Badass Attorney Shoots Down the Case for Drones
Last Sunday, General Michael V. Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times called “To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone Warfare.” After an opening scene of a drone operator double-checking for nearby civilians before taking out two enemy targets, General Hayden makes the case that America’s program of remote targeted killings, while not perfect, is achieving results. It has disrupted terrorist plots and weakened Al Qaida, he wrote. Furthermore, according to intelligence that Hayden himself claims to have seen, public concerns of massive civilian casualties are overblown.
“Unmanned aerial vehicles carrying precision weapons and guided by powerful intelligence offer a proportional and discriminating response when response is necessary,” Hayden concluded. “Civilians have died, but in my firm opinion, the death toll from terrorist attacks would have been much higher if we had not taken action.”
Last week, we published a story detailing the experiences of four former members of the drone program, who have publicly criticized the manner in which the U.S. is conducting its remote control war. They describe a culture that glorified killing, even in instances when it was impossible to identify the militancy of targets, and the strange disconnect that comes with flying mission in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan from cloistered bases in Nevada. “What we did as sensor operators and pilots tears a hole in your soul,” says Brandon Bryant, one of the whistleblowers profiled in the piece. “Being in the drone program is a kind of madness that sticks to you and won’t come off.”
The attorney representing the drone whistleblowers, Jesselyn Radack, first came to prominence over a decade ago as a whistleblower herself. In 2001, she was working as an attorney and ethics adviser at the Department of Justice, when John Walker Lindh, an American citizen who fought alongside the Taliban, was captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Long story short: Lindh told the FBI that anything they got from interrogating Lindh, without the lawyer Lindh’s famiy had hired present, would not be admissible in court. But leading up to the trial, Radack’s emails about Lindh’s right to counsel disappeared and Attorney General John Ashcroft submitted evidence gathered during the interrogation, under the claim that the DOJ was unaware that Lindh had an attorney at the time. Radack went public.
She now specializes in representing whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden, and her current caseload contains about a dozen former members of the drone program. We asked for her take on Hayden’s pro-done Op-Ed.
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