David Rittgers, a Cato legal analyst and former Special Forces officer, has an
excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal on the use of Predator drones. He cautions, on the one hand, against reflexively regarding drone attacks as nonjudicial execution or, really, functionally different from other weapons that soldiers might use — as well as cautioning against the idea that Congress or courts could somehow micromanage the use of these weapons. On the other hand, he cautions against thinking that the problem of drones is that the US should be seeking to capture rather than kill because of the loss of intelligence; he notes that operationally, there are many reasons why capture is very often infeasible. It’s a good piece, measured and sensible, and I highly recommend it.
I’ve been quiet around here in the last little while as I, too, have been writing about Predators and targeted killing — expanding and moving beyond my
book chapter from last year on this topic. Barring some big news on health care or some such, the
Weekly Standard will be running a piece from me next week arguing something I’ve developed at Volokh Conspiracy and here at OJ blog: first, that the administration’s lawyers need to step up to the plate and defend targeted killing using Predators and, second, the proper legal basis on which to defend it to the full extent undertaken by the Obama administration is the international law of self-defense, rather than simply the law of armed conflict, targeting combatants.
