Profs Talk Drones | International Law to Congress

In Fall 2009, I watched a PBS FrontLine show Taking out the Taliban : Home for Dinner. It was chilling and a bit incomprehensible watching dad sit at a computer terminal by day — dropping bombs in Afghanistan — then coming home for dinner in Las Vegas.

A colonel in the show spoke convincingly of his concerns about how not to lose detachment about the event itself. This is no video game. It’s war for real, and how does one stay engaged and objective, when s(he’s) dropping bombs halfway around the world, in the safety of the Las Vegas dessert.

War by remote: what do you think?

I thought of the FrontLine video reading this Wired article Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes,’ Law Prof Says.

Loyola Law School professor David Glazier, a former Navy surface warfare officer, said The drones themselves are a lawful tool of war and often preferable to armed conflict for all parties. It’s the collaboration between America’s CIA agency and military that present unique problems with international laws.

As Jane Mayer explains in a Fall 2009 article for The New Yorker The risks of the CI.A.’s Predator Drones, America is running two drone programs. The first one is featured in FrontLine and has its own set of military ethics challenges.

The CIA operation has had little public exposure and few complaints.

The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops are not based. It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel. The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed. via The New Yorker

Mary Ellen O’Connell, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, was much more blunt in her statement. “Combat drones are battlefield weapons,” she told the panel. “They fire missiles or drop bombs capable of inflicting very serious damage. Drones are not lawful for use outside combat zones. Outside such zones, police are the proper law enforcement agents, and police are generally required to warn before using lethal force.” via Wired

“Restricting drones to the battlefield is the most important single rule governing their use, O’Connell continued. “Yet, the United States is failing to follow it more often than not.”

We’re not informed enough to comment on America’s drone program, as a CIA tool against terrorism.

We introduce the discussion, simply because there’s none in America. My own response to the FrontLine show was a rather sick feeling in my stomach that the challenge to keep Americans engaged in the horrors of war for all parties, especially the innocent civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries.

As the New Yorker reminds us, CIA drones hunt down terrorists in countries where America has no official military engagement. The drone in the sky looks like military, sounds like military and sure as heck looks like military when it’s your relatives that are the collateral damage in America’s legitimate hunt for terrorists.

In a hearing today before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s national security and foreign affairs panel, several professors of national security law said that indeed America could have legal complications under international law over its drone program. Anne