[Peace-discuss] Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed: Sustained public debate is needed on drone strikes

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/sustained-public-debate-is-needed-drone-strikes-jb9a4jf-200323531.html

Sustained public debate is needed on drone strikes
by Conor McMullen
March 27, 2013

*Conor McMullen is a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a
member of Progressive Students of Milwaukee.*
*
*
After years of slumber, Congress is finally starting to wake up to its
responsibilities to question the legality, the wisdom and the morality of
the administration's officially and absurdly "secret war" using drone
strikes to try to kill alleged members of terrorist groups in Pakistan,
Yemen and Somalia, far from any legally recognizable battlefield.

When President Barack Obama nominated John Brennan to head the CIA, which
has been carrying out the officially "secret" drone strike policy, a
bipartisan group of 11 senators wrote to the administration and said: You
need to hand over to Congress the secret memos written by the Justice
Department's Office of Legal Counsel that purport to justify the legality
of the drone strike policy, which we have been seeking for more than a
year. If you don't hand over the memos, they said, Brennan's nomination
could be in trouble.

As a result of the threat, the administration finally shared some of the
memos with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, which are supposed
to oversee the CIA. The administration still has not shared the memos with
the Judiciary Committees, which are supposed to oversee the Justice
Department, which produced the memos, even though Attorney General Eric
Holder admitted in Senate testimony that access to the memos was necessary
to understand the policy.

Some members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees have threatened
to issue subpoenas for the drone strike memos if the administration doesn't
hand them over, but they have not yet followed through. Wisconsin Rep. Jim
Sensenbrenner is a member of the House Judiciary Committee; he could be
doing more to press the administration to release the memos to the
committee.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Brennan if the administration
was claiming that it had the legal authority to conduct drone strikes in
the United States, Brennan answered: "This administration has not carried
out drone strikes inside the United States and has no intention of doing
so." That was clearly a dodge of the question.

The question wasn't about what the administration intended to do. The
question was about what legal authority the administration was claiming.
The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has
claimed that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed
days after the Sept. 11 attacks, legalized a global war without borders in
every corner of Earth. This claim logically begs the question: If the war
is legal everywhere on Earth, does that include the U.S.? If not, why not?
If it does not include the U.S., what exactly does it include?

Brennan's subsequent confirmation shouldn't mean the end of congressional
scrutiny of this policy, and it won't. On April 16, the Constitution
subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding its first ever
public hearing on the drone strike policy. This subcommittee is chaired by
Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, and the hearing is expected to include witnesses
who can testify to the reality of who is being targeted by drone strikes
and who is being killed.

Until now, the administration has publicly claimed that only top terrorist
leaders are being targeted and that civilian casualties have been extremely
rare. But the record of independent reporting suggests that the standards
for targeting have been extremely loose - something along the lines of
"military age male in an area controlled by insurgents who looks like a
terrorist" - and that civilian casualties have been quite common, with
around 20% of the killings from CIA drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004
being civilians.

*Progressive Students of Milwaukee and Peace Action Wisconsin are
sponsoring a public forum Thursday on the drone strike policy. We'll be
discussing what is known about the policy from independent reporting and
what the public can do to help bring this policy into transparent
compliance with U.S. and international law.*

*** FORUM THURSDAY

A forum on U.S. drone policy will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday in the
Fireside Lounge at UWM's Union, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd.

-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
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