Fog is one of the besetting problems with the Obama drone program. For months the administration did not even admit its existence, even while selectively leaking its supposed successes. Brennan finally confirmed it in April. The administration still has not released the 50-page Justice Department memo offering the legal justification for targeting Anwar al-Awlaki, although Times reporter Charlie Savage reported last fall that it exists. Philip Alston, the New York University law professor who served as the UN's Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, has written an important and scathing article summarizing everything we know about the CIA's targeted killing program, including wildly varying estimates of collateral damage from credible sources, some of which suggest that civilian casualties are numerous and quite possibly disproportionate. Alston has concluded that in fact we know next to nothing and that the opacity and unaccountability of the program are, in and of themselves, threats to the rule of law. I agree. The decision to provide information for the Times article, like Attorney General Holder's speech, is a step toward transparency, but a baby step.
Kenneth Anderson raises a more subtle concern about the president's personal involvement. Is Obama trying to signal that hands-on involvement in targeted killing decisions is a moral imperative for any president? Or is he signaling "that these actions are legitimate only because he is personally trusted to do the right thing, just because he is Barack Obama"? Anderson accepts the former and rejects the latter. Surely he is right. Ultimately, the issue of personal involvement by the president isn't whether Obama reads Augustine and Aquinas, or whether George W. Bush studied biographies of Lincoln and Churchill, or whether the next president prefers The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Of course we want the ultimate decision-maker on matters of life and death to be wise and smart and morally decent, and I still like to think Obama is all those things. We won't always get that in a president. But we want the decision-maker to be the president for a different reason: to make sure that the buck stops at the top, with no plausible deniability.
• • •
So far I have said very little about the issue that, for the majority of observers, matters most-the drone strikes themselves-beyond my basic point that killing deadly enemies is in principle neither immoral nor illegal. I say "in principle" because so much turns on the details: the expected collateral damage, how much care has been taken to verify the target and the danger he poses, whether the target was trying to surrender, whether the foreign state is truly unwilling or unable to suppress the target, what the non-lethal alternatives were. The wrong answer on any of these issues means the decision to kill from the air flunks the test of morality.
But if the killing is legitimate, the fact that it was targeted, or done by a drone rather than a bomb or a gun, makes no difference. If anything, targeted killing is better than untargeted killing, which the laws of war call "indiscriminate" and a war crime.
The drone issue, however, seems more complicated for many reasons. To start, there is the dystopic, Terminator-like image of machines relentlessly hunting humans. There is also the jarring fact that the drone operators sit in safety thousands of miles away, insulated from the destruction they cause. And finally there is the nagging sense that somehow it is worse to kill someone whose name you know and whose photo sits on the table before you.
But manned aircraft also kill from a distance, sometimes in a risk-free way. Drone operators watch hours of video of the people they have killed, so they are not insulated (although a study shows that they experience little stress from seeing the video).
