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Obama Normalized Drone Warfare. Trump Is Escalating It.

Trump’s drone war should remind us how dangerous it is when a president claims the legal authority to kill in secret.

Truthout

Almost as alarming as the rate of civilian casualties from drone and other air strikes in the Obama years was the lack of information provided about them. The American public couldn’t find out how many civilians had actually been killed, whether their government compensated those who were harmed or not, or even the legal rationale for such strikes. Sometimes, it was impossible to tell whether drones were even behind them. Most of what could be known about the U.S. drone program, in fact, including the CIA’s role in it, how its “targets” were tracked, or even what those in targeted countries thought about such strikes, came from leaked information and independent reporting. On rare occasions when the drone program was officially acknowledged, statements made about it usually turned out to be lies.

Through executive orders just before he left office, President Obama finally put in place modest reforms to make the drone program more transparent and accountable. His key order outlined a process of review and investigation that had to be set in motion anytime reports of civilian casualties from drone strikes came in. Information from all available sources, including non-military or government organizations, was to be taken into account and the government was required to acknowledge responsibility for civilian deaths and injuries while providing redress to the victims and their families. Finally, the director of national intelligence was to release estimates of the number of combatants and civilians killed by military drone strikes since 2009. Another executive order required future presidents to release similar information annually. Although the numbers still proved dubious and many questions remained about, among other things, the CIA civilian casualty count, at least the pendulum finally seemed to be swinging in the right direction.

No such luck. Soon after President Trump took office, his administration began to quietly dismantle the safeguards Obama had just created. His administration would subsequently expand the battlefields on which drones would be used, ease combat rules in Somalia intended to protect civilians, rescind most aspects of Obama’s executive orders, and stop publishing civilian casualty data entirely, while telling the public even less about the program. Not surprisingly, drone strikes across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa would rise and a lot more civilians would start dying from them. None of this was exactly shocking from a commander-in-chief who had once asked a CIA official why he didn’t kill a terrorist target’s family during a drone strike.

In his Nobel Prize speech, Obama claimed that the reason the United States adhered to certain rules of conduct in war like protecting civilians was because “that’s what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is the source of our strength.” In the first half of last year, U.S. and Afghan air and drone strikes killed more civilians than the Taliban for the first time ever. Those strikes hit wedding parties, farmers, pregnant women, and small children. In Somalia, drone strikes decimated entire communities, destroying not only lives, but crops, homes, and livelihoods. And as the new decade began, President Trump not only carried out a drone strike so drastic and rare that many experts believed it was a straightforward act of (and declaration of) war, but also threatened to bomb non-military targets (“cultural” sites), a move which is generally considered a war crime under international law.

In its recklessness and brutality, Trump’s escalating drone war should remind us all of just how dangerous it is when a president claims the legal authority to kill in secret and no one can stop him. Maybe this decade we’ll learn our lesson.