Drone Strikes and International Law

(picture from http://ssecorp.blogspot.com/2011/08/predator-drone-aircraft-wallpapers_18.html)


As it has done in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the United States has decided to employ unmanned drones to drop bombs in Libya.

The use of drones raises interesting legal, ethical and political questions. Their obvious utility lies in complete absence of risk to American lives with their use. Even if shot down, a drone can only cost us money, not airmen or soldiers. Furthermore, their aim is accurate and precise; they hit what their controllers aim at. From a military persepctive, then, they can be ideal when they can be used.

But all of these strenghts also raise concerns. The Christian Science Montitor quotes David Ignatius in the The Washington Post thus:

My quick reaction, as a journalist who has chronicled the growing use of drones, is that this extension to the Libyan theater is a mistake. It brings a weapon that has become for many Muslims a symbol of the arrogance of US power into a theater next door to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, the most promising events in a generation. It projects American power in the most negative possible way.

I wrote late last year that the problem with the Predators is that they provide too easy an answer to political and military problems.

In other words, it looks and feels like we are playing god, floating around the skies with our ability to kill whomever we like. Send a drone to kill the one we don't like, and everything will OK, right? Well, not always and not for everyone.

Furthermore, drone strikes act more like extrajudicial executions than military maneuvers. In October of 2010, NYU professor and UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions John Alston wrote

that We need the United States to be more up front and say, 'OK, we're willing to discuss some aspects of this program,' otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.

At issue, in part, is that the US targets specific individuals, but keeps the reasons for their killing secret in an effort to protect the program and the hardware. These are not attacks on legitimate military targets as traditionally understood, with the necessary consequence of the death of bunches of people. Rather, the government chooses a person to kill, and then kills him. Because there is never any airing of evidence against this person, never mind a trial, the attacks raise serious concerns about due process.

It's ironic, of course, that international law will not give much resistance to the arbitrary killing of dozens of men, largely through the accidents of fate, that result from traditional bombings, but has no place for the assassination of a single person. Ethically, it seems better in some ways for the US to try to identify people who really "dserve" to die.

Millbrook School student Sarah Whalen wrote a very good essay on these questions in 2006. To quote her:

The United States’ use of targeted killing is an unwise decision in terms of its own foreign and domestic policy. It not only is contradictory to American values, but violates international law and has been frowned upon by the worldwide community. However, thus far this has not stopped its use or changed its legality within American domestic law. Although previously banned, assassination can be ordered by the executive branch from the powers delegated to the President by Congress. Even though permitted under U.S. law, the negative effects hinder the progression in the fight against hatred and violence that the world is currently facing in the twenty- first century.