The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law

Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, examines numerous primary source documents that offer legal and ethical rationales for targeted killings by the U.S., including of American citizens on foreign soil. The Obama administration’s continued use of drones as primary weapons in the “War on Terror” has been a major disappointment to supporters of the president. Jaffer, who oversaw many of the ACLU’s cases challenging expanded government powers post-9/11, exposes the rationales by which Obama and his advisers justify their drone policy. These include public explanations, such as Obama’s 2013 remarks at the National Defense University, and classified ones, such as the 2010 Justice Department legal memo analyzing the legality of a lethal operation against Sheikh Anwar Awlaki, an American who had been dubbed the “bin Laden of the Internet.” As Jaffer notes, these justifications reflect “a deep transformation in American attitudes and society” and measure “the extent to which the perceived demands of counterterrorism have erased rule-of-law strictures that were taken for granted only a generation ago.” The documents, many of which are heavily redacted, are replete with legalese that may sound Kafkaesque to lay readers, but Jaffer more than compensates for that with a trenchant summation of the issues at hand. (Nov.)