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Townhall
Deaf
Dialogue on Drones
by Steve Chapman
Mar 10, 2013
A
famous book on negotiation is
called "Getting to Yes." Sometimes, though, the better achievement is
arriving at "no." That's what Eric Holder and Rand Paul did the other
day.
It
came in a letter from the
attorney general to the Republican senator from Kentucky, which said:
"It
has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional
question: 'Does
the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an
American
not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is
no."
Until
then, the two had been
engaged in a dialogue of the deaf. On one side was Paul, suspecting
President
Barack Obama of seizing powers he has never used or asserted. On the
other was
the administration, obstinately insisting on secrecy and evading
questions it
could easily answer.
At
the center of the struggle are
armed drones -- unmanned aircraft that have been used to target alleged
terrorists abroad. Many civil libertarians treat them as though they
were
unlike any weapon known to humanity, with unique and boundless dangers.
In
fact, the chief difference
between them and missiles fired from an F-16 is they are more precise
and less
likely to kill innocents. Those traits have made them the
administration's
weapon of choice for suspected Taliban and al-Qaida operatives in
Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Yemen and beyond.
The
scope of the battlefield in the
war on terrorism is an important question, which Congress has been
reluctant to
consider. Consequently, the president has had the freedom to attack
purported
enemies wherever he chooses.
The
problem is not that these
jihadists are innocent. It's that the president should not have
unlimited
authority to decide with whom we are at war. A declaration of war on
China
would not authorize an invasion of Brazil.
But
most drone critics have
different concerns. The first is that the president used this weapon to
kill
Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen in Yemen whom it suspected of plotting
attacks
against the United States.
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
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