A seldom-used tactic in the Bush Administration, the use of Predator drones to launch attacks against Pakistani territory has become ubiquitous since President Obama took office last year. As the attacks have escalated the legal questions behind them continue to grow.
Today the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs looked into the legality of killing people with unmanned drones, but the opinions of legal experts differed so much it is unlikely to provide any serious guidance on the matter.
The use of unmanned drones to kill people in a nation that the United States is not at war with is a comparatively new phenomenon, so there does not exist much specific legal precedent to draw from. One of the experts, from Syracuse University, tried to draw parallels between the killings and targeted killings of bandits loyal to Pancho Villa along the Mexican border. He insisted that current intelligence laws “implicitly” give the president the power to launch targeted killings.
As the number of US attacks continues to rise, the legal basis for doing so seems bound to be questioned further in the future. In the end, however, it must be wondered why the legal questions weren’t resolved before the killings began, instead of nearly a decade hence.
They're nitpicking. The whole war is illegal, no matter how it's waged.
What? This is like asking Ted Bundy to examine himself and ask if he'd ever killed before, and if he had, would he please stop.
The targeted assassination of "bandits loyal to Pancho Villa" along the border? That professor must be as historically incompetent as he is legally incompetent. Villa was back and forth across the border, both as ally and foe, as part of the Mexican revolution, though he had started out a bandit, he was no longer.
According to the Douhet-Churchill-Roosevelt doctrine, there are no civilians.. and all the less so in view of the operational, not just strategic, control of drones from the continental USA .. Any "Al-Qaeda" linked (whatever that means) assault on the continental US, therefore, is justifiable whether as collateral damage….Were "they" for example, to take out half the US pharmaceutical industry at one blow, that would be not only justifiable in the above terms (and remember Dow's contribution to the deforestation of Vietnam and the poisoning of many thousands of Vietnamese…) it would be clearly proportionate as an imitation of Clinton's destruction of half of the Sudan's pharmaceutical capacity….. I should quickly point out that I condemn both sides….