Game of Drones: Terrorizing Civilians / Uludere and More

GAME OF DRONES: TERRORIZING CIVILIANS / ULUDERE AND MORE

Talha BAYEZİT, Bosphorus University 

Politics and International Relations, 2014
All rights reserved. If used without citition, author holds legal rights.   

 "Rare is the technology that can change the face of warfare. In the first half of the past century,tanks and planes transformed how the world fought its battles. The fifty years that followed were dominated by nuclear warheads and ICBMs, weapons of such horrible power that they gave birth to new doctrines to      keep countries from ever using them. The advent of the armed drone upended this calculus: War was

possible exactly because it seemed so free risk. The bar for war had been lowered, the remote-controlled age had begun, and the killer drones became an object of fascination inside the CIA.”   (Sifton 1).

               The predator system, “its deathly name [reminds] images of a science-fiction dystopia, a Termiator Planet where robots hover in the sky and exterminate humans on the ground. Of course, this is no longer science-fiction.” (Sifton 1).  Drones are remotely piloted vehicles and they are basically two kinds that are the Predators and Reapers, which are armed with Hellfire missiles. Reaper is loaded with more bombs than Predator, so they are used mainly for attacks rather than intelligence. They can be controlled from as far away as the U.S., the head-center is Nevada, but also from bases closer to the war zones. “These combat drones, such as the Predator and Reaper, are unique addition to the military arsenal. Unbound by the subsistence needs of the human body and designed for refueling in midair, drones are capable remaining aloft for days at a time. Their surveillance imagery is state of the art, and they can be equipped with laser-guided missiles. They offer precise airpower in almost any environment and, used effectively, are capable of targeting terrorists and insurgency groups across international borders, protecting soldiers from harm’s way, and (in theory) minimizing the risk of civilian casualties.”(337 Brunstetter). The United States is not the only country that operates drones. China, France, Great Britain, Italy, Iran, Israel, Russia, South Korea, and Turkey all have drone technology. However, only United States, Great Britain, and Israel have armed drones that can be used in combat. Others use drones only for surveillance. Drones can be both helpful and harmful depending on how they are used. “There is a marked trend for both state and non-state actors (such as Hezbollah) to acquire increasingly sophisticated drone technology, which suggests that drones will become an ever more important tool in modern warfare” (Brunstteter 337). U.S. policy on drones appears to be setting an example, and providing other countries with incentives to both develop and use these weapons.

     The predator system was designed in response to a Department of Defense requirement to provide persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information combined with a kill capability to the war fighter. Drones have become a major policy subject in U.S. counterterrorism policy as it is claimed that drones reduced human costs and in theory the surgical targets minimizing the civilian cost and collateral damage and in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq,Pakistan, and Afghanistan the U.S. drones patrol the skies and are used to launch lethal strikes against suspected terrorists. As Kenneth Anderson testified at a March 2010 U.S. House of Representatives hearing, “it is highly likely [drones] will become a weapon of choice for future presidents, future administrations, in future conflicts and circumstances of self-defense and vital national security of the United States.”( Brunstteter 338). The drone program represents a shift in strategy for the United States, turning the nation away from large-scale deployment of troops and instead focusing on drones and small bands of special operators who carry out lethal operations. The U.S. army and CIA are giving bigger proportion to drones while other army expenses are getting shrunk. Defense analyst Gordon Adams, a professor at American University, explained that “Over the next ten years, military officials will spend $17.9 billion on unmanned aerial vehicles, and they plan to build nine thousand new aircraft.”(McKelvey 11). The growth of the drone industry has been shown here by the numbers: “The American army’s inventory of drones went from fifty-four in October 2001, the month the Afghanistan war began, to today’s store of more than 4,000 unmanned aerial vehicles.”( McKelvey 10). There is also the effect of the economic downturn, which hit the defense industry hard, “which will no longer accommodate the deployment of large forces overseas at a rough annual cost of  $1million per soldier, and by improvements in the technical capabilities of remotely piloted aircraft”.( McKelvey 10), but the program remained unaffected. 

        

           It would be better to start with these questions which are how were the predators and reapers developed and for what needs were they responding?  Combat drones are newly developed war machines, but its technical development takes over 150 years. Such machines can date back first to on August 22, 1849 “[…] 200 pilotless balloons mounted with bombs against the city of Venice.” (Sifton 1). In modern sense the building of the predator was started by Abraham Karem, the son of a Jewish merchant. He was born in Baghdad and with his family moved to Israel in 1951, and started to build aircraft for the Israel Air Force for satisfying the need for real-time intelligence. In 1980 he emigrated from Israelto Los Angeles and built an aircraft called the “Albatross”, this was the first prototype of predators and this prototype has changed the old type warfare. “Drones were used for aerial reconnaissance during the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns in the 1990s. Initially they were used only for surveillance purposes, as the U.S. government rejected the idea that they could be used for targeted killings. However, following the attacks on September 11, 2001, drones were equipped with laser-guided missiles.” ( Brunstetter 340). Then, George W. Bush administration gave permission to CIA the right to kill members of al-Qaeda in self-defense virtually anywhere in the world, “a global war on terrorism”. “As antiterrorist activities have spread from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan, the United States has come to rely on drones to monitor large swaths of land, lend air support for soldiers on ground missions, and to strike at suspected terrorists leaders in remote locations. Troop numbers have waxed and waned, but the current U.S. fleet of drones has steadily increased from 167 in 2001 to more than 5, 500 in 2009- a year in which they flew more than 16,000 flight hours per month in Iraq and Afghanistan. While much of their use is geared toward surveillance, President Obama has dramatically escalated the targeted killing program begun by the Bush administration. For example, combat drone strikes in Pakistan have surged from approximately 33 in 2008 under the Bush administration to 118 in 2010 under Obama.” (Brunstetter 341).     

        Uludere (Roboski) strike took place on December 28, 2011 Turkish-Iraqi border. A group of 40 Kurdish villagers of Turkish nationality, mostly teenagers, in Uludere district of Şırnak Province were moving in the night from Iraq territory towards Turkish border. The people were on a course for smuggling cigarettes, diesel oil and the like into Turkey, packed on mules. Turkish Armed Forces had received certain information about activities at the region supplied by United Statesintelligence services that was based on a U.S. drone ten days before the incident according to the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. 

     The footage of the unmanned aerial vehicles flying over the terrain was mistakenly evaluated as a group of militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Two Turkish F16 jets fired at a group of villagers, acting on the intelligence was reached from American officials and Turkish officials took the initiative as they taught that PKK militants were crossing the border. According to Turkish government sources 34 cigarette smuggling civilians, as they were thought as terrorists, were killed in the incident. The funeral of the victims formed by about 1,000 vehicles and attended by a crowd of about 10,000 people, covered the distance of 20 km between the district center and the cemetery in one hour reference. “Turkey's Kurds feel ever more alienated, and sympathy for both the BDP and the PKK is rising. In a show of defiance, the victims' headstones are draped with Kurdish banners” (the Economist), even though the victims were members of village guard families, the village men are members of a state-paid Kurdish village protectors against the PKK's members. 

     This incident above is showing and strengthening that as Noam Chomsky called that “the drones are terror generator machines”. Here is the irony that the members of village guard families as they are the representative of the state in the village and securing this village mainly against PKK, now tide reverse with this bombing, and nearly the whole village can be turned against the state as its signal was given by wrapping the coffins, including the state guardians with the flag of PKK. In turkey the drone program was recently started and as far as now Uludere is the first such a mistakenly attack with drones. However, the United States were using this before 2001 and with 9/11, 2001 drones started to equip with bombs and laser guided missiles. Now, the United States are using the remotely-piloted unmanned vehicles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Somalia. “A recent study carried out by clinics at New York University and Stanford University law schools suggests that the presence of the drones ‘terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.’” There have been some mistakes took place that resulted in families including women and children being killed by drone strikes. “Some of these “mistakes” end up as YouTube videos of “children’s bodies and American missile parts,” which serve as recruitment devices for al Qaeda and its associates, and fuel anti-American sentiment in areas where drones are operating.” (Sadat 228).

       The drone program in the media coverage the quantity and quality of the coverage of the drone program has improved since President Obama’s period. “Public relations for drones “Obama White House officials have attempted to foster positive coverage of the drone program by disclosing information about successful operations.” (MvKelvey 14). Many of the published articles about the drone program during his early years Obama administration provided accounts of the successful strikes, but not about the controversial strikes. “Philip Alston, the former special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions for the United Nations, wrote that ‘played a powerful role in legitimizing the targeted killings program by trumpeting the killing of senior militants and disseminating the CIA’s entirely unsubstantiated accounts of the number of civilian casualties.’”(McKelvey 15). For example in the operation of Baitullah Mehsud, Taliban leader and Osama bin Laden were the largest coverage “ with a total of eighty-seventy articles, many of these articles about the drone program were positive, only a few mentioning legal or moral issues. There is a turning point in the view of the articles started with the killing of al-Awlaki in the fall of 2011. This point alerted ‘journalists to the legal and ethical complexity of a targeted-killing program.’” (Mckelvey 18). Journalists put pressure on administration officials for more transperancy and started to write more critical and investigative works about the targeted killings. They questioned who is targeted? ,Are these individuals a threat to Americans?,  “Why has only one high-level terrorist been taken prisoner since 2009, yet thousands have been killed?” with the death of an American citizen.

        Now turning back to the history “in 1625, the father of international law, Hugo Grotius, wrote that ‘in general, killing is called a right of war’ and that ‘according to the laws of nations, anyone who is an enemy may be attacked anywhere’.” (Goodman 1). Grotius’ understanding remained almost untouched during the world wars, the American Revolution, as well as American Civil War. The modern law has change by one of the architects of the modern laws of war, the Swiss jurist Jean Pictet, advocated that parties to a conflict should apply only so much force as necessary by stating a simple maxim that “If we can put a soldier out of action by capturing him, we must not kill him, if there are two means to achieve the military advantage we must choose the one which causes the lesser evil.”(Goodman). In 1973, a group that included leading intellectual figures of the time, such as Sweden’s Hans Blix, and the Netherland’s Frits Kalshoven, adopted Pictet’s principle that if it is unnecessary to kill an individual, capture must be a preferable option as a fair reflection of existing law.” Around the same time, the International Committee of the Red Cross accepted the similar law that “the principle of humanity enjoins that capture is to be preferred to wounding and wounding to killing.” (Goodman 1).  This eventually goes to an international conference in Geneva in 1977, which established and determined new treaties reflecting and updating the rules of warfare. “The end result was a pact agreeing to a worldwide prohibition on ‘superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering,’ words that again mirrored Pictet’s maxim. And words that are now included in war manuals of the U.S. military.” (Goodman 1).

        “Trying to ascertain the real civilian death rate from the drone strikes is important both as moral and as a matter of international law, which prohibits indiscriminate attacks against civilians.” (Bergen 2). For attacks in Pakistan some commentators have suggested that the civilian dearth rate is 98 percent, while one study claims it is only 10 percent. It is morally and lawfully important to know the true numbers of the civilian casualties. However, there are some challenges in producing an accurate count. First, it is very likely that one cannot precisely differentiate the militant from civilians in the circumstances, where militants live among the population and do not wear uniforms. “For instance, when Baitullah Mehsud, [the chief of the Pakistani Taliban,] was killed by a drone last August, one of his wives and his father-in-law died in the strike as well.” (Bergen 3). The other challenge is that government sources claim that those who were killed were militants in the strikes, while the militants do the opposite. According to the research, which is conducted by New America Foundation, presents a different result from those of Pakistani authorities, and the anonymous U.S.government official, as well as others. As they stated that their research does not claim that it has included every single death in all such drone attacks. However, claiming that “It has generated some reliable open-source information about the number of the militant leaders killed, a fairly strong estimate of the number of lower-level militants killed, and a reliable sense of the true civilian death rate.”(Bergen 3). New America Foundation’s result shows that “the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to the present have killed between 830 and 1,210 individuals, of whom around 550 to 850 were described as militants in reliable press counts, about two-thirds of the total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 percent. Averaging the press reports in 2009 indicates that 502 people were killed, 382 of whom were described as militants, for an average civilian fatality rate of 24 percent.” (Bergen 3).

        The statistics says so, what about the reality, to put differently how effective are these drone strikes in reality? There emerges “the “drone myth” that is, the belief that technologically advanced drones increase the probability of success while decreasing the risk to our soldiers and of collateral damage, which is, also coupled with the “separation factor the fact that the pilot can be situated thousands of miles away at a computer console rather than in the line of fire can potentially make discriminating between combatants and noncombatants more difficult.” (Brunstetter 339).The drone strikes have disrupted militant operations, “the strikes are quite unpopular among Pakistanis, who view them as violations of national sovereignty: according to a Gallup poll from August 2009, only 9 percent approved of such attacks.” (Bergen 1). “Their unpopularity with the Pakistani public and their value as a recruiting tool for extremists groups and errors on targeting civilians may have ultimately increased the appeal of the Taliban and al Qaeda, undermining the Pakistani state.”( Bergen 5). The second one is about how shaky the drone attack’s legal ground, the legality of the drone program will be elaborated below in another paragraph. The last and the third one is that “drone strike is not a strategy, but a tactic.” This means killing the leader of a terrorist group does not necessarily stop the terrorist activities. On the contrary as in the example of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, hardly forced the group to shut its doors. Violence in Iraq accelerated following his death rather than getting slow.

      This program not only presents complex issues of international law but difficult moral and ethical questions. There emerges basically two opposite groups which are the ones that have praised targeted killing as effective and lawful and others criticized it as immoral, illegal, and unproductive.  “America’s drone wars” raises many questions about the application of humanitarian law principles to the effects and implications of America’s longest-running war. “States generally assume that unless a particular weapon is prohibited by treaty or a particular method of warfare has not been outlawed by treaty or it is lawful.” (O’cennal 1). Therefore, advocates say that using drones is legal. However, “Drones can easily become a means to terrorize a civilian population, so their usage may be prohibited by the international law.”       (Sadat 215). This drone war and its practice of the targeted killings by remotely-piloted unmanned vehicles exist inAfghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, and Somalia. The United States waged war on Iraq and Afghanistan. They are, however, at peace with Yemen, Pakistan, and others. Still they use drones in such areas, so, here we should ask how they justify this program in such countries. “A group of lawyers in the administration known as ‘the council of counsels’ is trying to develop a more sustainable framework for how governments should use such weapons.”(McKelvey 18). They, also are worried about setting precedents for other countries, including Russia or China, that might conduct targeted killings as such weapons proliferate in the future because “Because there is little precedent for the classified U.S. drone program, international law does not speak directly to how it might operate. That makes the question of securing consent all the more critical.” For the use of Predators they need explicit consent from government, like Pakistan and Yemen, in order not to violate the international war. Especially, Pakistan case is very important and interesting for justification. “The Central Intelligence Agency sends a fax to a general at Pakistan’s intelligence service outlining broad areas where the U.S. intends to conduct strikes with drone aircraft, according toU.S. officials. The Pakistanis, who in public oppose the program, don’t respond… Two senior administration officials described the approach as interpreting Pakistan’s silence as a ‘yes’. One dubbed the U.S. approach ‘cowboy behavior’.” (Entous 1). “On the international stage… conducting drone strikes in a country against its will could be seen as an act of war.” (Entous).           

     “Rome Law applies to all nations, small, large, rich or poor; with, unfortunately a possible escape hatch for the Permanent Members of the Security Council and countries under their protection.”(Sadat 224). In the international law context there emerges a probability to an existence of as Ryan Goodman called it “American Exceptionalism” as in the cases of Guatemala, Iran, Congo in the belief of the right of the United States to overthrow democratically elected governments, and to help and arm insurgencies in Nicaragua and, also to launch aggressive wars as in Iraq. Many people criticize this exception by saying that the selectively applying international law will shake its legitimacy and exceptions can easily become the rule as it happened in “the practice of torture by the United States following the 9/11 attacks” (Sadat 219). Now, for targeted killing “the government being required to show not only why it is legal for the killing to take place, but that capture is impossible”. “The United States has a long history of violating international law when its leaders believe foreign policy objectives justify doing so.” (Goodman 1). “The CIA began to see its future: not as the long term jailers of America’s enemies but as a military organization that could erase them” (Brunstetter 121). President Obama’s drones program potentially violates a number of international legal norms. There is a growing international movement against the impunity with which President Obama runs his drones program. “UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism Ben Emerson has called for an independent investigation into each and every death that results from drone strikes. In October 2009, Philip Alston, then UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, stated that the drones program would be illegal if the U.S. was failing to take ‘all of the relevant international rules.’ Alston continued, ‘The problem is that we have no real information on this program.’” (Sadat 216).

      There are mainly two-top very controversial issues, which are the “kill list” and “signature strikes”. “The President personally maintains a “Kill Lists” and holds weekly meetings during which, as judge, jury, and executioner, he determines who lives and who dies.” (Bachman 2). The kill list does not have rigid rules on the preparation and the decision of who, and why should be included and excluded. “It has been reported that President Obama himself oversees decisions to place terrorists on a “kill list,” looking at pictures and intelligence briefings and considering discussions with his advisors.”(Goodman 1). The kill list is prepared very secretly and no one mentions about how, why and who will be included through which processes in administration because they think that explaining such process will cause damages to the nation’s security. It is obvious that in preparation of this kill list there have been made some very crucial mistakes as well. Therefore, even Nelson Mandela, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 was included and recently he has been excluded this list. He becomes from a terrorist to an icon of equality, and freedom.  Therefore, This “kill list” have been heavily criticized as this is not consistent with the rule of law to make the lives of thousands of individuals depend solely on executive grace, or the wisdom and integrity of the person inhabiting the Oval Office in a particular year. With the killing of al- Awlaki, there emerged a public discussion about how is it that theU.S. government can now use lethal military force to kill a U.S. citizen with no judicial process in a foreign country far from any active theatre of war? They questioned the legality of such strikes in the international and local law context. Is a suspected terrorist a proper target?  As Sadat points out that the rhetoric used to describe the individuals placed on the CIA’s “kill list” is imprecise. The individuals in question are alternatively described as “terrorists”, “suspected terrorists” , “Islamic radicals”, “insurgents”, “members of al-Qaeda and its associates”, “Taliban”, “Jihadist”, “Muslim extremists”, and “unlawful combatants” depending upon the source consulted. None of these have much legal consonance, nor are they particularly well-defined categories of individuals. This situation is strengthened by the tendency to count all military-age males killed in drone strikes as militants.

    In Yemen, and especially Pakistan, the President had approved not only “personality” strikes, aimed at named individuals, but “signature” strikes that target unidentified and unconfirmed individuals based in behavioral characteristics that are perceived to be those of militants or terrorists. Of course, it doesn’t actually matter whether an individual killed by a signature strike is a militant because he will be easily counted as one regardless as many incidents happened prominent one is that “in 2002, an American of Yemeni background, kamal darwish, was killed by a missile from a Predator Drone. Derwish was not the target of the attack, according to media reports, but the U.S.position was that “as an enemy combatant … [ he] had no constitutional rights. Nonetheless, it shocked many and the killing was widely reported and denounced in the U.S. media. Fewer than ten years later, government policy has been transformed from accidentally killing U.S. citizens to targeting them, with very little public explanation or justification. The kill lists target specific individuals, not just soldiers on a battlefield, and of course, no surrender is possible once a targeting decision has been taken.”( Sadat 227).Yet, in Pakistan because signature strikes became so controversial, they were stopped in Pakistan, but it is said that the CIA had sought authority to carry them out in Yemen. “These “signature strikes” use the same legal justification as the Presidential finding signed by Bush immediately after 9/11 and then re-signed by Obama in 2009 and they represent the apex of modern biopower and surveillance, honed and developed over decades.” (Sifton 11).

   The publicly discussion was started with Jane Mayor in The New Yorker in 2009 reported on drone strikes in Pakistan and discussed about the CIA’s secret program of drone strikes in Pakistan as well as other countries around the world, and, also the use of the drones by U.S. military forces operating in war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. This writing raised many criticizm against of U.S. foreign policy. Harold Koh, the Legal Advisor to the U.S. Department of State, gave a speech, which defends “the Obama Administration’s increasing use of drones against individuals alleged to be members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or ‘associated forces’.” (Sadat 218). He says, as a matter of “self- defense” against suspected terrorists and militants, the United States have the right to kill upon the existence of an armed conflict. This speech, also emphasized that the United States want to comply with international humanitarian law, and especially the very controversial issues, the principles of distinction and proportionality. This speech was heavily criticized as controversial. As the Bush Administration asked lawyers to justify their policies on detention after 9/11 attacks, Obama Administration lawyers were asked to do the same for the drone program as well.  “Although Obama had promised to pursue terrorists and ‘finish’ the war in Afghanistan during the presidential campaign, many human rights activities did not expect his administration to cleave to the same legal arguments about the ‘war on terror’ that his predecessor had, and were surprised that he had done so.” (Sadat 220). Therefore this speech shows the continuity the same policy with the past administration, not a departure from old policies.

       Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles were flying missions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen, undertaking lethal attacks against perceived security threats when President Barack Obama mentions about the importance of the just war tradition in guiding the use of force, regulating the destructive power of war in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009. There are limits to even unintentional civilian deaths in war. “The concept of a ‘just war’ emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and, if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.”(Brunstetter 337 ). The very crucial rules, which should be taken into consideration for complying with “just war tradition”, are distinction and proportionality ones. The distinction rule, which is to differentiate civilians from militants in international context, human rights groups have often challenged particular weapons as violating the principles of distinction and have challenged particular means of warfare as violating international law. Bachman and like him many other scholars and, also, blame President Obama’s method of distinguishing militants from civilians, which inherently violates the principle of distinction. One prominent example for the violation of the distinction rule is that “during the NATO bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia, for example, human rights organizations and the government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia argued that the NATO decision to wage a “zero-casualty war” caused NATO pilots to fly at “heights which enabled them to avoid attack by Yugoslav defenses and, consequently, made it impossible for them to properly distinguish between military or civilian objects on the ground.” “Today’s drone pilots are as far as Neveda, the hub for the drones, even further removed from their targets than NATO air commanders during the 1990s, have to be very careful to differentiate surely civilians from militias for the law of war in theory, but in reality there have been occurred some mistakes, that end many civilian human lives. “By way of comparison, the committee on the NATO bombing reported the FRY reported 495 civilians killed and 820 civilians wounded in a bombing campaign that lasted for several months, and involved more than 38,000 sorties, 10,000 strike sorties, and the release of more than 23,000 air munitions. Yet, as noted earlier, America’s drone strikes in Pakistan alone from 2004 until 2012 are estimated to have resulted in between 2,524-3,247 casualties, including 482-852 civilians and additional 1,203-1,330 injured, from an estimated 350 strikes. While these figures are not uncontroverted, it would appear, if they are correct, that the ratio of civilians killed to air strikes undertaken is dramatically higher, by many orders of magnitude, in the case of the drone wars than the NATO intervention in 1999.”( Sadat 229). The other rule which is proportionality, the number of civilians killed in a military action cannot be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated” (Bachman 2). The United States, also potentially violates the proportionality rule.

   This drone program was so expended and intensified such strikes now include not only foreigners, but also United States citizens. A sixteen-page “Department of Justice White Paper” has been made public in the New York Times, which authorized the targeting killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al- Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. According to Department of Justice White Paper, which “sets a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the U.S. government could use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans” and who becomes “the targets of a lethal operation a U.S. citizen who may have rights under the Due Process Clause and the Fourth Amendment, that individual’s citizenship would not immunize him from a lethal operation.” (Memorendum). This memorandum make possible that the killing an American citizen without any charge of murder, or an assassination because “the President has authority to respond to the imminent threat posed by al-Qaeda and its associated forces, arising from the constitutional responsibility to national self-defense under international law, Congress’s authorization of the use of all necessary and appropriate military force against this enemy, and the existence of an armed conflict with al-Qaeda under international law.”(memorandum 1). In short, the Justice Department’s legal analysis accepts as a truism that unless he surrenders, a combatant can be killed regardless of activity.  Goodman argues that A careful reading of law and modern history shows how wrong the White House position is and getting the law wrong can be as bad as ignoring it altogether. As, also, in another paragraph above the brief history of international law was mentioned. “The international rules of warfare require nations to capture instead of kill enemy fighters, especially when lethal force is not the only way to take them off the battlefield.”(Goodman 2). The one of the fundamental conceptual error of “the Bush Administration‘s legal regime is that the targets of the U.S. ‘war on terror’ are entitled to neither the protections of the criminal law (or human right law), nor the protections of international humanitarian law, but exist instead in a legal ‘black hole’ subject to the whim or the grace of the executive branch-remains virtually unchanged” (Sadat 232), continues under the Obama Administration as well.

   Drones are neutral, their usage will determine such machines whether they are harmful, or helpful. Drones’ history and usage are very similar to the planes’ history and usage. Planes were used first for surveillance and then, people realized they could be armed and they started to produce designed planes to be armed. After all, eventually they were used for commercial purposes, transportation, so on. Computers were, also in the control of just governments. Later, some entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs broke such monopoly and “democratized” this technology. Today, almost all individuals have computers in their home. If such drones become such democratized, this step will cause serious damages to many peoples privacy, especially celebrities. However, like planes drones today can be used from constructing towers to carrying cargos without pilots, not just military operations. The developments are realized very rapidly. Today, with increased critics, Obama Administration shows some signs to put restriction on drone usage, the idea that to restrict CIA, as closed box, in drone program; let only army function drones, as hierarchical more open to the public, to dismiss the opposition to labeling him as the imperial president due to being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner all in one is very contrary to the traditions and the laws of country. It is to me that the usage of combat drones within the cities should be strictly restricted for both surveillance and dropping bombs. In mountainous places they can be used for surveillance and they can shoot only in the condition that the people are certainly terrorists in order to prevent another kind of Uludere, and if terrorist, their capture should be completely infeasible to shoot legitimately.

Works Cited

Bergen, Peter and Tiedemann, Katherine “The Year of The Drone” An analysis of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, 2004-2010, Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative Policy Paper by New American Foundation

Sadat, Leila Nadya “America’s Drone Wars” in Case Wester Reserve Journal of International Law

Goodman, Ryan “The Lesser Evil”

Bachman, Jeff “Growing Opposition to US Drones Program”

O’connell, Mary Ellen “drone program”

Brunstetter, Daniel and Braun, Megan “The Implications of Drones on the Just War Tradition

Sifton, John “ Drone Program” 

McKelvey, Tara “Media Coverage of the Drone Program” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Pres, Politics and Public Policy

Entous, Adam, and Gorman, Siobhan as well as Perez, Evan “U.S. Unease Over Drone Strikes”

Department of Justice White Paper “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S: Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force

http://www.economist.com/node/21556616