What is worse? Locking somebody up for years, without trial, while you try to find proof he is a terrorist? Or killing somebody whose name you don’t even know because his pattern of behaviour suggests to you that he is a terrorist? The first strategy, internment without trial at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, was a signature policy of the George W. Bush administration. The use of drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists has become a trademark of the Obama administration. Yet while Guantánamo attracted worldwide condemnation, the use of drones is much less discussed.
It is hard to avoid the impression that Barack Obama is forgiven for a remarkably ruthless antiterrorism policy simply because his public image is so positive. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for goodness sake!
Yet President Obama’s free pass on drones may be running out. America’s expansion of this secretive programme is finally attracting legitimate criticism and concern – and not just from the usual civil-liberties types. Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to Nato for George W. Bush, asked recently in The Washington Post: “What do we want to be as a nation? A country with a permanent kill list? . . . A country that instructs workers in some high-tech operations centre to kill human beings on the far side of the planet because some government agency determined that those individuals are terrorists?”