WASHINGTON – The Obama administration has made targeted drone strikes a key tool in fighting al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, but the secrecy surrounding the controversial program means that journalists have a difficult time investigating the attacks.
Perceptions of the drone program are shaped by the media, whose access to relevant information is limited, according to a recent National Security Law Journal-sponsored panel of journalists and scholars at George Mason University.
U.S. targeted drone strikes resulted in the killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud was in October. Source: flickr
“The reporting environment is shaped by secrecy and paranoia,” said Tara McKelvey, a panelist and BBC national security reporter. The Obama White House, McKelvey said, values secrecy more than previous administrations.
McKelvey has written extensively on the questions surrounding the legality of targeted drone killings and noted the difficulty in obtaining information. For example, gaining access to Creech Air Force base in Nevada, where remotely piloted aircrafts around the globe are controlled, is nearly impossible.
Targeted drone killings have resulted in the deaths of wanted terrorists across the world, notably and recently of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in October.
Such high-profile killings demand media attention, panelists said.
“Even the congressional intelligence committees, which exist to be told about these secret programs, had to fight to get a temporary look at the Justice Department’s legal opinion justifying, for example, the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the only American who has been deliberately targeted and killed,” said Scott Shane, a New York Times national security reporter.
Shane has questioned the administration’s claims about drone program for years. He and colleague Charlie Savage filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the Justice Department to obtain a 2010 document from the Office of Legal Counsel that discusses the justification for targeted killing of Americans, NPR reported earlier this year.
The panelists also noted that the drone strike program lends itself to an asymmetrical advantage if there is not adequate media attention —the fighting is not human-to-human but rather seductively billed as using pinpoint precision and not involving U.S. troop casualties, thus it is able to change the nature of warfare.
James Carafano, a national security and foreign policy expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservation think tank, said there is not much need for debate over the drone program as long as the use of force is proportional to the task and as long as civilian lives are spared.
“This technology absolutely fits totally and cleanly and easily under the existing laws of land warfare, which derive from a just war tradition, which we’ve been working under for centuries,” Carafano said.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New America Foundation estimate that there have been 3,149 drone-related fatalities in Pakistan since 2004—and that high-profile targets accounted for 49 fatalities, or less than 2 percent, but deaths of children have amounted to 175, or 5.6 percent.
The cost in civilian lives is cause for concern, and the government needs to be more transparent if it wishes to have the support of the American people, the two journalists said.
A July 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center revealed that 61 percent Americans approve of the use of drones, and among the 39 countries surveyed, that number was the second highest only to Israel, which, along with China, is the only other country in the world with a drone program.
“We’re beginning to have the debate that, as a reporter who advocates for the freedom of information, I would have thought that we’d want to have some time ago,” Shane said.
One solution to provide more oversight that was posed during the discussion was the creation of a robust Inspector General’s office specifically assigned to the drone program, which would audit the program and report its findings. “That is great idea,” McKelvey said, adding later that such oversight would help hold the government accountable.
“I want people to know about what the program is,” McKelvey said. “I want government officials to think about what they’re doing.”
