What Torture Was For Bush, Drone Strikes Are For Obama.

Conor Friedersdorf has gotten me thinking again about Obama and drone strikes. In the Atlantic he writes forcefully on the utter horror we're causing in Pakistan and on the way the strikes are not “surgical” at all. The report he quotes from shows that about 1 in 5 people killed is likely innocent:

The best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes are provided by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization. TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562-3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474-881 were civilians, including 176 children.

Not surprisingly, he’s come out against voting for Obama.

He does have a point. I’m still a supporter of the president, still think on domestic policy he’s made good progress especially given the intransigence of the Republican party. But his record on national security and executive power is a separate thing; it’s incredibly disturbing, especially given the way he talked about these issues before he became president. He has kept indefinite detentions, gone to war in Libya without Congressional authorization, aggressively prosecuted whistleblowers and, worst of all, made drone assassinations a routine part of national security. The program is secret and without due process. He has even taken for himself the power to kill US citizens if his administration, and only his administration, considers the person a national security threat. He’s a Constitutional lawyer! He should know better!

Tom Junod wrote a great article on this a few months ago. It does a great job of getting into the head of Obama as commander-in-chief, of showing the ways Obama has tried to maintain control of the program, to stay moral and also the ways he may be fooling himself into thinking he IS moral. Junod’s ultimate point is that the kind of control Obama thinks he has is an illusion:

the danger of the Lethal Presidency is that the precedent you establish is hardly ever the precedent you think you are establishing, and whenever you seem to be describing a program that is limited and temporary, you are really describing a program that is expansive and permanent.

You start using something in only limited, extreme cases, but eventually it’s used all the time and becomes a standard tool you take for granted. In an exchange with Andrew Sullivan, who I think is instinctively too hawkish on this issue, he gets at the heart of why this bothers me so much: it’s the equivalent for Obama of what torture was for Bush.

... the moral risk of torture is not so different from the moral risk of targeted killing. Indeed, the moral risk of torture provides a template for the moral risk of targeted killing. What was introduced as an option of last resort becomes the option of first resort, then the only option. Sullivan always understood that torture was a temptation, and that the day would come when it was applied not in emergency, “ticking-clock” situations, but as a matter of routine. Well, that day has come, only now with targeted killing, where the option of first resort meets the court of no appeal.

It’s going to be Obama’s most horrible legacy and, sadly, one of his most important.