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FindLawCongress is holding hearings tomorrow on the legality of the US government's drone warfare program. Conducted by the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the hearings will examine the CIA's use of unmanned aerial vehicles – commonly known as drones – to fire missiles at suspected militants in Pakistan and elsewhere.
While the Bush administration had an active drone warfare program, US reliance on drones increased greatly after President Obama took office. According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation, who have carried out a study of the drone program, the Bush administration carried out a total of 45 drone strikes in eight years, whereas the Obama administration carried out 53 strikes in 2009 alone. The pace of such attacks quickened even further in 2010.CIA drone strikes are now common in the tribal areas of Pakistan that border Afghanistan, an area over which the Pakistani government has little effective control. In Yemen, additionally, the US military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command is believed to have carried out a couple of drone strikes late last year.
The use of drones to target suspected militants raises a plethora of complex legal and policy questions. Notably, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, has voiced concern over the US use of unmanned drones, warning that the attacks may fall afoul of international human rights and humanitarian law.
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Questions That Remain
Koh's remarks were a useful introduction to the legal issues implicated by the US drone warfare program, but they raised as many questions as they answered. In the hearings tomorrow, representatives might want to delve into some of the following issues:
*
How many people are estimated to have been killed in US drone strikes since 2001? How many of these people are believed to have been civilians? How does the US make factual assessments regarding whether civilians have been killed in any given strike?* Does the US government claim the power to target suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants via drone strikes outside of the context of an armed conflict? Or is it the US position that the United States is engaged in a global war with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces, such that killings of suspected members of any of these groups anywhere in the world should be judged under the rules of armed conflict (in other words, by international humanitarian law)?
* Did the Obama administration revise CIA and/or Defense Department rules on the lethal targeting of suspected militants via drone strikes, or are Bush-era targeting rules still being applied?
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* Are US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen contingent on getting the local authorities' approval for these strikes, or is it the US position that such approval is unnecessary, given the inherent US right of self-defense against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated groups?
* Is the US currently considering – or has it ever previously considered – conducting drone strikes in countries other than Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen? (Suspected al-Qaeda operatives can be found in dozens of countries.) If not, are the limits on drone use based on political concerns or legal constraints?
* State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh cited "the imminence of the threat" as one of the key factors relevant to the administration's targeting decisions. What exactly does this mean? In particular, how imminent does the threat have to be? For example, does the administration require any showing that the target of a drone strike is planning an imminent terrorist attack, or is a likely participant in such an attack?more:
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20100427.html
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