The Drone Memos

Starred review from December 5, 2016
Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, examines numerous primary source documents that offer legal and ethical rationales for targeted killings by the U.S., including of American citizens on foreign soil. The Obama administration’s continued use of drones as primary weapons in the “War on Terror” has been a major disappointment to supporters of the president. Jaffer, who oversaw many of the ACLU’s cases challenging expanded government powers post-9/11, exposes the rationales by which Obama and his advisers justify their drone policy. These include public explanations, such as Obama’s 2013 remarks at the National Defense University, and classified ones, such as the 2010 Justice Department legal memo analyzing the legality of a lethal operation against Sheikh Anwar Awlaki, an American who had been dubbed the “bin Laden of the Internet.” As Jaffer notes, these justifications reflect “a deep transformation in American attitudes and society” and measure “the extent to which the perceived demands of counterterrorism have erased rule-of-law strictures that were taken for granted only a generation ago.” The documents, many of which are heavily redacted, are replete with legalese that may sound Kafkaesque to lay readers, but Jaffer more than compensates for that with a trenchant summation of the issues at hand.

October 1, 2016
A trove of documents, some heavily redacted, on the American governments evolving practice of targeted killing of terroristsand, sometimes, untargeted killing of civilians in the process.Can the U.S. government kill U.S. citizens without due process? That is the question that civil rights attorney Jaffer pressed in a legal brief filed on behalf of the family of Anwar al-Aulaqi, a Muslim cleric who had been targeted for assassination. It was a bizarre death-penalty case in which there was no indictment, the accused was in hiding overseas, and the prosecutors, who had already pronounced the sentence, were apoplectic at the suggestion that there should be anything resembling a trial, writes Jaffer. This volume collects documents broadly relevant to that case and the after-the-fact judicial review of the legal framework under which the governments actions were taken. Among them are speeches by President Barack Obama, who praised the al-Aulaqi killing as a tribute to the effectiveness of Americas intelligence-gathering services while allowing, in remarks delivered at the National Defense University, that this new technology raises profound questions. The remarks of intelligence adviser John O. Brennan are more considered; here, speaking at Harvard Law School, he presents a case for a counterterrorism framework guided by several precepts, not least the primacy of American security and of a pragmatic and not ideological policybut also upholding the core values that define us as Americans, a matter with which Jaffer finds issue. In an extensive introduction, the editor mounts a multitiered critique of national security efforts that rely on extrajudicial killing by proxy, arguing that the use of lethal force in response to non-imminent threats constitutes a violation of a jus cogens normthat is, a norm so fundamental and well settled that no departure from it is permitted. The extended redactions may put off some readers, but the collection should interest those concerned with the conduct of modern warfare, fought in the courtroom as well as on the battlefield.

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November 15, 2016
Targeting high-value enemy combatants is not a new phenomenon; however, only two U.S. presidential administrations have prosecuted this war doctrine through the use of drones. With a new U.S. administration waiting in the wings, Jaffer, deputy legal director for the ACLU, offers a timely look at the political and judicial reasonings for their use. Jaffer's extensive introduction prepares readers to review the documents and speeches that collectively set out the Obama administration's legal and policy framework for the use of drone strikes in the globalized war on terror. Many of these previously classified documents (which retain their original redactions) were released through the Freedom of Information Act at Jaffer's request on behalf of the estate of Anwar al-Aulaqui, an American Muslim cleric, and his 16-year-old son, who were killed in 2011 by separate drone strikes in Yemen. In the absence of substantive public debate on executing individuals away from hot battlefields, this book provides an insight into the government's efforts to establish legality for new methods of waging war, sometimes on its own citizens.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)