Remote Control: Our Drone Delusion

The Fifth Amendment asserts that no “person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” a statement that the Supreme Court has usually interpreted as requiring, among other things, that American citizens receive a fair trial and the right of appeal. The Obama Administration has never made clear why it thought that capturing Awlaki and bringing him to trial was infeasible. Nor has it described the specific standards it used to approve Awlaki’s execution. As things stand, Obama will bequeath to his successors a worrisome precedent: without trial, the President has the right to kill any U.S. citizen who is judged, on the basis of unpublished criteria, to have become an enemy combatant.

But Awlaki’s case, troubling as it may be, raises a broader issue: the Administration’s refusal to disclose the criteria by which it condemns anyone, American or otherwise, to death. The information used in such cases is intelligence data rather than evidence; it is not subject to cross-examination or judicial review. Unanswered questions abound. Does the President require that intelligence used to convict a terror suspect in absentia be based on multiple sources, or is one sufficient? Must intercepts, photographs, or credible firsthand testimony be obtained, or can people be executed on the basis of hearsay from paid informants? How directly involved in violence must an individual be to receive a death sentence? At what point does a preacher’s hate speech warrant his being killed?

Mazzetti describes how the imperative to protect American troops in Afghanistan from cross-border attacks originating in Pakistan led to a slackening of the standards used to mark terror suspects for assassination. After 2008, the C.I.A. won approval for a category of drone attacks known as “signature strikes,” in which, even without a specific target, an attack is justified by a pattern of behavior—young men of military age test-firing mortars at a training camp in South Waziristan, say, or riding under arms in a truck toward the Afghan border.

Under the laws of war, strikes of that kind are typically legal on a formal battlefield like that in Afghanistan—in war, if an enemy camp is discovered, it is not necessary to know the names of the fighters inside in order to attack. In secret, Obama unilaterally extended such permission to Pakistan’s border region, where the United States had never declared war. The President put the C.I.A., not the Pentagon, in charge of these attacks, in order to maintain deniability.

Without judicial review or informed public debate, the potential for abuse and overreach is vast. In one of the most disquieting passages in his book, Mazzetti notes that, as the death toll in Pakistan mounted, Obama Administration officials at one point claimed that the increased drone strikes in Pakistan had not led to any civilian deaths. “It was something of a trick of logic,” Mazzetti writes. “In an area of known militant activity, all military-age males were considered to be enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant.”

by Steve Coll, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Noma Bar