http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/10/24/3309424/drones-the-liberal-role-in-an.html
The advocacy groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are accusing the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama of possible war crimes for drone strike campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. These charges won’t have much weight within the United States – after all, even Hollywood now portrays the way we tortured detainees, and no one has been held to account.
But the reports presage what will probably become history’s verdict on drone strikes taking place off the battlefield in weak states: bad for human rights, bad for the rule of law – and bad for U.S. interests in the fight against terrorism.
I can’t escape the gnawing feeling that people like me – legal critics of the George W. Bush administration’s detention policy – bear some moral responsibility for creating incentives for the Obama administration to kill rather than capture. True, we didn’t realize that condemning interrogation practices and quasi-lawless detention at Guantanamo Bay would lead a Democratic president to break new ground in unfettered presidential authority. But that’s just the point: We should have seen it coming. And we didn’t.
***
Then came the drones – and with them a series of legal justifications that arguably went much further than the Bush administration had gone in expanding executive power. One Justice Department memorandum, which has still outrageously not been released to the public, apparently justified the killing of U.S. citizens by drone strikes in part through the argument that due process had been satisfied by internal deliberations within the executive branch. If the reports are accurate, this amounts to the first time I know of in our tradition since the Magna Carta in 1215 that due process has been deemed satisfied without giving the victim of a government deprivation of life and liberty the opportunity to be heard by a neutral decision-maker.
The advocacy groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are accusing the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama of possible war crimes for drone strike campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen. These charges won’t have much weight within the United States – after all, even Hollywood now portrays the way we tortured detainees, and no one has been held to account.
But the reports presage what will probably become history’s verdict on drone strikes taking place off the battlefield in weak states: bad for human rights, bad for the rule of law – and bad for U.S. interests in the fight against terrorism.
I can’t escape the gnawing feeling that people like me – legal critics of the George W. Bush administration’s detention policy – bear some moral responsibility for creating incentives for the Obama administration to kill rather than capture. True, we didn’t realize that condemning interrogation practices and quasi-lawless detention at Guantanamo Bay would lead a Democratic president to break new ground in unfettered presidential authority. But that’s just the point: We should have seen it coming. And we didn’t.
***
Then came the drones – and with them a series of legal justifications that arguably went much further than the Bush administration had gone in expanding executive power. One Justice Department memorandum, which has still outrageously not been released to the public, apparently justified the killing of U.S. citizens by drone strikes in part through the argument that due process had been satisfied by internal deliberations within the executive branch. If the reports are accurate, this amounts to the first time I know of in our tradition since the Magna Carta in 1215 that due process has been deemed satisfied without giving the victim of a government deprivation of life and liberty the opportunity to be heard by a neutral decision-maker.
