Targeted Assassinations Quotes
Many Americans use this opinion to justify our Drone program. Others use it for other targeted killings or assassinations. However, Alston is opining about International Law. When a killing takes place in another country, the biggest problem is the laws of the country where the killing takes place. See {637113}. When a foreign diplomat is assassinated in America, we go after the killers because they have broken U. S. law even if the assassinating nation has convicted the target properly. Whenever we kill someone with a Drone Airstrike, we have the required conditions stated and have not violated International law. However, according to the Pakistani’s for example, we have broken their laws. However, in many occasions, there is little the country where the killing takes place can do anything other than making diplomatic protests unless they want to go to war and use force. Also, targeted killing is perfectly legal if the target is a combatant at war with the killing country, and this is the reason that most of the American Drone killings are legal from a U. S. point of view.
See {620373} for a similar quote. However, there are many who disagree. They point to the Vietnam War as just one counter example. Generally, this tactic has worked for non-democratic nations facing insurgents and terrorists, but has not been very successful for the United States, England, France, Israel and other industrial democracies. These societies have found it difficult to inflict enough terror in the general population to make Luttwak’s tactic effective. The norms and mores of the culture was contrary to the methods that are required, and public opinion forced cessation in the instances where industrial democracies had tried it such as France in Algeria. See {620377}.
Executive Order 12333 prohibits political assassinations. The administration took the position that the prohibition did not apply to war where assassination (targeted killing) of enemy leaders is clearly permitted. The problem was that the George W. Bush Administration did not classify the “War on Terror” as a war. They didn’t want to treat captured jihadists as prisoners of war. The Obama administration also would not ask Congress for a Declaration of war, and this caused the moral, ethical, and legal ambiguity that has plagued targeted killings by drones or other means throughout the Afghan and Iraq Wars which were legally not wars.
This statement is quoted by many critics of the agency who ask if the threat is so easy and ubiquitous, why have there been so few attacks?
Although the Amerian Drone program did inadvertently kill untargeted or mistakenly targeted civilians at that time, the collateral damage rate was smaller than any other weapons system available to the American forces. War has always produced unintended collateral damage. The only way to stop the killing of innocent civilians then and now is to stop the war.
