![]() The Times reported that administration officials have advised Trump to retain another much-touted Obama rule, which says that strikes cannot take place absent “near-certainty” that civilian bystanders would not be killed. That Obama rule was already a fig leaf, as I explain shortly, but it may have been better than nothing. In an exclusive New York Times report, the Trump team rationalizes that dropping this safeguard will allow the US to kill not only the people it deems to be in the top echelon of a terrorist group but also those it considers lower-level members, even if they are far from any battlefield, and in countries such as Nigeria and the Philippines where the US is not already conducting such strikes. The Trump administration proposal, reportedly advanced by his top national security advisers, would scrap protections that Obama approved in 2013 for lethal targeting, including the core requirement that the target pose a “continuing, imminent threat” to American lives. Debates rage over how many of those were killed lawfully and how many were civilians. That’s a perilously low bar to assess a dismantling of already insufficient rules for a program that has killed thousands of people in countries including Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen-the vast majority of them during Obama’s presidency. Hartig notes that the plan is more tempered than Trump’s campaign vow to “ take out” not only Islamic State members but also their families. “Based on initial reports, it’s actually not nearly as bad as we might have feared,” Hartig writes of the proposal, which would make it easier for the United States to kill more people off the battlefield with less oversight, greater secrecy, and no due process. What Hartig largely ignores is how flaws in the existing targeted killing policy, crafted under President Barack Obama, helped pave the way for President Donald Trump to kill more civilians. In Trump’s New Drone Strike Policy: What’s Any Different? Why It Matters, Luke Hartig astutely flags some – but not all – of the key dangers in the Trump administration’s reported plan to rescind many, if not most, rules for US lethal operations against terrorism suspects outside conventional warzones. ![]()
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