O
nce every four days. That’s how often the Obama administration attacks a target with a drone. Pilots in the United States control the unmanned aerial vehicles launched in Afghanistan. The federal government is expanding its use of drones to the U.S. for purported surveillance purposes. Recent polls show that the majority of Americans support President Barack Obama’s drone strike program, but many lawmakers are becoming concerned with the legality and efficacy of the president’s plan. And rightly so.
A recently leaked Department of Justice memo details that the president reserves the right to use drone strikes on U.S. citizens if they pose a suspected threat. The government does not have to take responsibility for these killings and can carry them out in secret. The memo does not, however, deal with the theoretical. In 2011, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike in Yemen. He was suspected of attempting terrorist attacks, but the government never charged him with a crime. News agencies reported his death by U.S. drones, but the government denied any involvement.
Two problems stand out. First, the president’s justifications for drone strikes against American citizens stands against the due process of law guaranteed in the Constitution. The 5th Amendment to the Constitution states that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Yet Obama’s drone strike policy says that the government can deprive U.S. citizens of life on a mere suspicion, and it does not have to acknowledge that it has done so.
Due process acts as an accountability measure so that the government will not become tyrannous. Yet now the government is claiming that it can violate due process by killing American citizens in secret.
The government also claims that it does not have to take responsibility for killings or give evidence for them, creating a process for eliminating troublesome citizens with impunity. Now that the government is using more and more drones in the United States, citizens face threats even in their homes. The deprivation of due process will not lead to a tyrannical government necessarily, but it is distressing that the cogs are in place.
The second problem with U.S. drone strikes is that of blowback. Blowback is a CIA term referring to unintended consequences of covert operations. Michael Scheuer, former Chief Adviser for the CIA’s bin Laden unit, has commented repeatedly that U.S. interventionist policy in the Middle East has spawned a host of ill-will towards the United States and has become a recruiting point for terrorists. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center revealed that 74 percent of Pakistanis view the United States as an enemy. This animosity can be attributed, at least partially, to U.S. drone strikes that have killed Pakistani militants and civilians. Retired General Stanley McChrystal has said that drones are “hated on a visceral level” and are seen as “American arrogance.” This leads to more terrorism, the opposite goal of the policy.
Drones erode our Constitutionally-protected rights and fail to make the world safer from terrorism, rendering them both a bad precedent and bad policy. The program deserves reevaluation, and soon — the next strike might be only three days away.