{"id":13468,"date":"2015-10-16T06:52:32","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T11:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13468"},"modified":"2015-10-16T06:52:32","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T11:52:32","slug":"the-drone-papers-the-assassination-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13468","title":{"rendered":"The Drone Papers: The Assassination Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Drone Papers: The Assassination Complex<\/a><\/h3>\n
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From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama\u2019s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed \u2014 through secretive processes, without indictment or trial \u2014 worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state\u2019s power over life and death.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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D<\/span>RONES ARE A TOOL,\u00a0not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even\u00a0defining<\/a>\u00a0the word \u201cassassination.\u201d This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, \u201ctargeted killings.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Obama administration has discussed drone strikes publicly, it has offered assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to boots on the ground and are authorized only when an \u201cimminent\u201d threat is present and there is \u201cnear certainty\u201d that the intended target will be eliminated. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly\u00a0redefined<\/a>\u00a0to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings.<\/p>\n

The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than\u00a012 years ago<\/a>, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a\u00a0set of standards and procedures<\/a>\u00a0for conducting such strikes.\u00a0Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an \u201carea of active hostilities\u201d if a target represents a \u201ccontinuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,\u201d without providing any sense of the\u00a0internal process<\/a>\u00a0used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried. The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been one of\u00a0trust, but don\u2019t verify<\/em>.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Drone Papers: The Assassination Complex From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama\u2019s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed \u2014 through secretive processes, without indictment or trial \u2014 worthy of execution. There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1007,9909,9908,5567,827,834,844],"class_list":["post-13468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-drones","tag-jeremy-scahill","tag-the-drone-papers","tag-the-intercept","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-us-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13469,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13468\/revisions\/13469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}