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Brace yourself: George W. Bush’s former attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is arguing publicly that the Obama administration’s drone war exceeds legal limits on executive authority. As anyone with a memory of\u00a0Gonzales’s tenure under Bush knows, this is more than a little ironic.<\/p>\n
For example, the Wall Street Journal<\/em> reports<\/a>, “Gonzales was a key figure in counterterrorism policies that placed executive power at the pinnacle, often at the cost of individual rights.” Gonzales supported the Bush administration’s denial of habeas corpus rights, torture, and warrantless NSA surveillance. Additionally, “the drone war began under Mr. Gonzales\u2019s tenure, with a 2002 strike in Yemen that killed six people, including a U.S. citizen.”<\/p>\n Writing in the George Washington Law Review, however, Mr. Gonzales says current targeting practices may not be constitutional, and urges the legislative and executive branches to take steps to strengthen protections for citizens.<\/p>\n The 60-page article,\u00a0\u201cDrones: The Power to Kill,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0focuses on President\u00a0Barack Obama<\/strong>\u2018s decision to target\u00a0Anwar al-Awlaki<\/strong>, a U.S. citizen killed by a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. Mr. Gonzales says that while he believes there was sufficient evidence to justify killing Mr. Awlaki, the decision-making process may fall short of standards established by a series of Supreme Court decisions since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Supreme Court has a role to play. As Justice O\u2019Connor said in Hamdi, \u2018a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation\u2019s citizens,\u2019\u201d Mr. Gonzales writes.<\/p>\n Hamdi v. Rumsfeld is the 2004 opinion by Justice\u00a0Sandra Day O\u2019Connor<\/strong>\u00a0that rejected the Bush administration\u2019s claim to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely as an enemy combatant. Mr. Gonzales was on the losing side of the case, as he was in three other enemy prisoner cases.<\/p>\n …According to remarks by Mr. Obama and Attorney General\u00a0Eric Holder<\/strong>, various groups of \u201csenior officials\u201d and government lawyers determined Mr. Awlaki could not feasibly be captured and that killing him was appropriate.<\/p>\n Such a process may fall short of the Fifth Amendment, Mr. Gonzales said, which prohibits the government from taking a life \u201cwithout due process of law.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Let’s put to the side, for the moment, the issue of Gonzales as a walking contradiction. Instead, consider the weight of his claim that Obama’s drone war policies go to far in the way Americans’ constitutional rights. Coming from such a champion of executive power and, let’s face it, acting outside the law, it is much heavier.<\/p>\n But it’s important to note that we needn’t rely solely on Gonzales’s arguments here. Back in October, an investigation by Human Rights Watch found<\/a> the Obama administration to have conducted the drone war in “violation of international law” on several occasions. Amnesty International also described<\/a> the drone war as illegal,\u00a0and called on U.S. authorities to \u201cbring those responsible for unlawful drone strikes to justice in public and fair trials.\u201d<\/p>\n A UN report<\/a> last year identified serious questions as to the legality of the drone program.\u00a0\u201cThe global war paradigm has done immense damage to a previously shared international consensus on the legal framework underlying both international human rights law and international humanitarian law,\u201d Ben Emmerson, the UN\u00a0special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism,\u00a0explained. \u201cIt has also given a spurious justification to a range of serious human rights and humanitarian law violations.\u201d<\/p>\n A\u00a0study from the\u00a0Stanford and NYU schools of law<\/a>\u00a0found\u00a0strong evidence that drone strikes have targeted rescuers running towards bombed sites in follow-up attacks, something\u00a0the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,\u00a0has said<\/a>\u00a0would constitute war crimes.<\/p>\n