A Response to the “Drone Papers”

[Blue_Tires]

The Intercept’s “Drone Papers” leaker “believes the public has a right to know how the U.S. government decides to assassinate people.” Maybe so—or maybe public safety and the need for secrecy trump the public’s curiosity. Unfortunately, the leaker has unilaterally decided for all of us. One person with a thumb drive again trumps the democratic process.

Tant pis; the “Drone Papers” are out there (the name suggests a massive archive; in fact, there are only four documents, one of which is a shorter version of another). So what do they tell us about how the U.S. Government is targeting terrorist leaders in Somalia and Yemen for drone strikes—or, as The Intercept would have it, “decid[ing] how to assassinate people”? Unsurprisingly, The Intercept is out to convict; its focus is on the “shortcomings and flaws” of the program, as supposedly exemplified by its ingenuous account of the life and death of al Qaeda commander Bilal el-Berjawi.

But the documents themselves are hardly as damning as the breathless tone of the reporting suggests. In fact, for those concerned about oversight and accountability in the targeting process for AUMF-based strikes, the documents should reassure rather than unsettle. The overall impression is of thorough, individualized review, at the highest levels of government, that meaningfully constrains those developing and carrying out these operations...

...These slides do not suggest operators run amok, “assassinat[ing]” targets with little forethought or oversight. To the contrary, the “Drone Papers” suggest that these operations go forward only after a deliberate, individualized process. They confirm that senior political decisionmakers, including the President, review and approve each individual operation. And they reveal that operators view this review process as a significant constraint—a constraint that distinguishes these operations from the (presumably more liberal) operating environments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/response-drone-papers-aumf-targeting-deliberate-process-robust-political-accountability

Wow...It's almost like Scahill/Greenwald spun this story with as much sensationalized hysteria that they could muster to further an agenda... Why on Earth would they do that? Because that has certainly never happened before!

[brush]

1. Thanks for this perspective

Maybe this is why this isn't going 24/7 in the MSM to damage Obama.

Also, wonder if Snowden is feeling even more abandoned now that Greenwald/Intercept have a new boy wonder to use.

[Downwinder]

2. Nothing wrong with vigilantes as long as they are

our Government.

[xocet]

3. The lawfare blog creates a strawman (the process), and you use an ad hominem (against the authors).

There certainly is a process which may even be "deliberate", but it is not the process itself that is the problem.

Instead, the problem is that there is an assassination program in the first place in spite of assassination programs being banned. (Of course, one could speak here of the process of targeting and of determining the target's guilt and thereby become distracted from the issue.)

Lastly, your closing statements do not address the contents of the "Drone Papers" - you are merely engaging in an ad hominem attack on the authors of these articles, authors with whom you do not agree: i.e., your argument is fallacious.



Note that the evidence of the strawman's construction is left as the article's conclusion:

A Response to the “Drone Papers”: AUMF Targeting is a Deliberate Process with Robust Political Accountability
By Adam Klein | Thursday, October 15, 2015, 5:40 PM

...

But if the concern is the process for approving these strikes—“how the U.S. Government decides to assassinate people”—then the Drone Papers should reassure rather than alarm.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/response-drone-papers-aumf-targeting-deliberate-process-robust-political-accountability

The actual point is made at the beginning of the "Drone Papers":

The Assassination Complex
Jeremy Scahill | Oct. 15 2015

From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death.

Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.” This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, “targeted killings.”

...

The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.

...

https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/

[OnyxCollie]

4. Blue_Tires: Advocate for domestic surveillance and drone strikes.

Even drone strikes against US citizens without a trial! ('Cause those guys are bad. Really bad. The government says so.)

[LeftOfLiberal]

5. To a ignorant fool

And, you can trust the government too, right??? After all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing fear.

[Blue_Tires]

6. kicked