Trump presidency shaping up to be a disaster for international norms

A little more than two weeks into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, it is clear that his administration is shaping up to be one of the most hostile to international norms in recent memory. While George W. Bush once dismissed a reporter’s question about whether his Iraq policies conformed with international law by joking, “International law? I better call my lawyer,” Trump’s attitude toward rule of law principles was summed up by a tweet today disparaging a “so-called judge” who put a nationwide hold on the implementation of his travel ban on nationals of seven majority-Muslim countries.

“The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Trump tweeted.

The travel ban has sparked a national and international outcry, with demonstrations taking place at airports across the country and numerous world leaders weighing in on Trump’s controversial executive order to halt entries into the United States by citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

“Discrimination on nationality alone is forbidden under human rights law,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein. “The U.S. ban is also mean-spirited, and wastes resources needed for proper counter-terrorism.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed regret over the U.S. government’s entry ban and explained the U.S.’s international obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention in a phone call with Trump, Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.

“The Refugee Convention requires the international community to take in war refugees on humanitarian grounds. All signatory states are obligated to do. The German government explained this policy in their call yesterday,” Seibert said.

The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly’s human rights and humanitarian committee chair Ignacio Sanchez Amor expressed concerns that the ban on refugees represents a major step backward in the international community’s efforts to develop a cohesive response to the refugee and migrant crisis, and noted that on humanitarian grounds the United States cannot send refugees back to countries where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.

“This is the core principle of non-refoulement that is at the heart of the 1951 Refugee Convention, and is now a widely accepted norm,” he said.

Sanchez Amor also pointed out that the travel ban is contrary to the spirit of the OSCE’s founding document, which the United States signed along with 34 other countries of North America, Europe and Eurasia in 1975.

“To the extent that this travel ban may affect those with dual nationalities or residents of OSCE countries, I note that it may contravene the 1975 Helsinki Final Act’s stipulation that signatories should ease regulations concerning movement of citizens within the OSCE area,” he said.

In this document, the United States agreed:

to facilitate wider travel by their citizens for personal or professional reasons and to this end they intend in particular:

– gradually to simplify and to administer flexibly the procedures for exit and entry;

– to ease regulations concerning movement of citizens from the other participating States in their territory, with due regard to security requirements.

In addition to whipping up a frenzy of international condemnation over the travel ban, the Trump administration is also drawing fire for his nominations to lead the nation’s intelligence services. Yet, despite serious concerns about Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, Mike Pompeo, for his pro-torture statements and lax attitude about the use of mass surveillance, the U.S. Senate confirmed him on Jan. 23 by a vote of 66-32.

“Pompeo’s responses to questions about torture and mass surveillance are dangerously ambiguous about whether he would endorse abusive practices and seek to subvert existing legal protections,” said Human Rights Watch’s Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno. “Pompeo’s failure to unequivocally disavow torture and mass surveillance, coupled with his record of advocacy for surveillance of Americans and past endorsement of the shuttered CIA torture program, make clear that he should not be running the CIA.”

Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said Pompeo was the “wrong man for the job.”

“He has endorsed extreme policies that would fundamentally erode liberties and freedoms of our people without making us safer,” Wyden said. He said Pompeo’s answers to questions from some senators have been “vague” and “contradictory,” making it impossible to know what Pompeo believes.

Nevertheless, his nomination sailed through the Senate, likely paving the way for a return to torture as U.S. policy, as President Trump has promised to do on numerous occasions. The president recently even defended torture on national television, stating unequivocally that it “works.”

Shortly following Pompeo’s confirmation, his deputy director at the CIA was named as Gina Haspel, who, according to the New York Times “played a direct role in the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition program,’ under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.”

She also ran the CIA’s first black site prison in Thailand and oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

In addition, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. As The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald explains:

The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated both multiple court orders as well the demands of the 9/11 Commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by Commission Chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and Grand Jury investigated those actions but ultimately chose not to prosecute.

As if these developments were not bad enough, it also looks as if Trump is going to continue the reckless drone assassination program that was developed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. In one of his first military actions as president, Trump ordered an attack on a village in Yemen on Jan. 29 that killed as many as 23 civilians, including a newborn baby and an eight-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki.

Nawar al-Awlaki, eight-year-old girl killed by U.S. drone on Jan. 29, 2017

Nawar was the daughter of the al-Qaida propagandist and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a September 2011 US drone strike in Yemen. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman was killed in a second drone strike soon afterwards.

Following the tragic killing of this young girl, The Guardian pointed out that Trump has previously endorsed killing relatives of terrorist suspects, which is a war crime. “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he told Fox News in December 2015.

The human rights organization Reprieve pointed out:

Secret US strikes, in countries where the US is not at war, are widely considered to violate international law. Previous research by Reprieve has found that, in attempts to kill 41 named individuals in Yemen and Pakistan, US strikes killed some 1,147 unknown men, women and children.

It looks as though this is one policy area that we should expect some continuity between Obama and Trump. It also looks as if Trump will be moving rapidly to reinstate the torture regime that was halted by Obama in 2009. It should be noted, however, that the use of torture – although illegal – was never prosecuted by the Obama administration, and this lack of law enforcement ensured that it would remain a “policy option” for a fascist president like Donald Trump to pull off the shelf.

Obama’s dismal human rights legacy in focus as Trump takes the helm

President Barack Obama’s human rights record is under criticism once again as he prepares to step down after eight years leading the United States government. His record has been a major disappointment to many in the human rights community, who now genuinely worry how much worse U.S. policies will become under President Donald J. Trump.

As this blog has documented since 2011, the U.S. government’s human rights record has been dismal under Obama, with troubling policies including his lack of prosecutions of torturers – effectively institutionalizing a system of legal impunity for war crimes – his utter failure to follow through on closing the travesty of justice known as Guantanamo Bay, waging a “war on whistleblowers” and suppressing freedom of information, codifying illegal policies of extrajudicial assassinations, expanding mass surveillance programs in violation of individual privacy, and failing to take effective action to ensure accountability for a nationwide epidemic of police brutality.

In terms of promoting fundamental freedoms abroad, his administration has “treated human rights as a secondary interest – nice to support when the cost was not too high, but nothing like a top priority,” according to Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth.

In a recent article for Foreign Policy, Roth writes:

Obama took office with great promise, announcing on his second day that he would stop CIA torture immediately and close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. By all accounts, the torture did stop. But Obama has steadfastly refused to prosecute those responsible or even to allow the release of much more than the summary of a comprehensive Senate Intelligence Committee report that documented it. As a result, rather than reaffirming the criminality of torture, Obama leaves office sending the lingering message that, should future policymakers resort to it, prosecution is unlikely. Given Trump’s campaign rhetoric about reinstating waterboarding (“or worse”), this is hardly an academic point, even considering the opposition of his nominee for defense secretary.

With respect to surveillance, Roth notes that “Obama seems to have continued and expanded programs begun by George W. Bush that lead to massive invasions of privacy.” When whistleblower Edward Snowden alerted the public to these programs, Obama supported legislation to limit the National Security Agency’s ability to collect phone records in bulk under one program, but “most of the mass privacy violations that Snowden disclosed remain unaddressed,” Roth notes.

When it comes to closing Guantanamo, Roth says the president’s efforts have been halfhearted:

Early in his tenure, he moved slowly, enabling Congress to adopt legislation — which he refused to veto — imposing various obstacles to transferring detainees overseas and barring their transfer to the United States even for trial. Facing political resistance, he reversed early plans to try the accused 9/11 plotters in a federal district court in New York, where their trials would long ago have been completed. Instead, the suspects were placed before Guantánamo’s military commissions — made-from-scratch tribunals replete with procedural problems. Seemingly designed to avoid public revelation of the details of the suspects’ torture, the commissions have made virtually no progress toward actual trials, which will not begin until long after Obama leaves office, if ever.

Roth notes that Obama has slowly reduced the number of prisoners held at Guantanamo by transferring many abroad, but “his insistence on holding some two dozen detainees indefinitely without charge makes it easier for Trump to repopulate Guantánamo, as he has threatened.”

When it comes to Guantanamo, Amnesty International is imploring Obama to do whatever he can in his last days in office to close the legal abomination before Trump – who has threatened to repopulate the prison and reinstate a torture regime – takes over as president on January 20. In an open letter to Obama, Amnesty International USA Executive Director Margaret Huang begs the president, “Don’t Leave Guantánamo to Trump.”

“Dear President Obama,” she writes:

On behalf of Amnesty International’s 1.2 million supporters in the United States, I write to make a final plea that you use all the powers of your office to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. We are gravely concerned that if you fail to do so, President-elect Trump may attempt to bring dozens or even hundreds of people there, to be held in unlawful detention for decades and possibly subjected to torture and other forms of cruel treatment.

Despite your positive actions to date, your legacy will include failing to cure this corruption of our country’s ideals of justice and fairness. You will leave behind Guantánamo as a system of injustice that—having survived for 15 years, two political parties and four presidential terms of office—may remain open for the foreseeable future.

Our concern is heightened by the sharp rise in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric during the election. Proposals for large-scale detention without charge, which once seemed inconceivable, are now on the table as options your successor may pursue. Guantánamo, with its shameful tradition of secrecy and insularity from legal process, would be all too convenient a location for mass imprisonment without charge, returning the United States to one of its grimmest chapters.

“It is past time to shut down the detention facility at Guantánamo,” you said recently at MacDill Air Base, and not for the first time. You emphasized that Congress would be “judged harshly by history” due to restrictions it placed on your ability to transfer detainees. However, despite your concerted efforts, it is your presidency that will be judged harshly — by history, the international community and human rights supporters across the United States and the rest of the world — if you fail to take all possible measures to transfer those remaining out of Guantánamo.

Your actions now will impact this country’s decisions on detention without charge, torture and human rights for decades to come by informing the way young people understand the injustice of Guantánamo. People under the age of 25 have spent all or much of their lives with Guantánamo open. Most are too young to remember the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, or of men at Camp X-Ray kneeling next to their cages. They do not know the collective shock and moral outrage that millions of Americans felt then, which led political figures from Colin Powell to John McCain to call for the closure of Guantánamo. Through your actions now, you can ensure new generations learn this history—and do not repeat it.

We also urge your administration, in closing Guantánamo, to abandon the military commissions. These ill-conceived tribunals simultaneously fail to respect human rights principles or achieve justice. To be sure, anyone responsible for the crimes against humanity committed on September 11, 2001 should be brought to justice in fair trials. Guantánamo and the military commissions have not—and cannot—provide that justice. The 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks recently passed, and those who lost loved ones in the attacks have a right to see justice in their lifetime. However, not only do the military commission trials seem unlikely to begin—much less conclude—for years to come, when they do take place they will fail to meet international fair trial standards.

You began your presidency with an executive order to end the Guantánamo detentions and to close the detention camp there. We urge you to end it with bold action to realize your promise.

The human rights group urges supporters to send messages to Obama urging him to close this travesty of justice once and for all, and to prioritize other human rights matters in the waning days of his presidency.

It is not clear, however, how much stock Obama places in the concerns of the human rights community. He spoke rather dismissively of “activist organizations” in a recent interview with The Atlantic, in which he defended his drone assassination program, which has killed hundreds of innocent people including U.S. citizens.

“I think right now we probably have the balance about right,” he told The Atlantic, referring to the ratio of killed terrorists and innocent civilians. “Now, you wouldn’t know that if you talked to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or some of the international activist organizations.”

He further asserted that “the internal reforms we put in place had less to do with what the left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying and had more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this.”

It troubled him, he said, because the drone strikes could enable “a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.” Of course, this is exactly what Obama has done, as has been repeatedly pointed out.

As Naureen Shah of Amnesty International told The Intercept last year, “What’s so interesting is that President Obama acknowledges this problem – that future presidents will be empowered to kill globally, and in secret. What he doesn’t acknowledge is how much of a role his administration had in making that a bizarre normal.”

Another legacy that Obama is leaving behind is torture impunity, which he has instituted by failing to launch prosecutions of gross human rights violations during the Bush administration. By shielding torturers from criminal justice, Obama has done more than any other president in history in establishing torture as little more than a “policy option” for presidents to utilize or not depending on the political whims of the day.

To prevent torture from being reinstituted by the incoming Trump administration, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture is calling on Obama to release in full the Senate’s torture report and force “appropriate officials” to read it in order to ensure that they “learn from the past.” Although White House Counsel Neil Eggleston recently announced that Obama will archive one copy of the torture report, it will remain classified for at least 12 years. “At this time, we are not pursuing declassification of the full Study,” he wrote recently in a letter to Sen. Feinstein.

In an action alert, the online advocacy group Roots Action is urging supporters to sign a petition to President Obama urging him to release the full report.

Obama is also being urged by a range of organizations to free the U.S. government’s political prisoners, including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling and Leonard Peltier. For more on those cases, click here.

U.S. government sued over mass surveillance, freedom of information and drone assassinations

The United States government is finding itself on the defensive this month, being taken to court over a host of policies that violate constitutional and international law.

First, on March 10, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Wikimedia Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA and other groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. National Security Agency challenging one of its mass surveillance programs that the plaintiffs say violates Americans’ privacy and makes individuals worldwide less likely to share sensitive information.

In particular, the lawsuit focuses on the NSA’s “upstream” surveillance, which involves the NSA’s tapping into the physical infrastructure of the internet, compromising Americans’ online communications with each other and with the rest of the world.

As explained by the ACLU:

In the course of its surveillance, the NSA copies and combs through vast amounts of Internet traffic, which it intercepts inside the United States with the help of major telecommunications companies. It searches that traffic for keywords called “selectors” that are associated with its targets. The surveillance involves the NSA’s warrantless review of the emails and Internet activities of millions of ordinary Americans.

“This kind of dragnet surveillance constitutes a massive invasion of privacy, and it undermines the freedoms of expression and inquiry as well,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Patrick Toomey. “Ordinary Americans shouldn’t have to worry that the government is looking over their shoulders when they use the Internet.”

The lawsuit argues that the NSA is infringing on the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights and violating their privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment. The complaint also argues that the surveillance oversteps the authority granted by Congress under the FISA Amendments Act.

In explaining why her group joined the lawsuit, Human Rights Watch General Counsel Dinah Pokempner described the significant damage done by the NSA’s surveillance to the work of defending human rights around the world:

When Human Rights Watch can’t assure the privacy of the people with whom we work to expose and halt human rights abuses, we can’t protect their security either. Lives are in the balance, not to mention freedom of information, association, and speech.

Activists in Ethiopia, defense attorneys in France, and officials working in Indonesia won’t call or email us sensitive information about ongoing rights violations because they rightly fear surveillance. We have to get the facts face-to-face or not at all, and either way, that’s costly. People know the domestic government may well have an intelligence partnership with the US, and any leak of US-monitored communications may result in arbitrary arrest, prosecution, assault, or worse.

Last year, we documented the pall that surveillance has thrown over journalists and lawyers in the US, who now must go to extreme lengths to protect their confidential communications, or just forgo the reporting and defense strategies that keep our society informed, fair, and accountable.

HRW and the other groups in the lawsuit said that upstream surveillance “reduces the likelihood” that clients, journalists, foreign government officials, victims of human rights abuses and other individuals will share sensitive information with them.

Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote in the New York Times that they were concerned about where data on their users ends up after it is collected by the NSA. Noting close intelligence ties between the United States and Egypt, they said a user in Egypt would have reason to fear reprisal if she edited a page about the country’s political opposition.

The day after the lawsuit was filed challenging the NSA’s mass surveillance, the Associated Press sued the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The legal action was a response to Clinton’s attempts to circumvent transparency laws by using a private email account while she headed the State Department and followed repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act that have gone unfulfilled, according to the AP.

As the news agency explained in a March 11 article,

The FOIA requests and the suit seek materials related to her public and private calendars; correspondence involving aides likely to play important roles in her expected campaign for president; and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices.

“After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, The Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time,” said Karen Kaiser, AP’s general counsel.

The suit filed by the AP came a day after Clinton broke her silence about her use of a private email account while she was America’s top diplomat. In defending her actions – which were widely seen as a crude attempt to avoid government transparency requirements – the likely 2016 Democratic presidential candidate claimed that her decision to forgo the official State Department email system was simply a matter of personal convenience.

“At the time, this didn’t seem like an issue,” Clinton said in a March 11 press conference. Clinton insisted she was not violating any rules or seeking to hide her communications.

“I fully complied by every rule I was governed by,” she claimed.

The senior-most executive branch official in charge of freedom-of-information matters for over a quarter-century flatly disagreed. Daniel Metcalfe, whose job it was to help four administrations interpret the Freedom of Information Act, offer advice, and testify before Congress on their behalf, called Clinton’s explanation laughable.

“What she did was contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law,” said Metcalfe. “There is no doubt that the scheme she established was a blatant circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act, atop the Federal Records Act.”

Said AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll: “The Freedom of Information Act exists to give citizens a clear view of what government officials are doing on their behalf. When that view is denied, the next resort is the courts.”

Another challenge to the U.S. government playing out in the courts is a lawsuit filed this week against the lawless and secretive CIA drone assassination program being carried out by the Obama administration. The ACLU sued the White House in federal court on March 16 in an attempt to compel the release of classified information regarding the program of extrajudicial assassinations.

The lawsuit seeks in particular disclosure of the criteria for placing individuals on the administration’s “kill list.”

“The public should know who the government is killing and why it’s killing them,” said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer quite reasonably. “There’s no good reason why legal memos relating to the targeted-killing program should be secret in their entirety. Nor is there any legitimate justification for the government’s refusal to acknowledge individual strikes or to disclose civilian casualties or to disclose the procedures under which individuals are added to government ‘kill list.’”

An article by Matthew Spurlock, Legal Fellow at the ACLU National Security Project, explained why the ACLU decided to take the administration to court:

Our government’s deliberative and premeditated killings – and the many more civilian deaths from the strikes – raise profound legal and ethical questions that ought to be the subject of public debate. The Obama administration has made numerous promises of greater transparency and oversight on drones. In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama pledged to make lethal targeting “more transparent to the American people and the world” because “in our democracy, no one should just take my word for it that we’re doing things the right way.”

But the administration has failed to follow through on these commitments to openness, and it is continuing to withhold basic information­. When it has released anything – or been compelled to by lawsuits – discussion of crucial aspects of the program have been omitted or redacted. This lack of transparency makes the public reliant on the government’s self-serving and sometimes false representations about the targeted-killing program.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that 2,442 to 3,942 people in Pakistan have been killed by CIA drone strikes since 2004. Hundreds more people are thought to have been killed by U.S. drones in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan.

The White House has formally acknowledged that four of those killed by U.S. drone strikes were United States citizens, one of whom was just 16 years old.

The U.S. has come under intense international criticism over its drone assassination program for years, with a February 2014 report issued by Ben Emmerson, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, urging the United States to ensure that “any measures taken to counter terrorism, including the use of remotely piloted aircraft, comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law, in particular the principles of precaution, distinction and proportionality.”

Another UN report, issued by the UN Human Rights Committee in March 2014, expressed grave concern about the U.S.’s practice of targeted killings by drones, particularly “the lack of transparency regarding the criteria for drone strikes, including the legal justification for specific attacks, and the lack of accountability for the loss of life resulting from such attacks.”

Despite these concerns, the United States has decided to not only continue its drone assassination program but to begin exporting drones to countries around the world so that they may also begin remotely assassinating people without charge or trial.

Rather hypocritically, the Obama Administration has said that prospective purchasers of “unmanned aerial systems” must meet certain restrictions set out in the State Department’s “Fact Sheet”. For one, purchasers must use armed drones “in accordance with international law, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law, as applicable.”

Unfortunately, it will be the United States – perhaps the world’s most frequent and flagrant violator of international law – determining whether these standards are met.

Obama’s speech: Sidestepping key questions on Gitmo, torture and drones

In a wide-ranging speech Thursday on U.S. counter-terrorism policies, President Obama made a number of encouraging remarks regarding respect for the rule of law and renewed promises to ensure that the United States respects international norms – especially by finally closing the Guantanamo prison camp and guaranteeing that U.S. drone warfare complies with domestic and international law.

Notably, he also pledged that “this war, like all wars, must end,” a relief to many who might be under the impression that the U.S. is in an endless state of war.

Like most Obama speeches, the president touched on many of the right notes and made pledges that most reasonable people would welcome, especially the promise that the war on terror will indeed someday come to an end. But also like most Obama speeches, it is worth weighing the lofty rhetoric against the actual record, and comparing his claims against the facts.

This is true broadly, for example, when it comes to his pledge to someday bring the war on terror to an end, considering that as Commander in Chief he is in charge of the armed forces and has ultimate authority to hasten the war’s end. It is also true more narrowly on specific issues such as his renewed pledge to close Guantanamo.

In his speech, Obama announced the appointment of a new special envoy to focus on Guantanamo transfers and called for Congress’s cooperation:

I once again call on Congress to lift the restrictions on detainee transfers from GTMO. I have asked the Department of Defense to designate a site in the United States where we can hold military commissions. I am appointing a new, senior envoy at the State Department and Defense Department whose sole responsibility will be to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries. I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis. To the greatest extent possible, we will transfer detainees who have been cleared to go to other countries. Where appropriate, we will bring terrorists to justice in our courts and military justice system. And we will insist that judicial review be available for every detainee.

But as the Center for Constitutional Rights pointed out on Twitter, he has had ample time to do what he is now promising to do. “Obama wants to review #Guantanamo transfers on ‘case-by-case basis,’” CCR tweeted. “Didn’t he have 4yrs to do that? Over half the men were cleared yrs ago.”

CCR has long argued that Obama possesses a great deal of authority to make specific transfers and that by failing to show the needed leadership, he may be forever tarnishing his legacy. As the group put it in a statement:

The president’s stated reengagement on Guantanamo is welcome, but long overdue.  However, unless he takes immediate steps to resume transfers and ultimately close the prison, his administration will not escape the “harsh judgment” of history he anticipated in his speech.  We welcome his decision to lift the ban on transfers to Yemen, which has trapped more than half of the men at the prison.  However, we are disappointed by the president’s comment that cleared men will only be released “to the greatest extent possible.”  While more than 100 men continue to starve themselves in a principled protest for their freedom, the president’s equivocation is troubling. After eleven years of detention without charge or trial, all of the men President Obama does not intend to give fair trials should be released and reunited with their families. Anything short of that threatens to worsen a potentially deadly crisis unfolding a Guantanamo.

Amnesty International has also questioned the president’s commitment to closing Guantanamo, noting in a report released yesterday that “At the end of 2012, nearly three years after President Obama’s deadline for closure of the Guantánamo detention facility, 166 men were still held at the base, the vast majority without charge or criminal trial.”

In light of the ongoing hunger strike at Guantanamo, Amnesty has renewed its longstanding demands for the president to use his authority to close the prison camp, urging its supporters to “grab your phone and help us flood the White House with calls demanding action.”

In its annual report on the U.S. human rights situation, Amnesty also questioned the Obama administration’s commitment to holding accountable those who broke the law in the previous administration. In a section entitled “Impunity,” Amnesty lamented:

The absence of accountability for crimes under international law committed under the administration of President George W. Bush in relation to the CIA’s programme of secret detention was further entrenched.

On 30 August, the US Attorney General announced the closure of criminal investigations into the death of two individuals in US custody outside the USA. He stated that no one would face criminal charges in relation to the deaths, believed to have occurred in Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003. This followed the announcement in June 2011 that a “preliminary review” conducted into interrogations in the CIA programme was at an end and that, apart from in relation to the two deaths, further investigation was not warranted.

Despite this questionable record enabling torture impunity, Obama felt confident enough to brag about his record Thursday in supposedly returning the United States to the rule of law after eight lawless years of the Bush administration’s approach to the war on terror:

I believe we compromised our basic values – by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.

After I took office, we stepped up the war against al Qaeda, but also sought to change its course. We relentlessly targeted al Qaeda’s leadership. We ended the war in Iraq, and brought nearly 150,000 troops home. We pursued a new strategy in Afghanistan, and increased our training of Afghan forces. We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.

While talking about his renewed interest in closing Gitmo, Obama was repeatedly interrupted by Medea Benjamin, an activist with the antiwar group Code Pink:

“Excuse me, President Obama, you are commander in chief,” Benjamin said. Rejecting his attempts to blame the failure to close Guantanamo on Congress, Benjamin shouted, “It’s you, sir!”  She admonished him to “Abide by the rule of law,” reminding him that he’s a constitutional lawyer.

To his credit, Obama stood up for her First Amendment rights and called her passion commendable. “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to,” he said. “Obviously I do not agree with much of what she said. But these are tough issues. And the idea that we can gloss over them is wrong.”

However, glossing over the issues is precisely what Obama was doing, in some respects. During his talk on drone warfare, for example, he focused narrowly on “one instance when we targeted an American citizen: Anwar Awlaki, the chief of external operations for AQAP.”

Explaining this controversial action, Obama said,

When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team

That’s who Anwar Awlaki was – he was continuously trying to kill people. He helped oversee the 2010 plot to detonate explosive devices on two U.S. bound cargo planes. He was involved in planning to blow up an airliner in 2009. When Farouk Abdulmutallab – the Christmas Day bomber – went to Yemen in 2009, Awlaki hosted him, approved his suicide operation, and helped him tape a martyrdom video to be shown after the attack. His last instructions were to blow up the airplane when it was over American soil. I would have detained and prosecuted Awlaki if we captured him before he carried out a plot. But we couldn’t. And as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took out Awlaki.

Awlaki was killed in September 2011 along with Samir Khan, another U.S. citizen who was not specifically targeted but was traveling with him. Two weeks later, another drone attack killed Awlaki’s son, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen born in Denver, along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven others.

When confronted about this killing last year, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs rather callously blamed the victim for his “choice” of a father:

I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.

In his speech, Obama did not provide any additional insight into the killing of the two teenagers – whether they were specifically targeted for assassination or on what grounds. What is known, however, is that Obama has approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at identified, high-value terrorists, but also “signature” strikes that target suspicious compounds in areas allegedly controlled by militants.

In fact, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation, of the thousands who have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan, only 37 – or two percent – were leaders of al-Qaeda or affiliated organizations.

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder officially acknowledged for the first time that drone strikes have killed at least four U.S. citizens, only one of whom was specifically targeted however. “Since 2009,” Holder wrote,

the United States, in the conduct of U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qa’ida and its associated forces outside of areas of active hostilities, has specifically targeted and killed one U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi. The United States is further aware of three other U.S. citizens who have been killed in such U.S. counterterrorism operations over that same time period: Samir Khan, ‘Abd al-Rahman Anwar al-Aulaqi, and Jude Kenan Mohammed. These individuals were not specifically targeted by the United States.

What “not specifically targeted by the United States” means is unclear, but the concept fits in well with what is known about signature strikes, which may target large groups of people based on suspicious activity or perceived associations with “known terrorists.”

“Signature strikes in Pakistan were killing a large number of terrorist suspects, even when C.I.A. analysts were not certain beforehand of their presence,” reported the New York Times last year. The Times revealed that there has been substantial disagreement in Washington regarding the standards being applied for these attacks:

But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

Obama’s speech did not address the specific concerns over signature strikes, skirted the issue of the attacks on Awlaki’s 16-year-old son and glossed over the issue of innocent civilian deaths. Noting that “there is a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties, and non-governmental reports,” he did however acknowledge that “U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars.”

Nevertheless, Obama claimed that the strikes comply with international law, citing the “Authorization to Use Military Force” that Congress adopted in the days after 9/11.

“Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces,” Obama said. “We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first. So this is a just war – a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.”

Claiming that the war is broadly in compliance with international law, Obama failed to address the many specific concerns that have been raised by international organizations and officials regarding drone warfare.

Testifying to the UN the Human Rights Council’s following her visit to Pakistan last summer, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay criticized the use of drone strikes by the United States, noting in particular that they “raise questions about compliance with distinction and proportionality.”

“I also expressed serious concern over the continuing use of armed drones for targeted attacks,” she said,

in particular because it is unclear that all persons targeted are combatants or directly participating in hostilities. The Secretary-General has expressed concern about the lack of transparency on the circumstances in which drones are used, noting that these attacks raise questions about compliance with distinction and proportionality. I remind States of their international obligation to take all necessary precautions to ensure that attacks comply with international law. I urge them to conduct investigations that are transparent, credible and independent, and provide victims with effective remedies.

A 2010 United Nations report stated that a targeted killing outside of an actual battlefield “is almost never likely to be legal.” It rejected “pre-emptive self-defense” as a justification for killing terrorism suspects far from combat zones.

“This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the UN Charter,” said Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. “If invoked by other states, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos.”

As the 2010 UN report states: “Whether or not a specific targeted killing is legal depends on the context in which it is conducted: whether in armed conflict, outside armed conflict, or in relation to the interstate use of force.”

Under the rules of international humanitarian law, the report points out, “targeted killing is only lawful when the target is a ‘combatant’ or ‘fighter’ or, in the case of a civilian, only for such time as the person ‘directly participates in hostilities.’”

In addition, the killing must be militarily necessary, the use of force must be proportionate so that any anticipated military advantage is considered in light of the expected harm to civilians in the vicinity, and everything feasible must be done to prevent mistakes and minimize harm to civilians. These standards apply regardless of whether the armed conflict is between States (an international armed conflict) or between a State and a non-state armed group (non-international armed conflict), including alleged terrorists.

Since the U.S. drone strikes are being carried out far from any battlefield, it is inconceivable that they conform with the “military necessity” requirement under international law, a question that Obama sidestepped in his speech, along with so many other issues.

Opposition grows against drones as U.S. attempts to dictate global rules

A recent drone protest in Pakistan

With various countries developing drone technology and threatening to break the U.S. monopoly on the ability drop bombs by remote control, the Obama administration is reportedly seeking to influence global rules on the use of weaponized drones.

As Reuters reported March 17,

President Barack Obama, who vastly expanded U.S. drone strikes against terrorism suspects overseas under the cloak of secrecy, is now openly seeking to influence global guidelines for their use as China and other countries pursue their own drone programs.

The United States was the first to use unmanned aircraft fitted with missiles to kill militant suspects in the years after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

But other countries are catching up. China’s interest in unmanned aerial vehicles was displayed in November at an air show. According to state-run newspaper Global Times, China had considered conducting its first drone strike to kill a suspect in the 2011 murder of 13 Chinese sailors, but authorities decided they wanted the man alive so they could put him on trial.

“People say what’s going to happen when the Chinese and the Russians get this technology? The president is well aware of those concerns and wants to set the standard for the international community on these tools,” said former White House spokesman Tommy Vietor.

The hypocrisy and double standards on display regarding this issue are truly stunning. For one thing, the irony of the fact that China – no paragon of human rights or the rule of law – has apparently foregone using this technology (so far) in favor of pursuing justice in the courts should not be lost on anyone. Secondly, the audacity of a White House spokesman preaching the value of the U.S. “set[ting] the standard for the international community on these tools” is dripping with such duplicity that it’s difficult to wrap one’s head around.

The international community, of course, has been raising objections to the U.S. war on terror in general, and the drone wars in particular, for years. A 2010 United Nations report on extrajudicial assassinations stated that a targeted killing outside of an actual battlefield “is almost never likely to be legal,” rejecting the U.S. doctrine of “pre-emptive self-defense” as a justification for killing terrorism suspects far from combat zones.

In a section dealing specifically with drones, the report noted that “a missile fired from a drone is no different from any other commonly used weapon, including a gun fired by a soldier or a helicopter or gunship that fires missiles.” However, “the critical legal question is the same for each weapon: whether its specific use complies with international humanitarian law.”

Rather than dwelling on the specific technology used to carry out extrajudicial assassinations, the UN pointed out that “the greater concern with drones is that because they make it easier to kill without risk to a State’s forces, policy makers and commanders will be tempted to interpret the legal limitations on who can be killed, and under what circumstances, too expansively.”

The expansive interpretation that the U.S. has applied to its targeting killing program “goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the UN Charter,” said Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, in June 2010. “If invoked by other states, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos.”

The UN is now investigating in detail 25 drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Palestine where civilian deaths are credibly alleged. Announced on Jan. 24, it is the first official international inquiry into the drone program.

UN Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson, who is leading the investigation, has made clear that he’s not shying away from exposing U.S. “war crimes.”

On March 15, Emmerson told the Associated Press that, at the very least, the attacks violate Pakistan’s sovereignty. The Pakistani government made clear to him that it does not consent to the strikes, which have killed at least 400 civilians, Emmerson said. The statement was released following the investigator’s three-day visit to the country last week.

Yemen, another frequent target of U.S. drone strikes, has also made clear that it wants the bombings to end. Following an attack in January that killed three suspected terrorists, a Yemeni cabinet minister criticized Obama’s drone war in Yemen, noting that innocent civilians are often killed in these strikes.

“To have an innocent person fall, this is a major breach,” Yemeni Human Rights Minister Hooria Mashhour told Reuters. “I am in favor of changing the anti-terrorism strategy, I think there are more effective strategies that can be applied on the ground without harming civilians and without leading to human rights violations.”

Despite these criticisms, Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, says that the White House is refining the decision-making process for who gets targeted for aerial assassination, mindful of the possibility that other nations are pursuing this this technology.

“We are constantly working to refine, clarify, and strengthen the process for considering terrorist targets for lethal action,” Hayden said.

The administration recognizes “we are establishing standards other nations may follow,” she said.

But Zeke Johnson, Director of Amnesty International USA’s Security with Human Rights Campaign, pointed out in a recent blog post that the number one priority in the campaign to rein in the use of drones is to ensure that “the Obama administration must follow existing law on the use of lethal force.”

While Senator Dick Durbin has stated that the administration is willing to work with Congress to pass new legislation regarding the use of drones, the fact is, laws already exist governing any state’s use of lethal force regardless of the weapon: international human rights law and, in some circumstances, international humanitarian law. “The U.S. government must follow the law,” wrote Johnson, and “recognize that ALL people are equal in rights.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu expressed the thoughts of many around the world when he recently wrote regarding the U.S. drone program,

Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is an American? Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19th century, are not as human as you are? I cannot believe it.

In April, a series of protest actions will be held around the United States calling attention to the criminality of U.S. drone policy. The protests are being organized around the following principles:

• Armed drones are weapons of terror. They kill combatants and civilians, children and adults, men and women, alike. Their presence overhead terrorizes entire communities.
• Extrajudicial assassinations by killer drones violate U. S. and international law.
• Surveillance drones threaten our liberties, spying on communities and borders, invading our personal privacy.
• Drones make our families less secure by making it easier for military and paramilitary agencies (like the CIA) to continue endless war without limits in either space or time.

Kicking off on April 4, the 45th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader and peace advocate Martin Luther King, the demonstrations will specifically target drone manufacturers, including General Atomics, maker of the Predator and Reaper drones.

Protests will also be held at Air Force and National Guard bases that control the U.S. military drone program in their regions.

A national march and rally will also be held at the White House on April 13, calling for an end to the U.S. drone wars. As the call to action reads,

Over 3,000 people have been murdered by U.S. drone strikes in the last few years, including a large number of children among the many civilians who have been slaughtered by these robotic killing machines.

Sitting in offices thousands of miles away from their targets, U.S. operators routinely decide to “push the button” and kill their unsuspecting targets on the ground with hellfire missiles fired from unseen drone aircraft. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, villagers have staged mass protests against drone strikes after their kids were incinerated while they were collecting firewood or farming in nearby fields.

The demonstration is being organized by the ANSWER Coalition, which held some of the country’s largest protests against the Iraq War last decade, and has been endorsed by CODEPINK, the Council on American Islamic Relations, Veterans for Peace and others.

“Join us at the White House for a march and rally on Saturday, April 13,” reads the call to action, “to let the world know that the people of this country are demanding ‘Drones Out of Africa and Everywhere!’”

Amnesty International is also organizing a campaign to demand that the Obama administration follows international law in the use of drones. “Amnesty International is deeply concerned that the Obama administration’s so-called ‘targeted killing’ program allows for the use of lethal force, including with drones, that violates the right to life under international law,” Amnesty states.

Another campaign, organized by Veterans for Peace, details a ten-point program for the new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Point number four states, “Stop the illegal use of combat drones that are responsible the extrajudicial assassinations of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.”

To add your name, click here.

U.S. offers shaky legal justification for drone strikes

After years of secretly carrying out drone attacks that have killed an estimated 3,000 people in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, the United States has for the first time formally admitted the program, but stopped short of lifting the shroud of secrecy entirely.

Last week, President Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan acknowledged the growing international criticism against the U.S. drone program – including from countries that are the target of these attacks, such as Pakistan – but claimed that the targeted killings conform with U.S. and international law.

He explained that Obama wanted to be more open about the practice.

“A few months after taking office, the president travelled to the National Archives where he discussed how national security requires a delicate balance between secrecy and transparency,” Brennan said. “He has consistently encouraged those of us on his national security team to be as open and candid as possible as well.”

In that interest of greater transparency, Brennan acknowledged the U.S. government’s use of drone strikes, the first formal recognition by a government official of a covert program that has been widely known about for years.

“So let me say it as simply as I can,” Brennan said. “Yes, in full accordance with the law, and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives, the United States Government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.”

Brennan cited a March speech by Attorney General Eric Holder which attempted to provide a legal basis for some of the Obama administration’s more questionable tactics in the war on terror, including extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens.

“Attorney General Holder discussed how our counterterrorism efforts are rooted in, and are strengthened by, adherence to the law, including the legal authorities that allow us to pursue members of al-Qaida, including U.S. citizens, and to do so using technologically advanced weapons,” Brennan said.

Much like Holder’s earlier explanations, however, Brennan focused on narrow legal principles while ignoring the broader implications of these policies for domestic and international law. In Holder’s speech last January, he split hairs over concepts of due process and judicial process, claiming that since the Executive Branch has a secret process by which it determines whether a U.S. citizen shall be targeted for assassination, it is fulfilling constitutional requirements.

“Some have argued that the President is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces,” Holder said.  “This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

The attorney general also took issue with the question of whether targeted killings of terrorism suspects should properly be considered “assassinations.” He acknowledged that if these killings were considered assassinations, they would be unlawful, but since the U.S. government was pre-emptively killing people in “self defense,” the use of lethal force is perfectly legal.

As this blog pointed out in response to Holder’s speech, his narrow legal reasoning disregarded the international community’s most significant objections to “targeted killings,” concerns most clearly articulated in a 2010 United Nations report.

The UN report objected to the very term “targeted killing,” saying that it has no basis or definition in international law, but nevertheless stated that a targeted killing outside of an actual battlefield “is almost never likely to be legal.” The UN report rejected “pre-emptive self-defense” as a justification for killing terrorism suspects far from combat zones.

“This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the UN Charter,” said Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. “If invoked by other states, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos.”

Like Holder, Brennan’s April 30 speech utilized a constricted legal argument on behalf of U.S. policy, focusing this time on the technology of unmanned aerial drones rather than the broader legal principles raised by the targeted killings.

“There is nothing in international law that bans the use of remotely piloted aircraft for this purpose or that prohibits us from using lethal force against our enemies outside of an active battlefield, at least when the country involved consents or is unable or unwilling to take action against the threat,” he said.

But regardless of whether “remotely piloted aircraft” are used or whether more traditional means for dropping bombs are used, the primary legal concern is whether the policy is violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of armed force, a point left unaddressed by Brennan’s narrow legal reasoning.

As the 2010 UN report states: “Whether or not a specific targeted killing is legal depends on the context in which it is conducted: whether in armed conflict, outside armed conflict, or in relation to the interstate use of force.”

Under the rules of international humanitarian law, the report points out, “targeted killing is only lawful when the target is a ‘combatant’ or ‘fighter’ or, in the case of a civilian, only for such time as the person ‘directly participates in hostilities.’”

In addition, the killing must be militarily necessary, the use of force must be proportionate so that any anticipated military advantage is considered in light of the expected harm to civilians in the vicinity, and everything feasible must be done to prevent mistakes and minimize harm to civilians. These standards apply regardless of whether the armed conflict is between States (an international armed conflict) or between a State and a non-state armed group (non-international armed conflict), including alleged terrorists.

Since the U.S. drone strikes are being carried out far from any battlefield, it is inconceivable that they conform with the “military necessity” requirement under international law, a question that Brennan skillfully sidestepped by zeroing on the technological aspects of targeted killings carried out by unmanned aerial drones.

The legality of the attacks has been further called into question with a new directive issued by President Obama which authorizes the CIA and the military to launch attacks even when the identity of the targets are not known, in what the U.S. has dubbed “signature strikes.”

According to the Washington Post, congressional officials have expressed concern that using signature strikes would increase the likelihood that those who are killed by drone attacks are not involved in plots against the United States.

This new expanded policy exacerbates the violations of international law inherent in the U.S. drone program, which was already shrouded by ambiguity over who was being killed by these remote-controlled aerial bombing machines. As the UN report notes,

A State killing is legal only if it is required to protect life (making lethal force proportionate) and there is no other means, such as capture or nonlethal incapacitation, of preventing that threat to life (making lethal force necessary). The proportionality requirement limits the permissible level of force based on the threat posed by the suspect to others.

Similarly, Human Rights Watch points out: “During an armed conflict between a state and a non-state armed group, it is lawful to target only persons taking a direct part in hostilities. This would include individuals planning and directing operations, but not those linked to the armed group in a non-operational way.”

Considering that the U.S. policy now does not even require that the identity of the targets be known, it is impossible to meet the proportionality requirement under international law. After all, how can U.S. officials know whether the strikes are “required to protect life” if they don’t even know who it is that they are targeting?

The U.S. drone program also raises significant questions of sovereignty, another issue raised by the UN and glossed over by Brennan’s speech.

As the UN noted,

Targeted killings conducted in the territory of other States raise sovereignty concerns. Under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, States are forbidden from using force in the territory of another State. When a State conducts a targeted killing in the territory of another State with which it is not in armed conflict, whether the first State violates the sovereignty of the second is determined by the law applicable to the use of inter-state force, while the question of whether the specific killing of the particular individual(s) is legal is governed by IHL and/or human rights law. …

A targeted killing conducted by one State in the territory of a second State does not violate the second State’s sovereignty if either (a) the second State consents, or (b) the first, targeting, State has a right under international law to use force in self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter,  because (i) the second State is responsible for an armed attack against the first State, or (ii) the second State is unwilling or unable to stop armed attacks against the first State launched from its territory. International law permits the use of lethal force in self-defence in response to an “armed attack” as long as that force is necessary and proportionate.

Brennan briefly addressed the issue of sovereignty in his speech, while deftly skirting the issue of consent:

Finally, when considering lethal force we are of course mindful that there are important checks on our ability to act unilaterally in foreign territories.  We do not use force whenever we want, wherever we want.  International legal principles, including respect for a state’s sovereignty and the laws of war, impose constraints.  The United States of America respects national sovereignty and international law.

Brennan’s vague claims of the U.S.’s respect for national sovereignty and the laws of war, however, ignored the fact that some countries, notably Pakistan, have consistently objected to U.S. drone strikes carried out on their territory.

Pakistan has repeatedly protested the U.S. attacks, closing its Afghan border crossings to NATO supplies last November in retaliation for American airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. The government also kicked the U.S. out of a base used by American drones.

On April 12, Pakistan’s parliament unanimously approved a list of conditions that the U.S. must meet if relations are to be restored and NATO supply routes to Afghanistan reopened. The parliament further demanded an immediate end to U.S. drone attacks and an unconditional apology for the airstrike in November that killed 24 soldiers. (The U.S. has expressed “regret” for killing the soldiers, but has declined to apologize.)

Last week, on the same day that Brennan gave his speech voicing the U.S.’s respect for national sovereignty, the Pakistani government condemned a U.S. drone strike that killed three suspected militants in the northwest of the country, the first since the country’s parliament demanded that Washington end the attacks.

While Pakistan attempts to utilize diplomatic pressure to cease the U.S. drone attacks on its territory, American antiwar and human rights groups are ramping up the grassroots pressure to halt the policy as well. Code Pink has a “Ground the Drones” program which includes a petition to “tell Obama that we need a surge in diplomacy, not a surge in violence.”

The ACLU has reiterated its calls for the Obama administration to release memos from the Office of Legal Counsel providing the purported legal justification for the targeted killing program.

ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said Brennan’s speech “supplies legal conclusions, not legal analysis.”

We continue to believe that the administration should release the Justice Department memos underlying the program – particularly the memo that authorizes the extrajudicial killing of American terrorism suspects. And the administration should release the evidence it relied on to conclude that an American citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, could be killed without charge, trial, or judicial process of any kind.

The ACLU called it a “dangerous” proposition that the U.S. considers the entire planet a battlefield. “It is dangerous to give the President the authority to order the extrajudicial killing of any person – including any American – he believes to be a terrorist,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project.

“The administration insists that the program is closely supervised, but to propose that a secret deliberation that takes place entirely within the executive branch constitutes ‘due process’ is to strip the Fifth Amendment of its essential meaning.”

For its part, Fire Dog Lake has launched a petition drive demanding that the Obama administration release legal memos related to its drone and assassination program.