Yesterday the Washington Post published a must-read story about the much increased drone strikes used by the Obama administration for target killing of alleged terrorists.
The military Special Forces as well as the CIA are involved in these strikes and their various kill lists seem to be quite long. The case of the non-operative propagandist Awlaki and his son, both U.S. citizens, are only two of them:
On Sept. 30, Awlaki was killed in a missile strike carried out by the CIA under Title 50 authorities — which govern covert intelligence operations — even though officials said it was initially unclear whether an agency or JSOC drone had delivered the fatal blow. A second U.S. citizen, an al-Qaeda propagandist who had lived in North Carolina, was among those killed.
The execution was nearly flawless, officials said. Nevertheless, when a similar strike was conducted just two weeks later, the entire protocol had changed. The second attack, which killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, was carried out by JSOC under Title 10 authorities that apply to the use of military force. When pressed on why the CIA had not pulled the trigger, U.S. officials said it was because the main target of the Oct. 14 attack, an Egyptian named Ibrahim al-Banna, was not on the agency’s kill list. The Awlaki teenager, a U.S. citizen with no history of involvement with al-Qaeda, was an unintended casualty.
The fact that Ibrahim al-Banna wasn't killed in that drone strike lets me doubt that the killing of the Awlaki's kid was indeed unintentional.
As there is a lot of secrecy and no legal process around Obama's drone assassination there is no way to find out why the son of Awlaki was really killed and how many of thousands of people hit were really involved in something that would somehow justify their killing. But we do know that a lot of these assassinations are based on false intelligence:
Top U.S. military leaders who oversaw missile strikes last year against al Qaeda targets in Yemen suspect they were fed misleading intelligence by the country's government and were duped into killing a local political leader whose relationship with the president's family had soured.
…
These people say they believe the information from the Yemenis may have been intended to result in Mr. Shabwani's death. "We think we got played," said one participant in high-level administration discussions.
Something similar happened in Pakistan:
While attacks by US unmanned planes in Pakistan have become a contentious issue, tribesmen hired by US drone operators to tip off the CIA on terror targets have been using the opportunity to settle scores with rivals.
They provide false information identifying their rivals as terror targets prompting US drone operators to hit them. Mehsud and Wazir tribes are said to be locked in the tussle and they settle their scores using US drone attacks against each other.
Using unreliable locals who want to settle local scores for U.S. drone targeting is not the only problem.
"Signature strikes" are even worse:
Essentially, bombs are dropped on the heads of people who aren’t known to be terrorists, or militants, but who act like them.
How does one "act like a terrorist" or asked differently, how does one not act like a terrorist? Does one eat, walk, talk and sleep? What is a terrorist, except in the moment of his dead, doing that differentiates him from other humans?
Signature strikes violate both traditions of just wars, and are indefensible except by recourse to arguments of pure power.
But, as that piece reminds us, the "pure power" argument can be used by various sides and it is quite likely that all the assassinations by drones Obama has ordered will create a heavy blowback.
Remember that Israeli “targeted killing” was decried by the US before 9/11 as illegitimate. One wonders what the Middle East would look like if all the different states (and non state actors) therein got their mitts on rapidly proliferating drone technologies and considered it entirely normal and okay to start killing people across pesky international sovereign borders.
It is not only the Middle East that will experience drone strikes by others than the U.S. or Israel. There are many enthusiasts for radio controlled model planes and model rockets. It is not really that difficult to combine those toys for grown ups into something lethal.
Obama's drone campaign outside of any open legal framework makes drone killings a plausible and presumably legitimate tool to settle grievances. It sets an example. Its not a question of "if" but "when" this example will be used by others against U.S. citizens and interests.