Between President Obama’s limited release of a memo outlining drone policy and John Brennan’s Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings, drones are all over the news this week.
Drones are unmanned aerial devices that allow for either targeted strikes or surveillance, and they have altered the way the war on terror has been fought.
While drones have been newsworthy, the controversial policy surrounding their use is unlikely to change.
Brennan, who currently serves as President Obama’s counterterrorism chief, is undergoing Senate confirmation hearings for the job of CIA director.
Brennan is also known as the architect of the drone warfare program.
The controversy surrounding the program stems from the drone strike death of American-born, radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.
Given the top-secret nature of the drone program, the Senate hearings barely touched on the matter.
Brennan gave assurances that drones were the last resort and implied that their use was not something he took lightly.
However, no specifics were given for the situations in which drone use would be appropriate.
Feeling the pressure from lawmakers calling for more transparency about the drone program in light of Brennan’s confirmation hearings, Obama released an internal Department of Justice memo to select lawmakers about the legality of using drone strikes.
However, the memo is only available to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
This memo was prepared by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, an office infamously known for its “torture memos,” the memos legally justifying the use of enhanced interrogation techniques during the early days of the war on terror.
The OLC could find a legal justification for almost anything.
The lack of specifics from Brennan and the limited release of the memo clearly spell out the administration’s policy on drones, and it isn’t a policy of transparency.
Rather, it’s a policy of “trust us.” With the potential of targeting Americans overseas and limited oversight, “trust us” just isn’t good enough.
Drones are an entirely new technology that seemingly levels the playing field of the war on terror.
While terrorists are able to operate outside legal and political frameworks, they lack advanced technology.
Arguably, they’ve been successful enough with the tools they do have.
However, the United States is sometimes hindered by our political system and the need for cooperation, consensus and transparency. Where we do succeed is in resources and technology like drones.
With drones, there is no human cost.
Prior to the advent of this technology, a strike on a target meant the potential loss of American lives.
This created a built-in risk calculation for taking action: Is that strike worth the potential loss of life? With drones, that risk doesn’t exist.
The worst-case scenario is that the targeted person isn’t in the location and other civilians are killed.
To us, those people are collateral damage and a necessary evil.
The release of this memo and Brennan’s hearing presented an opportunity to re-evaluate the current policy on the use of unchecked drone strikes, and, sadly, it seems as if that’s not going to happen.
What could have been a moment of honest assessment of the current drone policy instead will continue on as business as usual.
It’s a shame that in the one moment Brennan had to answer for his actions, “trust us” proved to be a good enough answer.
Without any additional oversight, it seems likely that drones will continue to be the weapon of choice in the war on terror, and because of that, it seems pretty obvious that drones are having the best week ever.
Brittany Sharkey is a third-year law student from Oceanside, Calif. She graduated from NYU in 2010 with a degree in politics. Follow her on Twitter @brittanysharkey.
