At the end of March, Harold Koh, top lawyer at the State Department, used his keynote address at the annual confab of the American Society for International Law to make an announcement: the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to kill suspected terrorists is legal. The drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan are lawful because, Koh delineated, they are done only in national self-defense, their proportionality is always precisely calibrated, and they carefully discriminate civilians from combatants.
There’s both more and less to it than that, but the legal argument itself is of minor importance. What matters is that Koh said it. Harold Hongju Koh: renowned human rights advocate; leading theorist of international law (which, the ASIL conventioneers would happily have told you, is much more civilized than mere national law); until last year dean of Yale Law School and therefore unofficial pope of the American legal system, and former director of the school’s Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights; Obama appointee accused by Glenn Beck and likeminded screamers of wanting to smuggle Sharia law into U.S. courts. All of which is to say, if a liberal lion like Harold Koh says drone strikes are lawful, what more do you need to know?
Koh’s lecture—warmly applauded by the conventioneers—demonstrates once again the amazing elasticity of international law when it comes to the prerogatives of great powers. Koh’s lecture also demonstrates the accommodating suppleness of several international lawyers who, once strong critics of George W. Bush’s anti-terror policies, now see things differently from inside the Obama administration. For Harold Koh had been one of the strongest and most prestigious voices raised against the post-9/11 policies of Bush and Cheney. From his throne at Yale Law, he inveighed against the unlawful use of torture, against the unlawful invasion of Iraq, against the unlawful detentions at Guantanamo. (He has argued that the U.S. risks a permanent spot on the “axis of disobedience” for its chronic flouting of international law.) If it had been W. intensifying the drone strikes in Central Asia, one can easily imagine Koh condemning this practice as another brazen violation of international law. What happened?
I might whimper a little bit though.
watching you squirm, whine and pout since your first log entry here in current events....Congrats...You have recently taking over Tie, BaBa, and Moreluck as most frequent visitor here crying over a fair and square Democratic process....
