President Obama and his allies are quick to denounce harsh interrogation techniques as torture, framing the renewed scrutiny of Central Intelligence Agency methods as crucial to restoring U.S. moral authority on the global stage.
They are less eager, however, to apply the same standard to the administration’s reliance on remote-controlled, targeted killings, a drone campaign that critics say invites natural comparisons to extreme interrogations employed during George W. Bush’s presidency.
And some Republicans argue that Democrats now scrambling to put the spotlight on so-called torture could find it uncomfortable if a future president forces this White House to account for secretive and far deadlier drone strikes.
“With President Obama, I support his drone policy. Suppose five or 10 years from now, a Senate report comes out and says that he’s guilty of human rights violations, he’s guilty of war crimes because of all the innocent people that were killed by drone attacks?” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “What happens to us then?”
The White House points to tighter guidelines Obama issued last year on the drone program, which gave the Pentagon more oversight of operations previously undertaken almost exclusively by the CIA.
But lawmakers still complain about being left in the dark on the drone efforts, particularly as it relates to civilian casualties and Americans being targeted overseas.
And conservatives on Sunday criticized Obama’s supporters for trumpeting the White House’s stance on torture, while ignoring perceptions of drones in Muslim-majority nations.
“We’ve not had these tactics for six years,” former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said on “Meet the Press” of “torture” techniques.” “We haven’t had a major attack in six years.”
To which Dan Senor, a former foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney replied, “You know what we have been doing? We’ve been using drones to blow up terror operatives — and their families at picnics and weddings.”
Even Bush administration officials under fire for the CIA techniques during their tenure are now calling out Obama on drones.
“It seems to me what’s more harmful to this country are the drone attacks,” said former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
“Waterboarding may hurt our standing in the world community. The way the drone program is operated has equal damage — but even more so [because] when you kill a high-level operative, you lose the opportunity to gather intelligence, and that’s detrimental to our efforts,” he added.
Driving Washington’s ambivalence on drones, some analysts said, is that an overwhelming majority of Americans support the anti-terror efforts. Some polls show up to 70 percent of respondents back drone strikes.
Many of the same people turned off by the grisly details of extreme interrogations, such as waterboarding and rectal feeding, aren’t as alarmed by the clinical killings thousands of miles removed from U.S. soil, pollsters have found.
And the White House insists that Obama will not face a reckoning on drones after leaving office.
“Lethal counterterrorism operations are only conducted as a last resort,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday in defense of Obama’s drone campaign. “And the president has emphasized that extraordinary care needs to be taken to ensure that these counterterrorism activities are carried out in accordance with all applicable domestic and international law and are consistent with U.S. values and policy.”
