Drone Attacks Outside the Ongoing Conflict Zone

The Obama Administration has given us just a glimpse of its legal analysis authorizing its use of drone attacks on U.S. citizens in a foreign country outside the zone of active hostilities.  And that mere glimpse contains a telling, and deeply troubling, reference to an earlier episode, Nixon's bombing of Cambodia, writes Professor Mary Dudziak (Emory), author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, in the NYT.

Dudziak points to a citation to a 1970 speech by Department of State Legal Adviser John R. Stevenson in the recently released "white paper" setting out the administration's legal justification for drone attacks.  In that speech, Stevenson argued that the U.S. had authority to take military action in Cambodia in self-defense against North Vietnamese attacks from that country.  Dudziak explains:

Since 1965, "the territory of Cambodia has been used by North Vietnam as a base of military operations," [Stevenson] told the New York City Bar Association.  "It long ago reached a level that would have justified us in taking appropriate measures of self-defense on the territory of Cambodia.  However, except for scattered instances of returning fire across the border, we refrained until April from taking such action in Cambodia."

But there was a problem:

In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more than a year earlier.  (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson knew this.)  So the Obama administration's lawyers have cited a statement that was patently false.

Here's the full paragraph from page 4 of the white paper:

The Department has not found any authority for the proposition that when one of the parties to an armed conflict plans and executes operations from a base in a new nation, an operation to engage the enemy in that location cannot be part of the original armed conflict, and thus subject to the laws of war governing that conflict, unless the hostilities become sufficiently intense and protracted in the new location.  That does not appear to be the rule of the historical practice, for example, even in a traditional international conflict [i.e., a conflict between nations].  See John R. Stevenson, Legal Adviser, Department of State, United States Military Action in Cambodia: Questions of International Law, Address before the Hammarskjold Forum of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (May 28, 1970), in 3 The Vietnam War and International Law: The Widening Context 23, 28-30 (Richard A. Falk, ed. 1972) (arguing that in an international armed conflict, if a neutral state has been unable for any reason to prevent violations of its neutrality by the troops of one belligerent using its territory as a base of operations, the other belligerent has historically been justified in attacking those enemy forces in that state).  Particularly in a non-international armed conflict, where terrorist organizations may move their base of operations from one country to another, the determination of whether a particular operation would be part of an ongoing armed conflict would require consideration of the particular facts and circumstances in each case, including the fact that transnational non-state organizations such as al-Qa'ida have no single site serving as their base of operations. [Citation omitted.]

Dudziak argues that the citation to Nixon's bombing of Cambodia illustrates a problem, instead of providing a precedent:

The Cambodia bombing, far from providing a valuable precedent for today's counterterrorism campaign, illustrates the trouble with secrecy: It doesn't work.  If Nixon had gone to Congress or announced the plan publicly, the historian Jeffrey P. Kimball has written, "there would have been an uproad."  But disclosure was ultimately forced upon him when he decided to send ground troops into Cambodia.  A new wave of giant antiwar protests erupted, and Nixon's ability to take further aggressive action became infeasible.

She writes that we expect more, and deserve more, of President Obama.

SDS