President Obama’s Non Answer on Striking Citizens with Drones

Yesterday, President Obama was finally subjected to a probing question about his policy regarding drone strikes on American citizens. The question, by Lee Doren during a Google + event, left little wiggle room, but he sure did wiggle. Spoiler Alert: There wasn’t really an answer.

QUESTION: A lot of people are very concerned that your administration now believes it’s legal to have drone strikes on American citizens, and whether or not that’s specifically allowed with citizens within the United States. And if that’s not true, what will you do to create a legal framework to make American citizens within the United States know that drone strikes cannot be used against American citizens?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well first of all — I think, there has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil. And, you know, we respect and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct counterterrorism operations outside of the United States.

The rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States, in part because our capacity, for example, to capture a terrorist in the United States are very different than in the foothills or mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan.

But, what I think is absolutely true is that it is not sufficient for citizens to just take my word for it (What word? Yes or No?) that we’re doing the right thing. I am the head of the executive branch. And what we’ve done so far is to try to work with Congress on oversight issues. But part of what I’m going to have to work with Congress on is to make sure that whatever it is that we’re providing Congress, that we have mechanisms to also make sure that the public understands what’s going on, what the constraints are, what the legal parameters are, and that’s something that I take very seriously.

I am not somebody who believes that the President has the authority to do whatever he wants, or whatever she wants, whenever they want just under the guise of counterterrorism. There have to be legal checks and balances on it.

Notice there was no appeal to any principled stance, to the rule of law or to the U.S. Constitution.The only guideline seems to be a utilitarian argument that “the United States are very different than in the foothills…of Afghanistan,” so the rules “are going to be different.”

Come to think of it, there are a number of different things about this president. Let’s take a look at Pakistan, who’s people bare the burden of our president’s deadly drone policy (An estimated 891+ civilians killed by drones). While President Bush’s leadership was viewed with 70% disapproval, at its worse, President Obama has overseen an unprecedented rise in anti-American sentiment. 92% of Pakistanis disapprove of President Obama’s leadership as documented in a Gallup poll this week: