Too Much Power for a President
May 30, 2012
It has been clear for years that the Obama administration believes the
shadow war on terrorism gives it the power to choose targets for
assassination, including Americans, without any oversight. On Tuesday, The New York Times revealed
who was actually making the final decision on the biggest killings and
drone strikes: President Obama himself. And that is very troubling.
Mr. Obama has demonstrated that he can be thoughtful and farsighted,
but, like all occupants of the Oval Office, he is a politician, subject
to the pressures of re-election. No one in that position should be able
to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners
located far from a battlefield — depriving Americans of their
due-process rights — without the consent of someone outside his
political inner circle.
How can the world know whether the targets chosen by this president or
his successors are truly dangerous terrorists and not just people with
the wrong associations? (It is clear, for instance, that many of those
rounded up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks weren’t terrorists.) How
can the world know whether this president or a successor truly pursued
all methods short of assassination, or instead — to avoid a political
charge of weakness — built up a tough-sounding list of kills?
It is too easy to say that this is a natural power of a commander in
chief. The United States cannot be in a perpetual war on terror that
allows lethal force against anyone, anywhere, for any perceived threat.
That power is too great, and too easily abused, as those who lived
through the George W. Bush administration will remember.
Mr. Obama, who campaigned against some of those abuses in 2008, should
remember. But the Times article, written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane,
depicts him as personally choosing every target, approving every major
drone strike in Yemen and Somalia and the riskiest ones in Pakistan,
assisted only by his own aides and a group of national security
operatives. Mr. Obama relies primarily on his counterterrorism adviser,
John Brennan.
To his credit, Mr. Obama believes he should take moral responsibility
for these decisions, and he has read the just-war theories of Augustine
and Thomas Aquinas.
The Times article points out, however, that the Defense Department is
currently killing suspects in Yemen without knowing their names, using
criteria that have never been made public. The administration is
counting all military-age males killed by drone fire as combatants
without knowing that for certain, assuming they are up to no good if
they are in the area. That has allowed Mr. Brennan to claim an
extraordinarily low civilian death rate that smells more of expediency
than morality.
In a recent speech,
Mr. Brennan said the administration chooses only those who pose a real
threat, not simply because they are members of Al Qaeda, and prefers to
capture suspects alive. Those assurances are hardly binding, and even
under Mr. Obama, scores of suspects have been killed but only one taken
into American custody. The precedents now being set will be carried on
by successors who may have far lower standards. Without written
guidelines, they can be freely reinterpreted.
A unilateral campaign of death is untenable. To provide real assurance, President Obama should publish clear guidelines
for targeting to be carried out by nonpoliticians, making assassination
truly a last resort, and allow an outside court to review the evidence
before placing Americans on a kill list. And it should release the legal
briefs upon which the targeted killing was based.
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