To the Editor:
Re “Not All Targeted Killings Are the Same. Hegseth’s Boat Strikes Are Illegal,” by Jeh C. Johnson (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 9):
There is much to agree with in Mr. Johnson’s essay. The recent lethal American strikes on boats in the Caribbean, which are not part of an armed conflict, are illegal. They are murders. But when Mr. Johnson, a former Obama administration official, insists that there is “a world of legal and moral differences” that separate these attacks from the targeted killings that the Obama administration regularly engaged in, he’s not telling the complete story.
First, Mr. Johnson’s defense of President Barack Obama’s strikes — well more than 500 of them, which killed nearly 4,000 people, including as many as 800 civilians — boils down to his claims that officials in that administration took the law seriously, and engaged in remote-control killings only after soberly determining that they were “necessary to protect American lives.”
But because the Obama administration (like the Bush administration before it) vigorously argued against the ability of the courts to review its actions — even when it intentionally killed a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaqi — it handed President Trump a loaded weapon whose use or abuse is left only to the judgments (sound or not) of executive branch lawyers and the president himself.
Second, Mr. Johnson’s blanching at the Trump administration’s refusal to release the Office of Legal Counsel memorandum authorizing the boat strikes is hard to take seriously. For years, Obama officials insisted that the legal reasoning for the drone program could not be disclosed. It refused claims from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and this newspaper that, as Mr. Johnson now seems to agree, “constitutional law is not classified.” Though a court did ultimately release a redacted version of the memo in the al-Awlaqi killing, most of these drone memos remain classified.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, administrations of both parties have aggressively carved out almost unlimited executive powers in the realm of national security. To reckon with the horror of the ongoing boat strikes, we also must acknowledge that executive impunity works for the bad guys, too.
Brett Max Kaufman New York The writer is a senior staff attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Center for Democracy.
To the Editor:
Jeh C. Johnson’s condemnation of the Trump administration’s recent strikes on boats in the Caribbean appears to be either ironic or lacking in self-awareness.
While Mr. Johnson argues that Congress gave “implicit” authorization for the Obama administration’s targeted killings in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia — a claim many national security lawyers like me strongly disagree with — it is undeniable that this policy opened the door to what is playing out now off the coast of Latin America.
For the nearly quarter-century since the attacks of Sept. 11, the public has been primed and conditioned by a “global war on terror” to accept war without end or geographic limitation. The incineration of human beings outside areas of active hostilities, who have not been identified or tied to specific threats, let alone tried or convicted of crimes, has been normalized.
Secret legal opinions conjured by creative executive branch lawyers have twisted both domestic and international law beyond its breaking point in order to authorize torture and warrantless surveillance, and to make murder and assassination legal so long as, the public is told, the victims were bad guys who posed a threat to the United States.
Let’s be clear: Drug traffickers are not terrorists or combatants, the United States is not at war with any country in Latin America and the extrajudicial killing of civilians is always murder. Mr. Johnson is correct to condemn President Trump’s strikes, but his attempt to distinguish and exculpate himself and his Obama administration colleagues rings hollow.
J. Wells Dixon New York The writer is a senior staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights.
To the Editor:
During my time as a law enforcement officer, I was forbidden to use deadly force against fleeing felons and justified to use it only when someone posed a grave and imminent threat to my life or another person’s life. Otherwise, the use of such force would be an extrajudicial killing — essentially, carrying out a death penalty without a trial.
I agree with Jeh C. Johnson when he concludes, “We must now summon the strength of our convictions to look in the mirror and hold ourselves to the same standards.” Indeed, we should adhere to the laws of ethics rather than enact the laws of force and unbridled violence.
Tobias Winright Maynooth, Ireland The writer is a professor of moral theology at St. Patrick’s Pontifical University who specializes in the ethics of war and peace.
The post Trump’s Drone Strikes Are Wrong. Obama’s Were, Too appeared first on New York Times.
