US expands drone war

Over the past weeks questions have been raised in Washington on the legality of the Obama administration’s expanding use of drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) to surveil and, with devastating missiles fired from them, kill people it suspects as terrorists in countries with which the US is not formally at war.

This method of warfare, called “targeted killing” initiated by President Bush in 2001, has been conducted without judicial oversight or public accountability. Thus far, over 400 drone strikes have been launched in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, killing between 3,000 and 4,500 people, including more than 200 children.

 Both Bush and Obama have invoked a 2001 congressional authorization to wage a “war on terror” specifically targeting al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. The US Justice Department has issued secret legal memos to justify the killings, but these have remained confidential within limited circles in the Office of the President, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon.

Even after the 2010 killing of bin Laden in his Pakistan hideout in a special operation directly supervised by Obama, the US president expanded the target killings to include American citizens. In September 2011 a drone flown from a CIA base in Saudi Arabia to Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen who had joined al Qaeda in that country. The killing spurred demands in Washington for the government to explain.

In his first term in 2009 Obama had promised “the most transparent administration in history.” Yet he withheld disclosing, even to the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees, the classified justice department’s legal opinions.

Instead, the justice department prepared an unclassified white paper for briefing the oversight committees on the al-Awlaki killing. It is lawful for the government to kill a US citizen, the paper argues, if “an informed, high-level official” decides that the target is a ranking figure in al Qaeda who poses “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States” and if his capture is not feasible. 

After the white paper was leaked to NBC News, Obama was impelled to order the submission of the classified memos to the oversight committees.

Thus when the Senate intelligence committee called a hearing on the confirmation of the nomination as CIA director of John Brennan, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser who had overseen the drone operations, he was asked tough questions.

Although the senators who questioned him weren’t fully satisfied with Brennan’s replies, most likely he will be confirmed.

And the targeted killings will continue and further expand, with Brennan still overseeing most of them as CIA chief. However, a congressional act will probably set up a special court to which the government will be required to submit — in secret — evidence that a suspect is a terrorist before he/she is placed on the kill list.

Sen. Diane Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, has indicated that the special court may be akin to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Congress established in 1978, which passes on government applications to wiretap suspected enemies.

The FISA Court, however, has been criticized for being a “rubber stamp.”  Of the 32,000 wiretap applications submitted by the government from 1979 to 2011, it rejected only 11, says an editorial of the International Herald Tribune.

So much for judicial oversight!

In Yemen, both the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command conduct drone strikes, with different operational guidelines.  When the CIA gets specific information on the location of a target person, it can send a drone to kill him without clearance by the Yemeni government. In the case of the JSOC, it must get the government’s permission before ordering a drone strike. Reason: Pentagon works hand-in-hand with Yemen’s counterinsurgency special operations group.              

Drone strikes may soon extend to Libya, Mali and Nigeria, writes Mary Ellen O’Connell, a University of Notre Dame law professor, who contends that the conflict between the US and al Qaida cannot lawfully extend to nations outside Afghanistan. Referring to Hellfire missiles fired from a drone in Yemen in 2002 that killed six men, including an American, she points out: 

“A United Nations special rapporteur declared the attack unlawful, but CIA drone attacks have increased substantially since then.”

Besides the killing of civilians that has accompanied many drone attacks — at his confirmation hearing, Brennan’s only suggestion is for the US government to acknowledge innocent civilian casualties — what should concern us about the drones?

It’s this: Pretty soon these drones will be coming to our area, under the US “pivot” program to shift to Asia-Pacific much of its military forces and war materiel. 

More specifically, US military officials have cited a plan to base in the Philippines some of their drones — now numbering 7,500  — besides augmenting the 600-plus American troops that have been on-rotation deployment here since 2002, and more frequent docking of US warships at our ports.

Now indispensable to the US military, the drones can provide 24-hour patrols over “hotspots” and gather intelligence data in “millions of terabytes and hours of video feeds.” Without risking pilots’ lives, they can launch missile strikes with precision at any chosen target anywhere.

Verily, the drones can prejudice our national security and sovereignty.

*      *      *

E-mail: [email protected]