In claiming that the drone strikes are “legal...ethical...(and) wise”, the White House is unsuccessfully trying to stretch the interpretation of a memo of the Department of Justice (DoJ) which allows the US to kill not just foreign, but even its own nationals operating as terrorists in another country, with a lot of circumscribing ifs and buts. Its Press Secretary Jay Carney put up this defence of the use of these killer flying machines in Washington on February 5. The memo, first reported by the NBC, does not give the CIA blanket permission to use them and certainly there is no mention of non-Americans; it unambiguously relates to US nationals. It maintains that the constitution would not be violated by killing them but only if they are “senior leaders of al-Qaeda or an associated force”, they pose “an imminent threat” to the United States and their arrest is “infeasible”. While these precautions, if taken, might prove an attenuating factor for the US administration in defending the targeting of American nationals, the source that could establish these facts about a militant is, as stated in the DoJ document, just “an informal high-level official” is not likely to find favour with international jurists, even if the assumed terrorist is a US national.. Understandably, the US media has severely criticised the contents of the memo; on the other hand, the Press Secretary while rejecting the criticism said that the administration took great care in deciding to pursue an al-Qaeda terrorist to “ensure precision and to avoid loss of innocent life”. But these remarks of Mr Carney covered all drone strikes and not just those that could be directed at the US nationals. Besides, the media, the American Civil Liberties Union has cast doubts on the legitimacy of the DoJ initiative taken in “a democracy built on a system of checks and balances” and described it as “profoundly disturbing”.
The same day, Tuesday, Pakistan Ambassador to the US Sherry Rehman was also quoted by Washington Post as saying that the drone attacks were “a clear violation of our sovereignty and...of international law...(and are) operationally...counterproductive”. She emphatically denied the widespread impression that they enjoyed the tacit approval of Pakistan. “Let me assure you that since we have been in the government, there is no question of quiet complicity. There is no question of ‘wink and nod’”. She also talked of “parliamentary redline”, the resentment the drones create in society and the repercussions in the form of easy recruitment of tribesmen in the fold of militancy. Though Ms Rehman kept a façade of “upward trajectory” in the Pak-US relations, continued drone strikes cannot but leave its bad mark on the minds of the people who, in the ultimate analysis, are the formulators of government policies, internal as well as foreign. Wisdom and far-sightedness demand that these violations immediately come to end.