The Intersection of Vague Disclosure and Reduced Drone Strikes

The major challenge to legitimating the shadow war against terrorists is that the Executive branch is hand-tied by its own secrecy rules, and cannot disclose what it is doing to permit Congress and the American people to judge whether it approves.  Even Executive branch officials who want to be open about what is going on (as I believe the President and many of his national security officials want to be) are prevented by secrecy rules from being entirely candid.  Officials convey information in what I recently described as “limited, abstract, and often awkward terms” that “usually raise more questions than they answer,” a problem exacerbated by the fact that “secrecy rules often preclude the administration from responding to follow-up questions, criticisms, and charges.”  Disclosures designed to enhance trust can end deepening mistrust, especially when journalists start reporting on events that don’t fit the administration’s narrative, and the administration cannot (perhaps because of secrecy rules, perhaps because the truth is uncomfortable) respond fully.  This dynamic is made worse by the fact that partial disclosures are greeted for demands for more disclosures that the government simply cannot abide. This is starting to happen with the abstractions that the President used to describe his ostensible curtailment of the war.  Ryan Goodman and Sarah Knuckey have a careful analysis of the speech that note its ambiguities and uncertainties on the geographical scope of the war, the continued use of signature strikes, the meaning of non-feasible captures as prerequisite for strikes, whether Americans “not specifically targeted” (in the President’s words) were targeted as part of a signature strike or some other reason that prevented the president from describing their deaths as accidental, whether any member of a terrorist organization or only its leaders are targetable, and the crucial meaning of phrases like “near certainly,” “imminence,” and “associated forces.”  Goodman and Knuckey conclude that these ambiguities and uncertainties make it “impossible for the public to, in the President’s words: “make informed decisions and hold the Executive Branch accountable,” and note that “until the White House releases the legal memos that explain its understanding of such terms and its legal justification for the drone program more broadly[,] there is reason to remain deeply skeptical.”  Along similar lines, Lesley Clark and Jonathan S. Landay at McClatchy compare the President’s speech with past administration speeches and conclude that the speech might imply an expansion of drone killings. Pushing in the other direction, however, is the reality that drone strikes (and their consequences) are in some senses verifiable, and the rate of strikes in both Pakistan and Yemen have dropped this year (and having been dropping for a few years in Pakistan).  In the end, the credibility of the government’s new standards might turn less on the President’s words, which by themselves cannot establish credibility, but rather on how he is perceived to use drones (and other forms of fire) in fact.  It does not follow, of course, that reduced drone strikes mean that the new standards have bite, or are constraining.  As David Cole notes in a good if perhaps-too-hopeful NYRB essay:

[The reduction in drone strikes] may reflect a diminishing number of appropriate targets. It may suggest that the administration has for some time been employing more restrictive standards. Or it may reflect increasing acceptance of the view that drone strikes have become counterproductive—a point made publically by former counterterrorism intelligence chief Dennis Blair and retired General Stanley McChrystal, who headed the US forces in Afghanistan.

There is at present a correlation between reduce-the-war rhetoric and at least the verifiable elements of Obama’s stealth war.  But as Ben suggested at the end of this post, the causes of drone strike reduction, and the duration of their reduction, and the relationship between the reduction and the rhetoric, remain unclear.