The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Should CIA Drone Operators Worry?

The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Should CIA Drone Operators Worry? : "If this short report in Newsweek is true, then I think I would worry about legal liability more than before, if I were a CIA officer involved in Predator drone strikes. I would have a much greater level of concern that the administration would not back me up in case of an indictment in a European court, for example. Or that it would not take steps to ensure, once the Obama administration ends, that its officials would be protected from future prosecutions, by sending out an unambiguous message that no American administration, Democratic or Republican, will tolerate such moves against American officials. The international community that largely regards drone strikes as

* (a) extrajudicial executions and murder by any other name;
* (b) American cowardice in using technological superiority to avoid having to take personal risks to confront its targets;
* (c) a reason why America’s enemies hide out among noncombatant human shields, with the result that the Americans “force” their enemies to violate the laws of war; and
* (d) an invitation for the United States to use violence as a tool of frequent convenience because it does not have its personnel at personal risk (rather than seeing these advances in technology as humanitarian steps forward over a quarter century to increase discrimination in targeting, and rather than seeing that not having its people at risk allows the targeting to proceed on a more methodical basis, rather than in-out with greater, rather than lesser, pressure to act in the moment),

has so far refrained from doing to US officials what it is endeavoring to do to Israeli officials because of a belief, so far as I can tell, that Obama personally backs this, as he did in his campaign up until now. His personal authority, rather than views of the United States as such, is the key source of inhibition by NGOs, UN representatives, and others. The political calculation for the international community in this kind of debate is simple: attacking the United States increases one’s global legitimacy, while attacking Obama, at least at this point, does not."