"murder in violation of the laws of war"

CIA drone operators, who do not wear the uniforms
of conventional soldiers, could theoretically be
considered war criminals and subject to prosecution
in Pakistani courts.
(Air Force photo by Senior Airman Julianne Showalter)

Pentagon Changed Military Commissions Rules to Legitimize Drone Program

According to a report by the New York Times today, the Obama administration changed a new manual on military commissions rules to accommodate its illegal drone program. Under the old rules, "murder in violation of the laws of war" was defined as killings by people who did not meet "the requirements for lawful combatancy," which would have suggested that CIA drone operators - who are not members of the military and do not wear a military uniform - could be charged with war crimes for killing individuals using drones....

"Attempts to fix the military commissions rules to protect drone operators completely miss the point. Targeting people for killing outside armed-conflict zones is illegal regardless of who operates the drones, except in narrow circumstances where lethal force is used against a person who poses a genuinely imminent threat of death or grave physical harm, and there are no other means available to prevent that threat.

"Changing the rules in order to accommodate CIA drone strikes underscores the flaws in the entire 'global war on terror' paradigm. The entire world is not a battlefield. The government cannot use quintessentially warlike measures - deploying missiles and other offensive force - anywhere in the world that it believes a suspected terrorist might be located."

A senior United Nations official is planning to call on the US to end aerial drone attacks by the Central Intelligence Agency against alleged al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan, according to the New York Times.

The call is expected to come next week, a report in the US newspaper's website said on Friday.

Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said on Thursday that he will deliver a report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, arguing that the "life and death power" of drones should be executed by regular armed forces rather than intelligence agencies.

Alston’s views will not be legally binding, and his report will not assert that the operation of combat drones by nonmilitary personnel is a war crime, he told the New York Times.

But he clarified why he was targeting only actions by the CIA, not by the U.S. military.

“With the Defense Department you’ve got maybe not perfect but quite abundant accountability as demonstrated by what happens when a bombing goes wrong in Afghanistan,” he said. “The whole process that follows is very open. Whereas if the CIA is doing it, by definition they are not going to answer questions, not provide any information, and not do any follow-up that we know about.”

Reports over the weekend suggest that the U.S. government has been struggling to justify the CIA’s counterterrorism involvement without violating the laws of war.