National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 1
OVERSIGHT FOR EFFECTIVENESS: A COUNTERTERRORISM
PERSPECTIVE ON THE TARGETED KILLINGS “WHITE PAPER”
Joshua Foust is a researcher based in Washington DC, a former senior intelligence analyst for
the U.S. military, and author of a national security column for PBS. His website is
http://www.joshuafoust.com/.
IN FEBRUARY 2013, a Department of Justice White Paper was leaked, making publicly
available for the first time a summary of two legal memos setting out the legal details of the
administration’s justification for targeted killing of American citizens.
The paper’s scope is explicitly limited to decisions targeting U.S. citizens who meet three
criteria:
1. An informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted
individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;
2. Capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture
becomes feasible; and
3. The operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war
principles.
Despite these limitations on scope, the White Paper implicitly raises broader questions about the
structure, policies, legal framework and ultimate effectiveness of the targeted killing program as
a whole. These questions are often discussed in the context of legality and constitutionality, this
paper looks at them from the point of view of counterterrorism effectiveness.
If the targeted killing program is structured
so that it is not as effective as it should be,
and its legal foundation is presented in such
a way that political opposition becomes
overwhelming, then supporters of remote
warfare and targeted killing should be at
least as concerned as opponents with the
issues analyzed in this policy brief.
By Joshua Foust
February 2013
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 2
Below are five key concerns raised by this
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) White
Paper, and how those questions will affect
the long-term outlook and viability of the
targeted killing program. It is important to
note that they demand response from both
the executive and legislative branches. The
effectiveness, legal and ethical challenges
are complex, and a successful response will
be as well.
Public ability to assess the program
is essential to the effectiveness of a
broader counterterrorism strategy.
Counterterrorism professionals need
the ability to capture, detain,
interrogate and try as well as target
and kill.
Public confidence about
accountability is also a key
component of long-term support for
drone programs.
Counterterrorism professionals need
clarity about legal authorities and
their own responsibilities, duties,
limits and protections.
Broad legitimacy of the program will
also require greater clarity about the
authority under which strikes are
conducted and where the United
States is “at war.”
Public Assessment of Effectiveness is Key
for… Effectiveness
An underlying assumption of the White
Paper is that some aspects of the terrorist
threat can only be managed by targeted
strikes. The White Paper explicitly invokes
as a justification for the program “the
extraordinary seriousness of the threat posed
by senior operational al Qa’ida members and
the loss of life that would result were there
operations successful” (p. 1).
But the U.S. counterterrorism community
internally, and its observers externally, in
the U.S. and overseas, need to be able to
gauge the effectiveness of targeted strikes:
internally, to best allocate increasingly
scarce resources; domestically, to assure
American citizens that their government is
using the best data-driven policies available
to protect them; and globally, to protect the
foundational legitimacy of U.S. security
policy, and make a convincing argument to
global publics that they benefit as well.
In the narrowest sense, the effectiveness of
drone strikes is obvious: the individual
successfully targeted will not plan any more
attacks.
But from a broad perspective, the publicly
available data from which drone strikes’
effectiveness can be judged is extremely
poor. Neither the White Paper, nor other
administration responses to queries about
the results of strikes and how they are
measured, suggests that data available to
planners and lawyers inside government is
much better.
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 3
The difficulty of verifying or disputing data
about any given strike; the lack of clear
standards and agreement in or outside
government on what constitutes
effectiveness; and the focus of public
discussion on civilian casualty rates, which
while a critical legal and moral issue may
not correlate directly with effectiveness, all
have limited analysts’ ability to draw
scholarly conclusions about the value of
drone strikes.
Three databases are usually referenced in
drone studies: the New America Foundation
(NAF) i and the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism (TBIJ)ii are cited the most often,
and the Long War Journal (LWJ)iii
is cited
less frequently. All three have serious flaws.
The NAF and TBIJ databases rely on media
reports to plot the frequency and location of
drone strikes. The statistics they report are
not directly collected at the scene, nor are
their data verifiable, despite claims to the
contrary:iv
there are no public records to
crosscheck any drone strike or the resulting
fatalities.
Researchers have suggested measuring the
effectiveness of drone strikes indirectly,
either by tallying the numbers of attempted
and successful terror attacks over time or by
looking at the reported size and strength of
the extremist group targeted.
In a working paper, RAND political scientist
Patrick B. Johnston and UCLA postdoctoral
fellow Anoop K. Sarbahi analyze a large
dataset from drone strikes in Pakistan.v They
correlate reported acts of militancy with
reported drone strikes using standard
statistical methodology. The researchers find
that an increase in the number of drone
strikes strongly correlates with a decrease in
the frequency and lethality of terrorist
attacks, specifically those conducted by
means of improvised explosive devices
(IEDs) or suicide. The analysis and results
are controlled for “local effects and pre-
existing trends in militant attacks.” The
scholars conclude that drone strikes are
strongly associated with decreases in
militant violence.
It would appear that drone strikes have
worked to lower the threat from some
Pakistani terror groups, in the limited
context of the legally and politically separate
Federally Administered Tribal Areas of
Pakistan, the only area where drones fire
their weapons.
At the same time, across Pakistan drone
strikes have been effectively leveraged by
elites to generate deep anti-Americanism.
Pakistanis develop profoundly negative
opinions of the strikes the more their media
and political elites criticize them.vi
Such
opposition is, in part, due to how little
information about success with drone strikes
is relayed to the Pakistani public. Initial
survey work among Pakistani youth
suggests that highlighting successful strikes
against known terrorists generates support
for drone strikes.
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 4
Indeed, the attitude Pakistanis tend to have
toward drone strikes is somewhat fluid and
dependent on how strikes are presented.vii
Estimates of civilian deaths vary wildly.
One Pakistani researcher in 2009 estimated
that over 98% of deaths from drones strikes
in Pakistan were civilians.viii
Meanwhile the
U.S. government’s reported policy of
counting all military-age males as
combatants results in extremely low civilian
casualty claims from Washington.
Brookings’ Madiha Nfzal argues that these
large discrepancies fuel anti-Americanism
among the educated, elite middle-class
Pakistanis who “the U.S. counts on to serve
as a counterweight to the radical segments
of Pakistani society.”ix
They also, of course,
make up the ruling class whose
acquiescence makes the drone strikes
possible – suggesting that greater
transparency and documentation will be
essential not just to public support for the
program, but to the very continuation of the
program.
This dichotomy –the mostly-unknown
successes of the program and well-known
elite counter-messaging – suggests that
keeping data about drones in Pakistan secret
is actually making the program
unsustainable in the long run.
The White Paper was drafted to address not
Pakistan but Yemen, specifically to address
targeting Anwar al Awlaki, a U.S. citizen
who joined al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP). In Yemen, analysts have
even less data to work with than in Pakistan.
One indirect way to measure effectiveness is
to look at the reported size of AQAP over
time.
At the end of 2009 Yemeni officials
estimated that there were 300 or so AQAP
fighters in Yemen.x By early 2012, U.S.
officials, including John Brennan, estimated
AQAP had grown to nearly 1,000
members.xi
Since that estimation, the
Yemeni government undertook a massive
“clearing” operation through the southern
towns AQAP had occupied, leaving the
terrorist movement scattered throughout the
barren countryside.xii
Drone strikes have
killed an unknown number of AQAP
operatives, including three named as
“operators” by Brennan: Ammar al-Wa’ili,
Abu Ali al-Harithi, and Ali Saleh Farhan. xiii
Since then, no U.S. official has publicly
estimated AQAP’s size or strength. Critics
of the drone strikes still appeal to the largest
number to suggest the drone campaign has
been ineffective.xiv
Here again, the lack of
information available to US or global
publics threatens to undermine the key
argument the White Paper uses to justify
targeted strikes: not only is the threat grave,
but it requires immediate violent action.
This is perhaps even more crucial outside
the U.S. than at home; populations living
under the threat of strikes must believe that
the U.S. operations are working to secure
them from threats, in order to isolate al
Qaeda and its affiliates from the very
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 5
population they rely on for support. As the
U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy states:
We will put forward a
positive vision of
engagement with foreign
publics and support for
universal rights that
demonstrates that the United
States aims to build while al-
Qa‘ida would only destroy.xv
Kill or Capture? Clarify Options
Available to Counter-Terrorism
Professionals
The White Paper says that targeted strikes
are an option when capture is “infeasible.”
…[C]apture would not be feasible if
it could not be physically effectuated
during the relevant window of
opportunity or if the relevant country
were to decline to consent to a
capture operation. Other factors
such as undue risk to U.S. personnel
conducting a potential capture
operation also could be relevant.
Feasibility would be a highly fact-
specific and potentially time-
sensitive inquiry [pg. 8].
Because of the particular constitutional
concerns surrounding the targeting of
American citizens, the White Paper
contextualizes this difficulty-of-capture
argument into a broader discussion of the
imminency of threats. The White Paper
explicitly states that “An 'imminent' threat of
violent attack against the United States does
not require … clear evidence that a specific
attack on U.S. persons and interests will take
place in the immediate future.”
Such a broad definition of immediacy
expands considerably the number of
instances where capture will be “infeasible.”
It is also not a new concept within U.S. law.
Senior government officials have made
similar arguments with regard to terrorist
threats going back at least to 1984 remarks
by then-Secretary of State George Schultz
and a 1989 speech by then-State Department
Legal Adviser Abraham Sofaer.xvi
Regardless, it is clear the incentives of the
war on terrorism favor killing over
capturing. Neither the governments of
Pakistan nor Yemen have granted the U.S.
permission to carry out unilateral capture
missions, nor has either government
demonstrated great interest in capturing the
individuals currently targeted by drone
strikes. Breaking such an impasse might be
impossible; the diplomacy involved would
be intricate, extremely time consuming, and
likely to fail.xvii
The White Paper notes that “undue risk to
U.S. personnel” also limits the feasibility of
capturing terrorist suspects. Mary Beth
Leonard, the U.S. ambassador to Mali,
suspended manned surveillance flights over
Mali in 2012 over fears that the flight crews
could be endangered should they crash and
be captured by militants.xviii
The size and
likely casualties, military and civilian, of
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 6
forces which could carry out capture
missions are all significant issues.
But part of the kill-vs-capture problem
begins at home. When U.S. sailors captured
Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali
militant, in international waters, members of
Congress objected to his being transferred to
a civilian court in the U.S. for trial.xix
Terrorism experts and practitioners have
spoken explicitly about how this
Congressional backlash, and subsequent
legislative initiatives making it difficult or
impossible to hold suspects on US soil, try
them in US courts, and release them if that is
deemed in US interests, creates an
additional, powerful incentive not to capture
suspected terrorists.xx
The implications for the practice of
counterterrorism of this discussion are
enormous. Counter-terrorism (CT)
professionals will often face the choice of
invoking “imminence” as defined in the
White Paper, or risk seeing a suspect
disappear. Their ability to bring in and
question top operatives privately is very
limited; and their ability to use one of the
U.S.’s greatest perceived assets, the
professionalism, incorruptibility and
effectiveness of its court system, is now
non-existent. Finally, whatever the various
intentions of Congressional and Executive
Branch decision-makers, the risk of the
world – and especially target publics in
affected societies – perceiving that the U.S.
government would rather kill terror suspects
that prove their guilt is significant.
Paradoxically, by granting the targeted
killing program greater freedom to operate,
this set of norms risks covering up other
inflexibilities that will fatally undermine
U.S. ability to uproot whole networks as
well as destroying individual cells or
operatives.
How Accountability Can Lead to
Sustainability
The White Paper argues that the review of
“an informed, high-level official of the U.S.
government” (pg. 1) is sufficient to
determine a U.S. citizen can be targeted for
killing. Yet this assertion raises a series of
questions about executive power and
accountability. The Senate Select
Committee for Intelligence and the House
Permanent Select Committee for
Intelligence both review the strikes to some
degree in monthly meetings. But elected
representatives publicly voice their
frustration in getting much information
about the program from the White House. At
the recent SSCI hearing on John Brennan’s
nomination to be Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, Senators raised many
questions about how the targeted killing
program can be made accountable.
Chairman Senator Dianne Feinstein
complained that her staffs were excluded
from reading additional memos explaining
how the program works.xxi
The White Paper explicitly applies only to
the case of a U.S. citizen being targeted, and
explicitly says that it does not treat larger
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 7
questions about accountability. Yet these
questions may be critical to support for and
sustainability of the program, abroad and at
home.
The White House has enjoyed strong public
support for its targeted killing program.
Drone strikes, even against American
citizens, have been popular for years, though
that support began to drop in 2012.xxii
A new
poll at the end of 2012 suggested a sharp
drop in support for drone strikes against
U.S. citizens, along with further declining
support for drone strikes overall.xxiii
This
same period of time saw an unprecedented
amount of information about the program
leaked and reported to the public, which
suggests that the more the public hears about
the program the less it likes drone strikes.
Three central issues underlie the discussion
of accountability – both from the point of
view of public legitimacy and for the
counterterrorism professionals who carry out
the policy to know that they are acting
legally.
What is the appropriate legal
authority for strikes?
The different organizations that
operate drones operate under
different sections of U.S. law. The
Central Intelligence Agency operates
under one section of national
security law (Title 50)xxiv
while the
Joint Special Operations Command
operates under another (Title 10).xxv
When both agencies are involved,
operations are sometimes called Title
60 operations. Despite confusion
about both sections of law, they are
mutually reinforcing when
undertaking classified operations.xxvi
Moreover, both sections of the law
require different methods of legal
oversight and congressional or public
accountability for strikes. The
administration should be more
upfront about how it is applying the
law and when different authorities
apply.
What is the appropriate level of
secrecy?
While all drone strikes outside of
traditional warzones like
Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are
classified to various degrees, they are
protected from public disclosure in
different ways. The CIA tends to
engage in what are known covert
strikes,xxvii
meaning that the CIA’s
involvement is supposed to be a
secret (also called “deniable”
strikes). The military, through JSOC,
tends to engage in clandestine
strikes, meaning that the strikes
themselves are supposed to be
hidden from the public (also called
“hidden”). The reality is that neither
type of classification is feasible or
even believable: the strikes
themselves are not hidden in any real
way, and the official denialsxxviii
that
they occur beggar belief.
Declassifying the program is
unlikely, but the way secrecy is
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 8
handled needs to adapt to the
public’s current level of
understanding.
How can innocents be shielded
from abuse of the system?
The White Paper reveals that the
decision to place individuals on a
targeting list, and then to strike
against that individual, are handled
entirely within the executive branch.
Specifically, it says that a “well-
informed, senior official” can make
the determination to strike on his or
her own. The White Paper raises
serious questions about how people
who might be misidentified as being
targetable can either seek redress or
removal from the list. In addition,
should noncombatants be killed in a
strike – and some number have – the
victims have no way to seek
compensation, redress, or justice
from the targeters or officials who
approved the strike.
Accountability poses additional operational
challenges: will strikes be reviewed
beforehand, or after? How does one avoid
needlessly second-guessing strike decisions
while maintaining appropriate oversight? If
the drones program becomes seen by other
countries as basically illegal, then the U.S.
will lose a critical freedom of operation if it
needs to target terrorists in a region as
airspace and access to ground lines of
communication get restricted by host
governments.
Ambiguity and its Effects on
Counterterrorism Professionals
The White Paper does not clarify, and in
some ways further confuses, questions that
have arisen about the legal status of drone
strikes, and the operators, pilots and
planners who conduct and approve them.
Quite apart from questions of legality, which
are not treated here, this ambiguity could
potentially have chilling effect on future
operations.
For example, there is debate over whether
drone operators are legal or illegal
combatants that can affect their legal
standing outside of the U.S.xxix
Illegal or
unlawful combatants engage in armed
conflict outside the laws of war.
The White Paper argues that strikes only
happen within the bounds of the laws of
war. The UN, however, has disputed that
assertion repeatedly for several years.xxx
In
2012, the UN special rapporteur on
counterterrorism and human rights, Ben
Emmerson, launched an investigation into
certain targeted strikes to gauge whether
they really do conform to the laws of armed
conflict.xxxi
If drone operators (or even U.S. officials)
are found to be unlawful combatants, they
might be subject to arrest and trial by other
countries should they leave the U.S. When
an Italian court tried several CIA agents in
absentia for their involvement in a rendition
case, those agents were not only convicted
for their involvement, they also now cannot
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 9
travel to Europe without risking arrest.xxxii
A
similar finding for drone operators might
also leave them essentially trapped within
the U.S., unable to leave for fear of being
arrested to serve prison time for illegal
combat activity.
Also at issue, again, is whether the operators
are military or civilian: they operate under
different sections of law. The civilians
running the CIA’s drone program might be
illegal combatants (though the question has
never been subjected to judicial review). Air
Force JAG officers have suggested that
military drone operators are legal
combatants and thus can be retaliated
against by other legal combatants (like the
uniformed military of an adversary).xxxiii
Left operating in an ambiguous legal
context, personnel participating in targeted
strikes may face additional stresses from
reduced morale and fear of travel; over time
this could also result in extreme risk-
aversion in counterterrorism bureaucracies,
which would severely limit effectiveness.
The Problem of the Authorization for Use
of Military Force
The White Paper identifies its strike
authority as emanating from three sources:
the original Authorization for the Use of
Military Force (AUMF),xxxiv
passed after the
September 11th
2001 attacks; the President’s
duty to defend the nation under Article II of
the Constitution; and the right to self-
defense contained in international
humanitarian law.
It is unclear to legal scholars and Congress,
much less the general public, how these
three different authorizes relate to and affect
each other.
As a consequence the program seems to
exist a vague status of multiple overlapping
authorities. For example, it is unclear if the
White House views its authority to launch
strikes as existing separately from the
AUMF. Senator Ron Wyden has been
asking the White House for at least a year to
clarify whether authority comes from Article
II or the AUMF, and has not received an
answer.xxxv
These overlapping authorities
make it more difficult to resolve the
effectiveness concerns outlined above, and
create additional bureaucratic uncertainty.
Congress, too, has a role to play in settling
these authority questions. The AUMF
Congress passed calls for the president to
use “all necessary and appropriate means” to
prevent such attacks from happening again.
Congress did not limit the authorization by
time or geography, leaving it open-ended
and applicable globally. Such an unbounded
declaration of conflict largely excludes
Congress from authorizing much oversight.
A full discussion of the legality of the
AUMF is outside the scope of this paper, but
there is a growing legal and political
consensus that future counterterrorism
operations will require additional legal
authorization from Congress.
The White Paper claims that, if strikes are
not covered by the AUMF, they fall under
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 10
the President’s Article II responsibilities to
defend the country. Yet Jack Goldsmith, a
Harvard Law Professor and former assistant
attorney general under President Bush, has
argued that the President’s Article II powers
may not be sufficient on their own to justify
attacking groups beyond the original al
Qaeda.xxxvi
This is a critical question of authority,
especially if there is to be an effort to
coalesce authority for the program into a
single, clear, politically sustainable
argument.
Neither the problem posed by terrorist
groups, nor the technology that has enabled
drone strikes, are going away. A program
with such a global scope, and such political
consequences abroad, cannot continue in
secret if the United States hopes to maintain
broad legitimacy for its actions.
i New America Foundation. “The Year of the Drone: An Analysis of U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan, 2004-
2013,”
http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones. ii The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “Covert
War on Terror – the Data,”
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/proje
cts/drone-data/ . iii
The Long War Journal, “Charting the Data for U.S.
Airstrikes in Pakistan, 2004 – 2012,”
http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php . iv The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “Covert
U.S. Strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somali – our
Methodology,” The Bureau of Investigative
Journalism. August 10, 2011.
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/pa
kistan-drone-strikes-the-methodology2 . v Patrick B. Johnston and Anoop K. Sarbahi. “The
Impact of U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorism in
Pakistan,” working paper, 3 January 2013,
http://patrickjohnston.info/materials/drones.pdf . vi Karl Kaltenthaler, William Miller, and C. Christine
Fair, “The Drone War: Pakistani Public Attitudes
toward American Drone Strikes in Pakistan,”
Working Paper, April 2012,
http://www.uakron.edu/dotAsset/4823799c-34eb-
4b4f-992e-ac4a2261e0c4.pdf . vii
Adeline Delavande and Basit Zafar, “How Deeply
Held Are Anti-American Attitudes Among Pakistani
Youth? Evidence Using Experimental Variation in
Information,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Staff Report No. 558, 01 April 2012,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2
043148 . viii
http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_tt
news%5Btt_news%5D=37165%20 ix
Madiha Nafzal, “Drone Strikes and Anti-
Americanism in Pakistan,” Brookings, 7 February
2013,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/02
/07-drones-anti-americanism-pakistan-afzal . x Stefano Ambrogi, “Yemen Says May Harbor Up to
300 Qaeda Suspects,” Reuters, 29 December 2009,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/12/29/us-
yemen-qaeda-minister-idUSTRE5BS2NR20091229 . xi
Pam Benson, “New terrorist plot to attack plane
foiled,” CNN, 07 May 2012,
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/07/world/meast/yeme
n-qaeda-plot/ . xii
Joshua Foust, “Yes, Sometimes Drones Are
Effective,” The Atlantic, 24 July 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/201
2/07/yes-sometimes-drones-are-actually-
effective/260260/ . xiii
John O. Brennan, “Ensuring al-Qa'ida's Demise,”
remarks at Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced
International Studies, 29 June 2011,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-
office/2011/06/29/remarks-john-o-brennan-assistant-
president-homeland-security-and-counter. xiv
Geoff Dyer, “Brennan hearing exposes divisions
on drones,” The Financial Times, 08 February 2012,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0a7da420-7217-11e2-
89fb-00144feab49a.html#axzz2KcPbLoYO . xv
National Strategy for Counterterrorism, June 2011
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/counter
terrorism_strategy.pdf . xvi
Kenneth Anderson, “The U.S. Government
Position on Imminence and Active Self-Defense,”
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 11
Lawfare Blog, 07 February 2013,
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/02/the-us-
government-position-on-imminence-and-active-self-
defense/ . xvii
Joshua Foust, “War on Terror Should Focus on
Captures, Not Killings,” Bloomberg, 14 January
2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-
14/war-on-terror-should-focus-on-captures-not-
killings.html . xviii
Anne Gearan and Craig Whitlock, “Panetta
‘confident’ that U.S. will clear legal hurdles to
helping France in Mali,” The Washington Post, 16
January 2013,
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-
16/world/36384541_1_malian-government-spy-
plane-surveillance-drones . xix
Charlie Savage, “U.S. to Prosecute a Somali
Suspect in Civilian Court,” The New York Times, 05
July 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/world/africa/06
detain.html . xx
Steve Coll, “Dead or Alive?,” New York Review of
Books, 25October 2012
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/2
5/bin-laden-dead-or-alive/?pagination=false xxi
Ryan J. Reilly, “Drones Memo Not Shared With
Senate Staffers: Dianne Feinstein,” Huffington Post,
07 February 2013,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/drones-
memo_n_2639610.html . xxii
Scott Wilson and Jon Cohen, “Poll Finds Broad
Support for Obama’s Counterterrorism Policies,” The
Washington Post, 08 February 2012,
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-02-
08/politics/35445649_1_drone-program-support-for-
drone-strikes-drone-policy . xxiii
Ashley Killough, “Poll: Americans back drone
attacks, but not on U.S. citizens abroad,” CNN, 07
February 2013,
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/07/poll-
americans-back-drone-attacks-but-not-on-u-s-
citizens-abroad/ . xxiv
U.S. House of Representatives. “50 USC Chapter
4 – Espionage,” U.S. House of Representatives
Downloadable U.S. Code,
http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/50C4.txt . xxv
U.S. House of Representatives, “10 USC Title 10
– Armed Forces,” U.S. House of Representatives
Downloadable U.S. Code,
http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/10T.txt .
xxvi
Andru Wall, “Demystifying the Title 10-Title 50
Debate: Distinguishing Military Operations,
Intelligence Activities & Covert Action,” Harvard
Law School National Security Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 1,
2011, http://harvardnsj.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/Vol.-3_Wall1.pdf . xxvii
A discussion of how the CIA envisions itself
handling covert operations can be found in Nicholas
Dujmovic, “U.S. Covert Operations and Cold War
Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare, and the CIA,
1945-53,” Center for the Study of Intelligence, Vol.
54, No. 1, 2010, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-
for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-
studies/studies/volume-54-number-1/u.s.-covert-
operations-and-cold-war-strategy.html . xxviii
Paul Harris, “ACLU Takes CIA to Court as
Agency Denies Existence of Drone Programme,” The
Guardian, 19 September 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/19/aclu-
us-drone-programme-court . xxix
Gary Solis, “CIA Drone Attacks Produce
America's Own Unlawful Combatants,” Washington
Post, 12 March 2010,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010031103653.ht
ml . xxx
UN News Centre, “UN Human Rights Expert
Questions Targeted Killings and Use of Lethal
Force,” 20 October 2011,
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=401
36&Cr=heyns&Cr1#.USkwz-uY5XA . xxxi
Owen Bowcott, “UN to Investigate Civilian
Deaths from U.S. Drone Strikes,” The Guardian, 25
October 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/25/un-
inquiry-us-drone-strikes . xxxii
Naomi O’Leary, “Italy Court Upholds
‘Rendition’ Convictions on ex-CIA Agents,” Reuters,
19 September 2012,
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-09-
19/news/sns-rt-us-italy-usa-rendition-
verdictbre88i133-20120919_1_rendition-flights-
robert-seldon-lady-abu-omar . xxxiii
Dave Majumdar, “RPA Pilots are Valid Targets,
Experts Say,” Air Force Times, 30 May 2011,
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2011/05/air-
force-rpa-pilots-are-valid-targets-experts-say-
053011w/ . xxxiv
See the full text here:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-
107publ40/html/PLAW-107publ40.htm .
National Security Network www.nsnetwork.org (202) 289-5999 12
xxxv
Ron Wyden, “Wyden Continues to Press Justice
Department to Explain the Extent of its Authority to
Kill Americans,” 08 February 2012,
http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-
releases/wyden-continues-to-press-justice-
department-to-explain-the-extent-of-its-authority-to-
kill-americans . xxxvi
Jack Goldsmith, “What to Do About Growing
Extra-AUMF Threats?” Advancing a Free Society, 23
January 2013,
http://www.advancingafreesociety.org/the-
briefing/what-to-do-about-growing-extra-aumf-
threats/ .
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