Choosing who lives and who dies: the methodical assassinations of Barack Obama's 'kill list'

David Blair: There is something deeply unsettling about the disclosure in The New York Times that America has developed a clinical, dispassionate procedure for selecting the targets of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Every week or so, about 100 national security officials gather by video conference to pore over the photographs and biographies of al-Qaeda terrorists. They decide who should be spared and who should be marked for death.

Those “nominated” for assassination (yes, “nominated” is apparently the official word) are placed on a “kill list” that passes directly to Barack Obama. He then exercises the judgment of Solomon, going through the list name by name and deciding who will die. The CIA’s drones are then programmed to dispatch the President’s chosen targets.

The aim is to keep the drones on a “tight leash”, to use Obama’s phrase, and ensure that killings only happen with the strictest oversight. This procedure has been revealed presumably because the White House wants to reassure us that drones are not dealing death from the skies at random. The fact that it is all so methodical is supposed to be a virtue. Nonetheless, the idea that a formal process has developed at all is grounds for deep discomfort.

I have a minor personal connection with this argument. Back in 2002 – 03, I happened to interview three senior figures in Hamas, all of whom were later assassinated by Israeli missile strikes. Within months of my meeting Abdel-Aziz Rantissi, Ismail Abu Shanab and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, each had fallen victim to carefully targeted, clinical operations of the kind that Obama now approves week by week.

But things were different then. Whenever Israel assassinated a Hamas leader, the world would voice its outrage. Pretty much every country – including America – would issue a statement of condemnation. The US would say that it disapproved of extra-judicial killings. Meanwhile, Britain would get quite worked up. I remember Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, expressing great indignation when Rantissi was dispatched by an Israeli missile within weeks of succeeding Yassin as Hamas leader in 2004.

The fact that targeted assassinations are now happening on a far wider scale – with a fraction of the protest – shows how much the world has changed.

There is no doubt that drones have become the single most effective counter-terrorism weapon in the US arsenal. Few doubt that al-Qaeda has been crippled by the systematic elimination of its core leadership. Obama can credibly argue that lives have duly been saved.

But in his inaugural address back in January 2009, he also said: “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” The fact that he now pores over death lists shows the utter fatuity of that statement. The tension between safety and idealism, between liberty and security, is ever-present and unavoidable. As of today, Obama’s point on that spectrum is to believe that he can take upon himself the right to decide who lives and who dies.

His defence will be that he deals death in the cause of saving lives. The drones have doubtless averted terrorist attacks; many people are alive today only because they happened.

When I was a student, the first philosophical question I was set was the proposition that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should always prevail. I read about how this crude utilitarian calculation was morally indefensible in the modern world because it inevitably entailed the end justifying the means. It seems we are all utilitarians now.

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