"An approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound "

The Brookings Institution recently published some brief comments and illustrations on a Washington Post series on the Obama Administration's drone policy. Whether US law is ready for it or not, the Obama team has established a formal review process for the decision to kill a foreign national.

Brookings published a flow chart for the process, found here:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2012/wittes-byman-terrorist-threat-flowchart

On the surface, the thing seems eminently reasonable and legal. The government only kills "operational" targets who can not easily be captured and prosecuted in the United States. The rationale goes like this: if there is a really bad guy out there, we would like to capture him and try him for crimes, but if we can't we just have to kill him, right?

Maybe. But I just don't think it's as easy as all that.

As the Post article put it, "Obama administration officials at times have sought to trigger debate over how long the nation might employ the kill lists, but officials said the discussions became dead ends." In other words, they are no longer doing the deep thinking here about the moral, legal and diplomatic consequences of what they are doing. Officials admit that the targets they hit these days just are not as important or as dangerous as the targets from five years ago, but the bureaucratic momentum driving the existence of a "top 20" list makes it difficult to complete it once and for all. There will always be a "most dangerous" person, even if he's not nearly so dangerous as people we killed or imprisoned already.

Here's a thought-provoking exchange from the Post: "In one instance, Mullen, the former Joint Chiefs chairman, returned from Pakistan and recounted a heated confrontation with his counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Mullen told White House and counterterrorism officials that the Pakistani military chief had demanded an answer to a seemingly reasonable question: After hundreds of drone strikes, how could the United States possibly still be working its way through a “top 20” list?"

We still have not conducted a clear and open debate about the legality and utility of these assassinations. Too many people don't know about them or can't be bothered to think about them carefully enough. It's not so much that I worry about a slippery slope -- what will we do if we are willing to blow people up -- though that's not as silly as most slippery slope problems are. Rather, I am concerned that we as a people are changing who we are. We are now the ones who target and kill people because we can do it. I don't think that's a good idea.