(Jeff Danziger’s website)
Tom Junod, “The Lethal President Sends His Regrets”:
… President Obama was not the first representative of the Obama administration to offer a thoughtful and rather tortured public apologia for drone strikes. He was merely the latest and possibly the last, and as such his speech was remarkably consistent with what has come before. When administration officials have spoken of targeted killing, they have always spoken in the language of limits. They have never spoken in the language of expansion. But expand targeted killing they have, to an extent that has made some of their characterizations of a program marked by “precision” and “deliberation” sound like either a folly or an outright falsehood. To an extent unimaginable just a year ago, the president yesterday took ownership of his own Lethal Presidency. But while he took ownership of the policy that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, he did not take ownership of the policy that killed al-Awlaki’s son Abulrahman. And while he took credit for the policy that has killed “dozens of highly skilled Al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives,” he never came close to taking credit for — or acknowledging — the policy that has killed people by the thousand.
The speech, then, was not only notable for what the president said. It was notable — primarily notable — for the fact that he said it. The danger of the Lethal Presidency has always been its assurance that its killings are moral because they are accomplished by moral men. And so what critics of the president’s drone policy might have hoped from yesterday’s speech was that he would not merely portray himself as a moral man but rather offer to do the moral thing and submit to legal structures outside himself and the power of his office. He did some of that, saying that he asked his administration to “review” the feasibility of “a special court to evaluate and authorize legal action” or “the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch.” He also said that he was declassifying information pertaining to the four Americans killed by drone strike and promised not to sign any bill that would extend the Authorization for Use of Military Force. But mostly he did what he so often does, at his best and at his worst, using his own moral standing to advance an overarching moral vision instead of a simply political one — in this case, the end of the “war on terror” that he did not invent but has done so much to amplify and advance…
Alex Pareene, at Salon:
… Hopefully the end of the CIA’s drone program will mean the end of “signature strikes,” in which anonymous foreigners who merely look like they’re up to no good are murdered, with bombs, by our intelligence agency. The Times says Obama has signed a new “classified policy guidance” that “will sharply curtail the instances when unmanned aircraft can be used to attack in places that are not overt war zones.”
But the president also “plans to offer a robust defense of a continued role for targeted killings.” We already know the basic rationale for drone strikes: They necessitate less risk (of American lives) than conventional military action and they remove the apparently uncomfortable question of what to do with terrorists who can’t be charged with conventional crimes. For the Obama administration, drones provide a handy replacement for the Bush administration’s use of indefinite detention, which was highly problematic, as various inmates at our Cuban military prison could tell you.
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