White House: Rules Limiting Drone Attacks To Avoid Civilians Don't Apply In Syria

[Mike]

When the US finally set up some "rules" for its extrajudicial killing-via-drones (after years of no rules at all, which allowed the CIA to "acquire a taste for killing people with drones"), one of the "rules" was that drone bombs wouldn't be used unless there was a "near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured." As President Obama noted, this was "the highest standard we can set" to avoid civilian casualties via drones. This high standard upset some bloodthirsty hawks like Rep. Mike Rogers, who saw things like actually trying to prevent civilian casualties as unnecessary "red tape." And, in fact, soon after the rules were in place, the Obama administration itself started realizing that it didn't really like the restrictions it put on itself.

So it's just going to ignore them. Last week, we wrote about how the administration has been redefining pretty much everything to justify the attacks on Syria, including what is meant by "civilian." However, even with that new definition, they've run into some very obvious problems: namely that there's increasing evidence that (despite repeated denials) the bombings did, in fact, kill civilians.

No problem, apparently, for the Obama administration, which has now decided that the very rules it set up in the past to avoid killing civilians with drones... no longer matter. Basically, it looks like the Obama administration just added a big fat asterisk to the "near-certainty" standard for civilian deaths, whereby those rules can be ignored... because the Obama administration says "this is different."

At the same time, however, Hayden said that a much-publicized White House policy that President Obama announced last year barring U.S. drone strikes unless there is a “near certainty” there will be no civilian casualties — "the highest standard we can meet," he said at the time — does not cover the current U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

The “near certainty” standard was intended to apply “only when we take direct action ‘outside areas of active hostilities,’ as we noted at the time,” Hayden said in an email. “That description — outside areas of active hostilities — simply does not fit what we are seeing on the ground in Iraq and Syria right now.”

It's not much of a rule when you can exempt it based on... deciding to exempt it.

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Originally Published: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 17:15:24 GMT
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