That the US has an official “playbook” for its drone strikes might seem to offer some reassurance about those strikes…until one sees the playbook. From Anthony Walker at antiwar.com:
Finally. After three years of delays and a lawsuit from the ACLU, President Obama has disclosed his administration’s rules and procedures for conducting “direct action” counter-terrorism operations, including drone strikes.
The “Presidential Policy Guidance” (PPG) on how the United States decides to kill people abroad has been covered in the mainstream press as an important clarification of how death by drone actually works. But the document is somewhat misleading, especially if you don’t have direct experience hunting terrorists.
I do have that kind of experience. I spent a year conducting direct action missions in Afghanistan while attached to a counter-terrorism task force.
Direct action is a polite way of referring to what is commonly known in the military as “kill or capture operations.” Kill or capture is just what it sounds like – operations where the objective is to kill or capture high value targets (HVTs).
Thus, the PPG lays out the procedures not only for drone strikes, but also for the kind of night raids I did in Afghanistan, if conducted somewhere not considered an active war zone (there are some differences when such operations happen in Afghanistan). But the way in which targets are acquired and actioned is roughly the same throughout the military and national security bureaucracy.
So what exactly did the Obama Administration disclose about these operations?
Well, it detailed the careful review process that exists for evaluating how, where, and when the United States kills terrorists. Some of the highlights: President Obama must personally approve a strike against a U.S. citizen; the first priority of direct action should be capture, not lethal force; potential targets must go through an interagency review process to be approved for lethal action; and “near certainty” must exist that noncombatants will not be killed for a potential strike to be authorized.
What no one in the mainstream press has said thus far about the document is how utterly absurd it is to establish a set of rules to govern an assassination program that routinely murders innocent civilians.
First of all, one should be forgiven for thinking that the review process outlined in the PPG governs operations, not individuals. It is somewhat vague on this matter. But it is a crucial point. It is individuals that are approved for assassination; how a given assassination takes place is decided much further down the chain of command.
Once an individual is marked for assassination he enters a “target deck” and is cleared to be engaged by drones, SEALs, manned aircraft – whatever is available. That means that every person he comes into contact with until force is used is potential collateral damage. It is quite disturbing to imagine a 24-year-old soldier sitting a in a windowless room, observing a surveillance feed and wondering, “Who’s the target talking to? Can we kill him too?
And therein lies the absurdity. If anyone other than the targeted individual is ultimately engaged with kinetic action (which happens all the time) than the procedures are meaningless. Where is the interagency and legal review for those individuals, even if they are classified as combatants? It doesn’t exist. Consequently, by authorizing kinetic action against certain individuals, the Obama Administration almost guarantees that people that have not been reviewed will end up dead – and many of them turn out to be innocent civilians.
To continue reading: What the Drone ‘Playbook’ Really Says About US Counter-Terrorism Policy
