© Getty ImagesPredator drones
The Obama administration has
released its internal guidelines for how it decides to kill or capture alleged terrorists around the globe,
three years after they came into effect. They provide a look at the drone war bureaucracy behind hundreds of strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere, a system President Obama will hand off to his successor.
The guidelines show
the process is concentrated at the White House, specifically in the National Security Council. They also describe the process for approving so-called signature strikes, where the target of the strike is not a known "high value terrorist," but rather some other "terrorist target," which could be a group of people exhibiting suspect behavior, or a vehicle, building or other infrastructure.
Amid all these procedural details, however, the presidential policy guidance, or "playbook," as it has been called,
does not provide new insight into when, where, and under what authorities someone can be killed, or what kind of intelligence is necessary to make that decision.
Much of the document, which is dated May 22, 2013, echoes public statements by administration officials over the past several years and previously-released material. The general standards for killing terrorist targets away from active battlefields were made public that May, when the president gave a speech and issued an
abbreviated version of the guidance, promising that the United States would only undertake lethal action against a terrorist if they posed a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons, and if capture was not feasible.
It took a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union to get the full 18-page version of the guidance declassified, with some redactions.
Comment: It gets worse than that. The Kagans' Institute for the Study of War directed U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan while their major donors were arms manufacturers. (For details, see our interview with filmmaker Robbie Martin: The Truth Perspective: A Very Heavy Agenda: The rise, fall and resurrection of the neocons.) If there's a rule, you can be sure the war whores will find a way to break it.