The Drone memos // Life in the Age of Drone Warfare
The Drone Memos collects for the first time the legal and
policy documents underlying the U.S. government’s deeply controversial practice
of “targeted killing”—the extrajudicial killing of suspected terrorists and
militants, typically using remotely piloted aircraft or “drones.” The
documents—including the Presidential Policy Guidance that provides the
framework for drone strikes today, Justice Department white papers addressing
the assassination of an American citizen, and a highly classified legal memo
that was published only after a landmark legal battle involving the ACLU, the
New York Times, and the CIA—together constitute a remarkable effort to
legitimize a practice that most human rights experts consider to be unlawful
and that the United States has historically condemned.
In a lucid and
provocative introduction, Jameel Jaffer, who led the ACLU legal team that
secured the release of many of the documents, evaluates the “drone memos” in
light of domestic and international law. He connects the documents’ legal
abstractions to the real-world violence they allow, and makes the case that we
are trading core principles of democracy and human rights for the illusion of
security.
From Jameel's
introduction:
This book is
possible because the secrecy surrounding American drone strikes has begun, at
the margins, to erode. The documents collected here shed light on how a
president committed to ending the abuses associated with the Bush
administration’s “war on terror” came to dramatically expand one of the
practices most identified with that war, and they supply a partial view of the
legal and policy framework that underlies that practice. But while many of the
documents collected here were meant to be defenses of the drone campaign,
ultimately they complicate, at the very least, the government’s oft-repeated
argument that the campaign is lawful.
To be sure, even
the existence of these documents is an indication of the extent to which the
drone campaign is saturated with the language of law. Perhaps no administration
before this one has tried so assiduously to justify its resort to the weapons
of war. But the rules that purportedly limit the government’s actions are
imprecise and elastic; they are cherry picked from different legal regimes; the
government regards some of them to be discretionary rather than binding; and
even the rules the government concedes to be binding cannot, in the
government’s view, be enforced in any court. If this is law, it is law without
limits—law without constraint.
Ryan Goodman provides '10 Questions to Ask Yourself
When Reading Jameel Jaffer’s “The Drone Memos”' here. For me, the two most crucial on the list –
which anyone writing about drones and limiting the discussion to targeted
killing needs to ask themselves (and rarely does) – are these:
Despite the title
of the book, how much of the discussion and issues raised are really about
drones per se? How much applies to cruise missiles, night raids, and other
forms of direct lethal action? What analytic or rhetorical work is being done
by focusing on “drones”?
Despite the title
of the book, how much of the discussion and issues raised are limited to
pre-planned targeted killing? What about dynamic strikes when a moment of
opportunity arises, or so-called signature strikes? What analytic or rhetorical
work is being done by focusing on “targeted killing”?
“As the presence of
the drone in public imaginaries expands, its military/imperial paternities are
overshadowed while the modes of violence that drone operations enable are
progressively normalized. This thoughtfully curated collection definitively
interrupts those trajectories. Putting the drone in its geopolitical place, it
traces drone genealogies through histories of surveillance and killing from
above, to the colonial presents in which we are all implicated, and that we
need now more than ever to stand against.” — Lucy Suchman,
Lancaster University, UK
“Life in the Age of
Drone Warfare is an intoxicating whirlwind of a volume explicating the drone in
history, law, culture and geopolitics. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan steer the
way through an incisive feminist and critical lens partnered with startling
material evidence. We find the drone coiled within matrices of relations, both
distant and intimate, calculative, legal and bureaucratic, yet embodied and
affective. Twisted in not only a vertical but vortical kind of power, the drone
winds, distorts, corkscrews and strangles—rewriting worlds as it goes.” — Peter
Adey, Royal Holloway, University of London
