Look at the Administration’s Poorly Thought Out Drone Policy from an Adversary’s Perspective — then Consider What an Unbiased International Court Might Legitimately Say about Us Years Down the Road

30 May 2012

Killing adversaries is sometimes necessary — but being obviously hypocritical about the process is immoral and probably ineffective policy

According to New York Times reporters, Jo Becker and Scott Shane, the Obama Administration considers all military age men in the vicinity of a drone strike to be anti-American terrorists.

This convenient, but ethically questionable logic keeps our counts of collateral damage down:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.

“Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

Can we defend the “real world” logic of the Administration’s cavalier assessment of the ethical constraints on nationally approved murder?

Expedient hypocrisy increases the slippery-ness of America’s moral slope. When fighting terrorists, it is arguably hypocritical to adopt terroristic means in opposition.

On the one hand, killing our enemies with drone-launched missiles is certainly preferable to getting our warriors killed in hand-to-hand engagements with them.

On the other, murdering innocent “collaterals” with these explosions is metaphorically similar to local police shooting randomly into populated buildings in which they suspect a criminal might be hiding.

What is perverse about the Administration’s definition of terrorists is that it is equivalent to defining every corpse in the randomly bullet-riddled building as having been a bad guy. And a member of Al Qaeda at that.

This after-the-fact definition reverses the ethical logic that we ordinarily accord to defining guilt and innocence.

Turning law and ethics on their heads is what war criminals do — isn’t it?

War criminals typically kill people on the merest suspicion.

Though the Administration can defend itself by saying that it tries to reduce collateral damage, that defense merely moves it partway along the spectrum of moral culpability. We Americans might judge that we escaped the actuality of having committed war crimes. Other cultures will not.

The problem with the CIA-originated Administration drone policy is that it explicitly assumes guilt by mere association.

The policy arguably does not pay sufficient attention to the fact that clan and family connections often create physical associations between people that have nothing to do with terrorist activities. Just because Mr. A is a terrorist does mean that his son B is. Or vice versa.

You can bet that the self-serving and hypocritical immorality of Administration policy is clear to the families of innocents who have been killed or injured by American drones.

Ethical missteps have a way of occasionally circling back to take down their perpetrators

By counting all the men killed in drone explosions as having been enemies, we conceal targeting mistakes and collateral damage from ourselves. Then we react with hypocritical outrage to truthful allegations that not everyone in the blast zone was a bad guy.

Coming from a law enforcement background, I am not convinced that national security allows us to ignore the ethical restrictions on dealing with problematic realities.

Just because it is hard to distinguish and physically separate terrorists from their families and friends does not give us the right to label the whole crew as adversaries — especially after we cavalierly blow them all up.

Unfortunately, there is no immediate price to pay for ethically questionable actions on the President’s part

President Obama shields himself from political criticism by keeping America allegedly safe.

It is obviously better for his political career to kill a bunch of innocents along with terrorists — than it is to err on the side of self-restraint and let some of our adversaries roam loose.

Where I disagree with the President is in his acceptance of the CIA’s conveniently over-large definition of terrorist. I can certainly see the real world merit in blasting enemies. But I also see moral necessity in more closely adhering to traditional standards of proof before (somewhat) randomly executing people.

The President should not permit his security apparatus to so casually define terrorist militants as having been such — simply because a drone blew them up. That definition gets everything backwards.

The moral? — Fear and politics increasingly make us act in previously un-thinkable and un-American ways

This is not a beneficial trend. Someday, an international court is going to call us on it. We will not escape arguably legitimate accusations of war crimes simply because we are American and “meant well.”

Defensible legal and ethical actions closely adhere to traditionally accepted definitions. The Administration’s apparently poorly thought-out drone policy has toppled us from a once-respected position as a (mostly) ethical global actor.

Fear, unrecognized and not thwarted, makes us moral cowards.

PeteFree.com

Look at the Administration’s Poorly Thought Out Drone Policy from an Adversary’s Perspective — then Consider What an Unbiased International Court Might Legitimately Say about Us Years Down the Road