As a liberal, I’m against drones essentially by reflex. At least, I used to be. Recently, I’ve begun to reconsider that view; and I’m no longer sure where I come down on the morality of drone strikes. Disturbing as I find state-sponsored violence, when drones do the killing instead of soldiers, it seems apparent that we have an easier time recognizing the violence as horrific. War, in its traditional form, distorts our moral reasoning. Drones do not. And as much it grates against my broader political commitments to say so, this is plainly a benefit of drone warfare, other shortcomings notwithstanding.

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In a speech at the National Defense University, Obama tried to redefine that fight and at least rhetorically end the war. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’”

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On Wednesday afternoon, in a letter to Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder for the first time formally acknowledged that U.S. drones had killed four U.S. citizens -- including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. Bearing out long-held concerns in the human rights community over the description of these strikes as "targeted" killings, only one of these U.S. citizens (al-Awlaki senior) was on the government's kill list.

The New York Times' typically administration-friendly report suggests that Obama's speech will hail the dawn of a new age of high precision, unproblematic drone strikes. The language used in Holder's letter, however, alongside recent disturbing comments from top Pentagon officials, give us reason to doubt that the boundless, limitless War on Terror is coming to any sort of clean end.

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According to an administration official, Politico reports, Obama will discuss the policy at the National Defense University in Washington. From Politico:

Obama plans elaborate on "the state of the threats we face, particularly as Al Qaeda core has weakened but new dangers have emerged," the official said. He will also "discuss the policy and legal framework under which we take action against terrorist threats, including the use of drones" and "will review our detention policy and efforts to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay."

The president will also "frame the future of our efforts against Al Qaeda, its affiliates and adherents."

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Sheehan's remarks served as a defense of the military's current drone strike policy. While the majority of U.S. drone strikes are carried out by the CIA and authorized by the president directly, the Pentagon oversees strikes in Pakistan and will take increasing control of U.S. drone programs. Sheehan also defended the current structure of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Act (AUMF), passed after 9/11, which, in its present iteration, grants the president wide-ranging powers to wage drone wars. “At this point we’re comfortable with the AUMF as it is currently structured,” said Sheehan. He admitted that there was no expiration date or geographic boundary to the War on Terror.

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As Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian, in the third quarter of 2009 alone "Dang made a total of six arrests out of his 127 stops. He wrote one summons. He found contraband once. He never recovered any weapons and he only stopped people of color, primarily African Americans, 115 times to be exact. He never stopped a white person." Dang's record here is stunning enough alone. More telling still is the justifications he recounted to the court for making many of his stops, referring to repeated observation of individuals' general behavioral patterns, including "furtive movements" -- a vague policing phrase regularly stretched beyond the limits of all reasonableness. "We have a general idea of their behavior," Dang testified.

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The ruling bolsters recent claims made by U.N. human rights expert Ben Emmerson Q.C., following a visit to Pakistan, that authorities in the country gave no consent, tacit or otherwise, for the CIA strikes to be carried out in its tribal regions. However, reporting by Mark Mazzetti suggests that a secret deal, forged between the CIA and the Pakistani military, gave the go-ahead for U.S. drone strikes in return for the initial targeting of an enemy of the Pakistani state (not an al-Qaida operative).

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These kind of stories will continue for one big, if unstated, reason: robotic warfare seems to hold the promise of making many things easier, cheaper and less risky, at least for the countries that operate the drones. But the operative word is "seems," for drones involve a problematic illusion that distorts our perception of the risks we face.

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Wednesday's ad hoc drone hearing, called by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is a dim flicker of light shed against dense shadows surrounding the Obama administration's lethal drone strike program. While lawmakers including Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have made dubious claims about the precision of drone strikes and limited civilian casualties, and while CIA Director John Brennan has vowed that reports of civilian death are seriously investigated, rarely is testimony from those who've seen the first hand plight of drone struck regions heard on Capitol Hill. Written and video testimony was released to Salon in advance of the hearing.

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In the exclusive conversation below, Al-Muslimi tells Salon about the drone strikes’ devastating toll on Yemeni civilians and how the current U.S. counterterrorism policy in Yemen is like “reading from a manual '10 Steps on How to Lose a War.'”

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In 2008, the hysterical backlash to the above comment by Barack Obama's minister became a high-profile example of one of the most insidious rules in American politics: You are not allowed to honestly discuss the Central Intelligence Agency's concept of "blowback" without putting yourself at risk of being deemed a traitor to country.

Now, five years later, with America having killed thousands of Muslim civilians in its drone strikes and wars, that rule is thankfully being challenged, and not by someone who is so easily smeared. Instead, the apostate is one of this epoch's most revered journalists, and because of that, we will see whether this country is mature enough to face one of its biggest national security quandaries.

This is the news from Tom Brokaw's appearance on “Meet the Press” last Sunday. Discussing revelations that the bombing suspects may be connected to Muslim fundamentalism, he said:

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“I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important,” Paul declared. “That your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

Even though I disagree with Paul on virtually every other issue and generally consider him to be kind of a joke, I’d have been happy to be proven wrong. Maybe he had a conscience. Maybe he would become a much needed civil liberties leader on the right.

Alas, I haven’t been proven wrong. Mr. Filibuster, the tribune of civil liberties, now says that drones should have been used against the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston – not only that, he told Fox’s Neal Cavuto they should even be used against someone robbing a liquor store.

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Whether the Senate hearing will yield answers to crucial questions about Obama's drone wars is unclear. Witnesses scheduled to testify include retired Gen. James Cartwright of United States Marine Corp; activist and journalist Farea Al-Muslimi of Sana’a, Yemen; Peter Bergen, director of the National Security Studies Program at the New America Foundation; and a number of legal experts. Although the Senate committee tried to have a witness appear from the Justice Department, this request was denied.

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"If there is a killer on the loose in a neighborhood, I’m not against drones being used to search them," he said on the Fox Business Channel.

Paul said that the difference in this case was that there was an "imminent threat."

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The top-secret intelligence reports reveal, as one expert with the Council on Foreign Relations told McClatchy, that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.” It is not clear who leaked the documents to McClatchy for review.

Via McClatchy:

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Following his recent visit to Pakistan, Ben Emmerson, U.N. special rapporteur monitoring human rights in counterterrorism programs, reported that the Pakistani government had given no tacit consent for U.S. drones to enter Pakistani air space. However, Mazzetti reports that such a secret deal was made, at least with the Pakistani military, signed in blood with Muhammed's death. Via the Times:

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Another, perhaps less frequently asked question: What happens when innocent civilians are killed in drone strikes?

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Rasool and other Afghan villagers have their own name for Predator drones. They call them benghai, which in the Pashto language means the "buzzing of flies." When they explain the noise, they scrunch their faces and try to make a sound that resembles an army of flies.

"They are evil things that fly so high you don't see them but all the time you hear them," said Rasool, whose body is stooped and shrunken with age and his voice barely louder than a whisper. "Night and day we hear this sound and then the bombardment starts."

The U.S. military is increasingly relying on drone strikes inside Afghanistan, where the number of weapons fired from unmanned aerial aircraft soared from 294 in 2011 to 506 last year. With international combat forces set to withdraw by the end of next year, such attacks are now used more for targeted killings and less for supporting ground troops.

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Fantasies about the certain success of air power in transforming, even ending, war as we know it arose with the plane itself.  But when it comes to killing people from the skies, again and again air power has proven neither cheap nor surgical nor decisive nor in itself triumphant.  Seductive and tenacious as the dreams of air supremacy continue to be, much as they automatically attach themselves to the latest machine to take to the skies, air power has not fundamentally softened the brutal face of war, nor has it made war less dirty or chaotic.

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