US Air Force ground crew in Kandahar secure weapons to an MQ-9 Reaper drone after its return from a mission. Photograph: Reuters
Macy Wheeler, New Republic: Are There Any Limits on Obama’s Drone War, Really?
A newly released document reveals that the administration’s rules for drone warfare are full of workarounds and loopholes.
Early in his second term, President Obama set out to create a Rule Book that would provide some semblance of legal oversight over his administration’s drone program, which in the previous four years had become the administration’s preferred method of targeting suspected terrorists in remote regions of Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Sometimes dubbed the “Disposition Matrix,” news articles about the Rule Book offered tidy flow charts of how a suspected terrorist would go from “suspect” to “dead”—or, less realistically, “captured.” The book was intended to bring new order to the war on terror, there being “a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade,” as The Washington Post reported in the fall of 2012.
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WNU Editor: Another good post on President Obama's drone policy (and its aftermath) is here .... Obama's Drone Warfare Makes More Terrorists Than It Kills (Bonnie Kristian, RCD).
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