The LA Times has a good story on the
complete backing away of the CIA from any new detentions or interrogations in counterterrorism under the Obama administration (though it started back under the Bush administration). It describes a general paralysis of policy, frozen among a variety of government actors wary of doing anything that might restart the detention wars of the Bush administration. It’s a well reported piece by Ken Delanian, April 10, 2011.
The U.S. has made no move to interrogate or seek custody of Indonesian militant Umar Patek since he was apprehended this year by officials in Pakistan with the help of a CIA tip, U.S. and Pakistani officials say.
The little-known case highlights a sharp difference between President Obama’s counter-terrorism policy and that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Under Obama, the CIA has killed more people than it has captured, mainly through drone missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. At the same time, it has stopped trying to detain or interrogate suspects caught abroad, except those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The CIA is out of the detention and interrogation business,” said a U.S. official who is familiar with intelligence operations but was not authorized to speak publicly.
The article goes on to discuss the policy paralysis underlying this condition. But I want to add one caution. The article says, and it has been said many times in recent years, that the lack of a detention regime gives incentives to favor targeted killing.
Despite having made exactly this point myself many times, however, it bears noting that there are plenty of independent reasons for using targeted killings in many situations — avoiding detention is almost certainly far less important than the current meme suggests. Even if there were some protocol for detaining and interrogating people, there are plenty of circumstances in which seeking to capture is too risky and other operational reasons. Put another way, it's not as though people are sitting around the government all day saying, hey, here's a terrorist, we can't really capture him, so let's kill him! Some level of background incentive is there, no doubt, but it's background to a much more complicated decision-making foreground.
More interesting is that the article’s main focus is on a person captured by Indonesia from a CIA tip, not targeted with a missile. Even in that case, in which it is not a choice between targeted killing and detention, the CIA still does not want custody, even though the article says that experts believe that the CIA could get far more and better information if it controlled the detention and interrogation process. This is far from an ideal situation, of course.
While on the topic of targeted killing and drone warfare, let me point readers to a
conference at University of Pennsylvania Law School this weekend, a joint effort among lawyers, philosophers, diplomats, and national security and military personnel. It’s an impressive lineup - including Deborah Pearlstein and John Dehn - and you can even get CLE credit, I believe. (I’ve put the announcement below the fold.)
I’ll be talking at the Penn conference about an ethical tension between jus in bello and jus ad bellum. Targeted killing through drones results (I will take by assumption) in less civilian damage in the category of jus in bello. According to a common argument made today, however, that greater “efficiency” in jus in bello considerations thereby makes resort to force by the United States too easy, as a jus ad bellum matter, and indeed possibly “inefficient.” Why? According to this argument, the lack of personal risk to US personnel in drone warfare lowers to an inefficient level the disincentives upon the US to use force.
I have many problems with this argument. But I do think it’s an interesting one from a philosophical perspective, because even if the jus in bello and jus ad bellum considerations are not strictly inconsistent, there is at least substantial tension between them. Moreover, the ideas of “efficiency jus in bello” and “efficiency jus ad bellum” are interesting all on their own, even if I think that particularly the idea of an efficient level of violence, or an efficient level of incentives and disincentives to resort to force, premised around personal risk to US personnel, is deeply incoherent. But the incoherency seems to me to take part in an even deeper, and still more wrong, idea that an “efficient level of resort to force” can be extracted independent of the idea of “sides” in war with incommensurate ends.
I’m not a philosopher, though, and find all this philosophy stuff difficult. So I have been careful to load up my remarks with a lot of practical stuff about where, on the basis of my conversations, reading, discussions, etc., with lots of different folks, both targeted killing and drone warfare are likely to go. Since those are just my perceptions of where the technology, practices, and policies are going, there's plenty to dispute. The conference has a great lineup of experts from many fields, however — so even if my remarks are a big miss, in good conscience I can still highly recommend it to you.
