From Informed Comment, food for thought:

President Obama’s personal involvement in selecting the targets of covert drone strikes means he risks effectively handing a ‘loaded gun’ to Mitt Romney come November, says the co-author of a new report aimed at US policymakers.

‘If Obama leaves, he’s leaving a loaded gun: he’s set up a programme where the greatest constraint is his personal prerogative. There’s no legal oversight, no courtroom that can make [the drone programme] stop. A President Romney could vastly accelerate it,’ said Naureen Shah, associate director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at the Columbia Law School.

The president ‘personally approves every military target’ in Yemen and Somalia and around a third of targets in Pakistan, the report says. The remainder of strikes in Pakistan are decided by the CIA, so are even further from formal decision-making processes and public scrutiny.

‘We are asking President Obama to put something in writing, to disclose more, because he needs to set up the limitations of the programme before someone else takes control,’ Shah told the Bureau.

In The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions, experts from Columbia Law School and the Center for Civilians in Conflict examine the impact of the US ‘war on terror’ on the lives of civilian Pakistanis, Yemenis and Somalis caught in the crossfire. The report’s publication marks the anniversary of the assassination of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by a US drone in Yemen.

The report, which Shah said is ‘aimed squarely at policymakers’, calls on the Obama administration to justify its drone campaigns and their targets under international law. It also calls for a task force to examine what measures are in place to protect civilians.

‘The perception is that civilian casualties are not a problem. If you say otherwise, you’re accused of being naïve and being a pawn of al Qaeda… There’s an instinctual dismissal of reporting that shows there’s a casualty problem,’ said Shah.