8/28/2023 0 Comments Us drone strike obama![]() ![]() Until and unless the government does so, the default legal framework within which the United States operates should be the law-enforcement model of international human rights law, which in contrast to the less restrictive laws governing armed conflict only allows lethal targeting in order to protect an imminent threat to life. Therefore, Obama contended, the laws of war apply to killings of alleged enemy combatant members of those groups wherever they are, even far from any battlefield.īut the US government has yet to make the case that such hostilities outside conventional warzones have reached the threshold and intensity of an armed conflict. Obama, like his predecessor and successor, contended the US is engaged in an armed conflict without geographical boundaries with groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which spreads beyond conventional warzones such as Afghanistan and, later, Syria and Iraq. On the face of it, that Obama rule was his pledge to protect human life even more than he arguably had to. Let’s return to the Trump team’s plan to scrap Obama’s rule that a suspect must present a “continuing, imminent threat” to be targeted for death. Nor should even our qualified acceptance obscure the fact that Obama’s guidance for killing terrorism suspects outside war zones contained glaring loopholes for taking civilian lives that the Trump proposal exploits. But even if we accepted Hartig’s argument that the Trump proposal is better than no plan at all, this does not excuse its flaws. Since Hartig was Obama’s counterterrorism director at the National Security Council and, before that, the deputy counterterrorism director in the office of the defense secretary, it’s understandable that he heralds his successors for prodding Trump toward replacing rather than obliterating the killing rules he helped craft and implement. The possibility that Trump may keep that provision, Hartig proclaims, is nothing less than “a dramatic affirmation that minimizing civilian casualties is both a moral and strategic imperative.” More broadly, he writes, the “mere fact” that Trump even has a set of guidelines for operations outside warzones is “a huge vindication of the Obama approach to overseeing drone operations and the extent to which that approach has been institutionalized by career counterterrorism professionals.” The Times reported that administration officials have advised Trump to retain another much-touted Obama rule, which says that strikes cannot take place absent “near-certainty” that civilian bystanders would not be killed. That Obama rule was already a fig leaf, as I explain shortly, but it may have been better than nothing. In an exclusive New York Times report, the Trump team rationalizes that dropping this safeguard will allow the US to kill not only the people it deems to be in the top echelon of a terrorist group but also those it considers lower-level members, even if they are far from any battlefield, and in countries such as Nigeria and the Philippines where the US is not already conducting such strikes. The Trump administration proposal, reportedly advanced by his top national security advisers, would scrap protections that Obama approved in 2013 for lethal targeting, including the core requirement that the target pose a “continuing, imminent threat” to American lives. ![]() Debates rage over how many of those were killed lawfully and how many were civilians. That’s a perilously low bar to assess a dismantling of already insufficient rules for a program that has killed thousands of people in countries including Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen-the vast majority of them during Obama’s presidency. Hartig notes that the plan is more tempered than Trump’s campaign vow to “ take out” not only Islamic State members but also their families. “Based on initial reports, it’s actually not nearly as bad as we might have feared,” Hartig writes of the proposal, which would make it easier for the United States to kill more people off the battlefield with less oversight, greater secrecy, and no due process. What Hartig largely ignores is how flaws in the existing targeted killing policy, crafted under President Barack Obama, helped pave the way for President Donald Trump to kill more civilians. In Trump’s New Drone Strike Policy: What’s Any Different? Why It Matters, Luke Hartig astutely flags some – but not all – of the key dangers in the Trump administration’s reported plan to rescind many, if not most, rules for US lethal operations against terrorism suspects outside conventional warzones. ![]()
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