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| Daily News Brief May 23, 2013 |
Top of the Agenda: Obama to Restrict Drone Targets
A
day after his administration formally acknowledged killing four U.S.
citizens in drone strikes outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq,
President Obama, scheduled to give a major speech on counterterrorism
today at National Defense University, is set to restrict the use of unmanned drone strikes (NYT).
In an effort to increase transparency, he is expected to shift control
of any such strikes from the Central Intelligence Agency to the
military. He is also likely to propose renewed efforts to close
Guantanamo prison, and to anticipate a time when al-Qaeda is
sufficiently decimated so that the "war on terror" will end.
Analysis
"The issue of defining down the enemy
has become a topic of intense discussion inside the Obama
administration as critics in Congress and elsewhere have been
increasingly questioning how long U.S. presidents can continue to use
the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Act, which was passed
one week after 9/11 and set no temporal or geographic boundaries for
killing terrorists," writes Michael Hirsh in the National Journal.
"Under
President George W. Bush, the proportion of those killed by drones in
Pakistan who were identified in reliable news reports as civilians or
'unknowns'--people who were not identified definitively as either
civilians or militants--was around 40 percent, according to data
assembled by the New America Foundation. But the civilian and 'unknown' casualty rate (CNN)
from drone strikes has fallen steadily over the life of the program.
Under Obama that number has fallen to 16 percent. And in 2012 it was
around 11 percent," writes Peter Bergen for CNN.
"The president might begin spending the political capital needed to move remaining detainees to an alternative facility inside the United States,
as he planned in 2009, such as the facility in South Carolina where
former military detainees Yaser Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and Ali al-Marri
were held in the past, or the civilian facility in Thompson, Illinois,
that DOJ purchased last fall. It is almost impossible to imagine a
scenario for closing Guantanamo that does not involve moving some of
them here," writes CFR's Matthew Waxman with Robert Chesney in this
Lawfare blog post.
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