Earlier this month The Intercept published a massive expose on the United States assassination-by-drone program in the Middle East. Backed by a large number of leaked documents from an anonymous military official, this leak is being compared to Edward Snowden's 2013 NSA spying leak and the earlier Chelsea Manning information published by WikiLeaks.
I encourage anyone even tangentially interested in foreign policy, global politics or basic human rights to browse through The Intercept's page on the subject and read the information they contain for yourselves. The documents are really just confirmation of information that third parties had already gathered. The United States has a list of individuals subject for "targeted killing" (apparently assassination has too negative a connotation). President Obama personally has a large degree of oversight over who is put on this list. Attempts to terminate people on the list also often have a side effect of erasing non-targeted individuals in the area.
This isn't the first time controversial usage of drones has made headlines. The 2011 execution of American citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi without a trial sparked due process concerns. Sen. Rand Paul filibustered President Obama's nomination of a new CIA director over concerns about U.S. drone policy back in 2013. Just a few weeks ago we droned a Doctors Without Borders hospital.
What separates this from previous publicity is that we now have unequivocal evidence that not only do President Obama and his top officials know about these programs and their costs in terms of (often innocent) human lives, but also that our Nobel Peace Prize laureate President has had direct oversight over each and every one of the murders.
And let's be clear: These are murders, and I'm not just talking about the innocent civilians who get counted as collateral damage. Certainly, many of our targets have been terrible people. Many of them have even been murderers themselves. But what is supposed to separate our government from these butchers is the due process of law, the classical liberal idea that people should not be punished for crimes without their day in court.
We accept that defensive actions against armed individuals who are actively threatening the lives of others are an exception to this rule, but even those same individuals when they are asleep in their beds should not be considered an imminent threat. These releases make it clear that the Obama administration has abandoned the moral high ground that comes with a justifiable defensive use of military force against active combatants. They have thoroughly embraced the use of remote control death machines to carry out the kinds of missions that any human would be sickened to be a part of.