In a major address on national security and counterterrorism at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., last Thursday, President Barack Obama declared that America is at a crossroads and “this is the moment to ask ourselves hard questions — about the nature of today’s threats and how we should confront them.”
He said that after the elimination of Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking leaders, al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat and its regional affiliates — in places like Iraq, Yemen, and North Africa — pose regional threats to U.S. interests abroad, not direct threats to the U.S. homeland. He argued that homegrown terrorism, such as Boston Marathon bombing, is a more likely threat to the continental United States than foreign terrorists. “We have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11,” he said.
Obama also spoke about the U.S. use of remote-operated drones — which he said was both effective in combatting al-Qaeda and legal under international law. But, he said, “to say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance.” He said that U.S. drones have killed four America citizens abroad who had been identified as enemy combatants, but said that no U.S. citizen should be targeted without due process and no U.S. military drones would operate over U.S. territory.
Obama said that while U.S. drone operations would continue in the Afghanistan war theater (which includes northern Pakistan) under current rules, new oversight measures would be instituted for drone use in other parts of the world.
Ben Emmerson, the United Nations human rights special rapporteur who has been conducting an investigation into drone use since January, told the BBC that Obama’s new policy “sets out more clearly and more authoritatively than ever before the administration’s legal justifications for targeted killing, and the constraints that it operates under.”
Finally, Obama said that congressional restrictions that have prevented him from closing the Guantánamo Bay military detention facility should be lifted, allowing military commissions to try detainees on U.S. soil.
You can read more about the debate on the use of U.S. drones in the May issue of International Debates and about the Guantánamo Bay Detainees in the January 2012 and April 2006 issues of International Debates. For more information on the legal issues surrounding the detention of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, read the January 2008 and September 2004 issues of Supreme Court Debates. For a White House-provided fact sheet on his speech, click here.
