Brian Williams - Predators

British police also arrested twenty members of the United Ummah ( ummah translates as “Islamic community”) who were protesting U.S. drone strikes outside the U.S. embassy in London. The group claimed to be protesting against “the recent spate of anti-Muslim drone strikes that have been launched by the U.S. government against innocent Muslims.” 56

As the use of drones increases in both the United States, where they have been used for surveillance on the Mexican border and in an arrest in North Dakota, and the UK, news of the expanded use of drones overseas in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia has been mainstreamed by the UK and U.S. media. As a result, public awareness of the drones has increased, and this has led to mounting opposition to the world’s first “robotic” assassination campaign. (The drones are not actually autonomous robots, of course; humans still control them.) Antidrone activists, for example, appeared among the Occupy Wall Street protestors in the fall of 2011. One of them said, “The army considers human losses as collateral damage. Drone attacks are not just killing particular people but they are bombing entire villages and killing innocent civilians. It’s absolutely horrible that we even have that technology.” 57

The issue that many protestors find galling is, ironically enough, the very aspect of the drones that leads to their unique precision, i.e., the fact that they are flown remotely by pilots who use cameras to closely monitor their targets. Opponents fear that the drones represent a slippery slope down the path to the “roboticization” of warfare and the rise of a sanitized video-game mentality of assassination by “kill TV.” The very remoteness of the pilots from danger, they fear, will lead to an increased reliance on drones to kill real or suspected terrorists throughout the world. Soon other countries will be turning their suspected terrorists into “bugsplats” with drones. These activists fear a future when modern states use the drones to kill their enemies across the globe without trials. One antidrone activist summed up this sentiment when he wrote, “These silent surreptitious killings seem antiseptic, somewhat like playing a video game. We do not hear about the horror and grief these executions create. It will be all too easy for the citizens of this country to sanction these kinds of extra-legal activities when they know nothing about their devastating consequences. The absence of U.S. lives lost may make it easier for us to enter wars in the future.” 58

Thus the world’s first remote-control assassination/bombing campaign has led to the rise of the world’s first antidrone campaign, which shows no sign of weakening. As the U.S. military and intelligence agencies increasingly rely on drones in the war against al Qaeda in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, the opposition is bound to increase exponentially.

THE BATTLE OF THE DRONE LAWYERS

One of the most fascinating issues of the CIA’s drone campaign, which began as a targeted assassination campaign and then expanded into an all-out war, is its legality. Does the CIA have the right under both international and domestic law to kill thousands of people in a country that the United States is not officially at war with, or has it gone down a dangerous path toward legitimizing a cross-border campaign of mass extrajudicial killings?

These important questions were raised in 2009 and 2010 by Philip Alston, a professor of law at New York University who also served as the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing and arbitrary executions. In an extensive official report to the UN, Alston wrote that America’s “strongly asserted, but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extra-judicial executions.” The report further said, “This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the U.N. Charter. If invoked by other states, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos.” The report ended by saying, “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing.” 59

In an earlier report to the UN, Alston wrote that it was difficult to make any real assessments on the legality of the CIA’s unprecedented drone campaign because it was veiled in secrecy. He called on the U.S. government to provide more information on how targets were selected and civilian casualties avoided. He also called on the United States to explain the legal basis for its unprecedented drone campaign and to outline how it complied with humanitarian law. If the United States did not do so, Alston warned, it would “increasingly be perceived as carrying out indiscriminate killings in violation of international law.” He also said, “The onus is really on the government of the United States to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions are not, in fact, being carried out through the use of these weapons.” 60Alston added, “Otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line, which is that the Central Intelligence Agency is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.” 61

The Obama administration was clearly taken aback by Alston’s broadside and felt that some response was necessary to demonstrate that the drone campaign was a legal, responsible, and appropriate response to the terrorist threat that the United States was facing. Harold Koh, legal adviser to the U.S. State Department, was chosen to make that response. In March 2010 Koh gave a speech in Washington, D.C., to the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law that for the first time laid out the Obama administration’s rationale for relying on drones:

With respect to the subject of targeting, which has been much commented upon in the media and international legal circles, there are obviously limits to what I can say publicly. What I can say is that it is the considered view of this Administration—and it has certainly been my experience during my time as Legal Adviser—that U.S. targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.

The United States agrees that it must conform its actions to all applicable law. As I have explained, as a matter of international law, the United States is in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban and associated forces, in response to the horrific 9/11 attacks, and may use force consistent with its inherent right to self-defense under international law. As a matter of domestic law, Congress authorized the use of all necessary and appropriate force through the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). These domestic and international legal authorities continue to this day.

As recent events have shown, al-Qaeda has not abandoned its intent to attack the United States, and indeed continues to attack us. Thus, in this on-going armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks. As you know, this is a conflict with an organized terrorist enemy that does not have conventional forces, but that plans and executes its attacks against us and our allies while hiding among civilian populations. That behavior simultaneously makes the application of international law more difficult and more critical for the protection of innocent civilians. 62