Drone Wars: The Legal Debate Continues -- The Danger Room
Last week, the State Department’s top legal adviser laid out the administration’s case for using drones to fight al Qaeda and its allies. Now the drone war is starting to generate some real legal debate.
In the new issue of Joint Force Quarterly, Amitai Etzioni, professor of international relations at The George Washington University, has a piece that outlines a moral and legal case for using drones to attack what he terms “abusive civilians” (his term for unlawful combatants). “To negate the tactical advantages abusive civilians have and to minimize our casualties, we must attack them whenever we can find them, before they attack us,” he writes. Drone strikes, he adds, “are a particularly well-suited means to serve this goal.”
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