2020] Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy
Scott Dredge
scooterd408 at hotmail.com
Sun Nov 25 12:04:58 PST 2012
That's right V-Peeps, Tom has gone hyperbole once again adding no value to the topic at hand.
Paul,
<Why didn't they start trying to codify this *before* the first
drone strike, instead of waiting until Romney was possibly about
to take over?>
My guess is because the Obama administration in power wanted to conduct 'at will' drone strikes but wanted the Romney administration to be more constrained / ethical.
<Why
didn't our constitutional scholar of a president question this
"signature" assassination thing? Why didn't he question the idea
of assassination as a military tool, to begin with?>
Maybe because if he did question it, he wouldn't have plausible deniability if called to testify in front of congress later on.
<So much for his promises of an open and transparent government.>
That's just a sound bite to appease the gullible masses. Both parties engage in this sort of behavior. It's politics as usual.
-Scott
From: thansen at moscow.com
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 11:11:23 -0800
To: godshatter at yahoo.com
CC: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy
That's right, V-Peeps.
Mr. Rumelhart is suggesting that everybody should have unfettered access to classified information.
We'll jus' shut down all the intelligence branches of our armed forces and simply have unit commanders post this information to Facebook.
Oh, yes. I feel so much safer now.
Seeya round town, Moscow, because . . .
"Moscow Cares"http://www.MoscowCares.com Tom HansenMoscow, Idaho
On Nov 25, 2012, at 10:53 AM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
Why didn't they start trying to codify this *before* the first
drone strike, instead of waiting until Romney was possibly about
to take over?
There is so much wrong here, I don't know where to begin. Why
didn't our constitutional scholar of a president question this
"signature" assassination thing? Why didn't he question the idea
of assassination as a military tool, to begin with?
Oh, and I loved this bit:
"The draft rule book for drone strikes that has been passed among
agencies over the last several months is so highly classified,
officials said, that it is hand-carried from office to office
rather than sent by e-mail."
So much for his promises of an open and transparent government.
Paul
On 11/25/2012 08:12 AM, Art Deco wrote:
November 24, 2012
Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy
By
SCOTT
SHANE
WASHINGTON — Facing the possibility that President
Obama might not win a second term, his administration
accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop
explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by
unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit
clear standards and procedures, according to two
administration officials.
The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more
than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by
the Central Intelligence Agency and the military
since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still
pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal
uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action
is justified.
Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether
remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort
against imminent threats to the United States, or a more
flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack
their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling
territory.
Though publicly the administration presents a united front on
the use of drones, behind the scenes there is longstanding
tension. The Defense Department and the C.I.A. continue to
press for greater latitude to carry out strikes; Justice
Department and State Department officials, and the president’s
counterterrorism adviser, John
O. Brennan, have argued for restraint, officials
involved in the discussions say.
More broadly, the administration’s legal reasoning has not
persuaded many other countries that the strikes are acceptable
under international law. For years before the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, the United States routinely condemned targeted
killings of suspected terrorists by Israel, and most countries
still object to such measures.
But since the first targeted killing by the United States in
2002, two administrations have taken the position that the
United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies and can
legally defend itself by striking its enemies wherever they
are found.
Partly because United Nations officials know that the United
States is setting a legal and ethical precedent for other
countries developing armed drones, the U.N. plans to open a
unit in Geneva early next year to investigate American drone
strikes.
The attempt to write a formal rule book for targeted killing
began last summer after news
reports on the drone program, started under President
George W. Bush and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some
details of the president’s role in the shifting procedures for
compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes. Though national
security officials insist that the process is meticulous and
lawful, the president and top aides believe it should be
institutionalized, a course of action that seemed particularly
urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the
presidency.
“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our
hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone
strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous”
program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which
would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney
won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the
official said.
Mr. Obama himself, in little-noticed remarks, has acknowledged
that the legal governance of drone strikes is still a work in
progress.
“One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture
in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that,
to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s
reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making,”
Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance
on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 18.
In an interview with Mark Bowden for a new book on the killing
of Osama bin Laden, “The
Finish,” Mr. Obama said that “creating a legal
structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use
unmanned weapons, is going to be a challenge for me and my
successors for some time to come.”
The president expressed wariness of the powerful temptation
drones pose to policy makers. “There’s a remoteness to it that
makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any
mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems,” he said.
Despite public remarks by Mr. Obama and his aides on the legal
basis for targeted killing, the program remains officially
classified. In court, fighting lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union
and The New York Times seeking secret legal opinions on
targeted killings, the government has refused even to
acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.
But by many accounts, there has been a significant shift in
the nature of the targets. In the early years, most strikes
were aimed at ranking leaders of Al Qaeda thought to be
plotting to attack the United States. That is the purpose Mr.
Obama has emphasized, saying in a CNN
interview in September that drones were used to prevent
“an operational plot against the United States” and counter
“terrorist networks that target the United States.”
But for at least two years in Pakistan, partly because of the
C.I.A.’s success in decimating Al Qaeda’s top ranks, most
strikes have been directed at militants whose main battle is
with the Pakistani authorities or who fight with the Taliban
against American troops in Afghanistan.
In Yemen, some strikes apparently launched by the United
States killed militants who were preparing to attack Yemeni
military forces. Some of those killed were wearing suicide
vests, according to Yemeni news reports.
“Unless they were about to get on a flight to New York to
conduct an attack, they were not an imminent threat to the
United States,” said Micah
Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who
is a critic of the strikes. “We don’t say that we’re the
counterinsurgency air force of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia,
but we are.”
Then there is the matter of strikes against people whose
identities are unknown. In an online
video chat in January, Mr. Obama spoke of the strikes in
Pakistan as “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a
list of active terrorists.” But for several years, first in
Pakistan and later in Yemen, in addition to “personality
strikes” against named terrorists, the C.I.A. and the military
have carried out “signature strikes” against groups of
suspected, unknown militants.
Originally that term was used to suggest the specific
“signature” of a known high-level terrorist, such as his
vehicle parked at a meeting place. But the word evolved to
mean the “signature” of militants in general — for instance,
young men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist
groups. Such strikes have prompted the greatest conflict
inside the Obama administration, with some officials
questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally
justified or worth the local backlash.
Many people inside and outside the government have argued for
far greater candor about all of the strikes, saying excessive
secrecy has prevented public debate in Congress or a full
explanation of their rationale. Experts say the strikes are
deeply unpopular both in Pakistan and Yemen, in part because
of allegations of large numbers of civilian casualties, which
American officials say are exaggerated.
Gregory D. Johnsen, author of “The
Last Refuge: Yemen, Al Qaeda and America’s War in Arabia,”
argues that the strike strategy is backfiring in Yemen. “In
Yemen, Al Qaeda is actually expanding,” Mr. Johnsen said in a
recent
talk at the Brookings Institution, in part because of
the backlash against the strikes.
Shuja Nawaz,
a Pakistan-born analyst now at the Atlantic Council in
Washington, said the United States should start making public
a detailed account of the results of each strike, including
any collateral deaths, in part to counter propaganda from
jihadist groups. “This is a grand opportunity for the Obama
administration to take the drones out of the shadows and to be
open about their objectives,” he said.
But the administration appears to be a long way from embracing
such openness. The draft rule book for drone strikes that has
been passed among agencies over the last several months is so
highly classified, officials said, that it is hand-carried
from office to office rather than sent by e-mail.
--
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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