Targeted Killings

Introduction

Officials investigate the bullet-riddled car in which Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leader of Iran's nuclear program, was slain last year in a targeted killing allegedly carried out by Israel. Such killings have become a more common tactic for the United States, Israel and other countries. (AP Photo/Fars News Agency)

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Overview

In December 2013, a missile from an American drone struck a wedding procession in Yemen, killing several members of the al-Ameri and al-Taisy families, according to witnesses. Over the next several years, these families say that at least 34 of their relatives were killed in drone strikes during U.S. counterterrorism operations.

Now these families, who say they were never involved in terrorism, have filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — an independent body affiliated with the Organization of American States — demanding that the United States stop targeting them and release its criteria for killing suspected terrorists. It is the first time a human rights body is investigating an American drone strike, after U.S. courts have declined to hear such cases.

Although any ruling or injunction issued by the commission is not legally binding, those who filed the petition say it is bringing long-needed attention to the United States' secretive targeted killing program, launched in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.1

“The initial aim is to halt further strikes against the family,” says Jennifer Gibson, a lawyer with the London-based nongovernmental organization Reprieve, which helped the families file the petition. “But we also need a real public debate about a program that has operated in the shadows.”

Yemeni children pray over the graves of relatives killed during a nearly decade-long war between Yemeni rebels and Saudi Arabia and its regional allies, which are seeking to restore Yemen's government to power. U.S. drone strikes in Yemen have killed many civilians, including members of a wedding party. (Getty Images/Mohammed Hamoud)

Pioneered by Israel, the targeted killing of nonstate actors, such as members of militant or terrorist organizations, has become a more common tactic of warfare and security for the United States and other countries, including the United Kingdom, France and other democracies.

The rise of targeted killings, often with armed drones and other precision weapons, is changing the nature of warfare and military operations. States can now participate remotely in years-long operations against enemies. Thirty-nine militaries around the world have armed drones, and 12 countries have used these drones to target and kill individuals.2

In drone strikes between 2010 and 2020, the United States killed up to 16,900 people — including as many as 2,200 presumably innocent civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a U.K.-based nonprofit that is one of the few organizations that has tracked drone strikes in the absence of official government data.3

The practice has raised ethical and legal questions. International law governs the use of lethal force in warfare, but targeted killings often happen outside of defined battlefields, with little accountability. This lack of accountability, especially when government officials are targeted, such as the U.S. killing of Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani in January 2020, could lead to a dangerous escalation, said Agnes Callamard, the United Nations' special rapporteur investigating extrajudicial and summary executions.

“If you have a few more countries moving in that direction, the real risks of global conflagration are becoming very high,” Callamard said.4

The International Committee of the Red Cross defines targeted killings as a nation's or armed group's use of lethal force against pre-selected individuals, including suspected terrorists, who are not in one's physical custody either during or outside of an armed conflict. The past three U.S. administrations have used the method to varying degrees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan and elsewhere.5

Only one targeted killing has been reported so far in the 11 weeks since President Biden took office, and his administration has reportedly tightened requirements for carrying them out, but the White House has issued no official public comment or policy change on the matter.6

“The war on terror created the drone campaigns,” says David Sterman, senior policy analyst at the think tank New America. “Still today, it creates a willingness to use force in this way.”

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The Trump administration carried out at least 340 drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan alone in the past four years. The Obama administration tallied 563 drone strikes in these countries in eight years, up from 57 strikes under the George W. Bush administration, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.7 While the Trump administration reduced troop levels in Afghanistan, where the United States declared war against the Taliban and its allies in 2001, it carried out more than 11,000 drone strikes there since 2017.8

The use of targeted killings has its defenders. Some experts and government officials say assassinating key individuals can stop imminent terrorist attacks, limit the power of terrorist organizations and, in the case of Iran, slow its development of nuclear weapons.

“The deterrent element is especially important,” wrote David Deptula, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general and the dean of the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies, in support of the Trump administration's 2020 decision to assassinate Soleimani. “Killing Soleimani sent a particularly powerful message because he is not replaceable in the short term. He was Iran's top terrorist, a leader of its revolutionary ideology and an important strategic thinker.”9

President Barack Obama argued that drones hold significant advantages over other military options. “Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones and are likely to cause more civilian casualties and more local outrage,” Obama said in 2013. “And invasions of these territories lead us to be viewed as occupying armies, unleash a torrent of unintended consequences, are difficult to contain, result in large numbers of civilian casualties and ultimately empower those who thrive on violent conflict.”10

Critics, however, question the effectiveness of targeted killings in preventing terrorism or achieving other military and defense goals. They argue such strikes actually can empower terrorist groups by creating momentum for their cause.

“My work has not found convincing evidence that targeted killings carried out by the U.S. have reduced terrorism perpetrated by the global jihadist movement,” says Jennifer Carson, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Missouri, who has conducted one of the few empirical studies about the effects of targeted killings of suspected terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States.

Targeted killings are gaining public support in the United States. A 2019 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, for instance, found that 48 percent of Americans felt that drone strikes on targets abroad make the United States safer.11

“The public has become almost inured to these killings,” says Claire Finkelstein, director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. The United Kingdom, France and others have also engaged in the practice, sometimes in coordination with the United States or with American weapons.12 In a few cases, Britain and the United States have targeted their own citizens overseas, suspecting them of being involved in terrorism.13

“States that employ targeted killing have also started to abandon their policies of denial and to hesitantly engage in public justification,” says Jodok Troy, a political science professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. “So targeted killing has moved from the fringes of undercover activity to the very core of policymaking in national security.”

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Israel continues to use targeting killings against Palestinians and, according to analysts, has recently expanded them in places such as Syria and Iraq, partly to hinder Iran's nuclear weapons development program. Experts have attributed to Israel the November 2020 killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian military officer, physicist and senior official in the country's nuclear program. Israel has carried out at least 2,300 targeted killing operations since its establishment in 1948, with most of those happening since 2000, according to investigative journalist Ronen Bergman.14

Meanwhile, many European countries, including Germany, continue to debate whether they should arm drones.15

“I believe that what makes countries willing to engage in such killings is their perception of the level of threat,” says Daniel Statman, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, who has studied the moral, legal and practical dimensions of the topic. “If any of the countries who are now against targeted killings faced a terror threat, and saw no other way to respond, I would put my money on that they would accept this tactic.”

The relatively low financial and human cost on the side of those carrying out these attacks with drones is driving the trend to target and kill individuals rather than conduct raids or other traditional operations, says Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution think tank.

“Even if the drones are shot down or crash, the pilot always lives,” Byman says. “It enables missions that would not take place otherwise.”

But many analysts say the use of armed drones carries important ethical costs that are changing the nature of warfare.

“Armed drones vastly increase the asymmetry of the battlefield,” Sterman says. In addition to preventing casualties on the side carrying out the attack, he says, drone warfare means that targets cannot surrender as they could, in theory, to human troops.

Drones can also loiter for hours waiting for the right moment to fire at the target, giving them “a persistence that manned aircraft don't possess,” said Sophy Antrobus, a research associate at the Freeman Air and Space Institute at King's College London and an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter.16

A soldier guards a Reaper drone at the French air base in Niamey, the capital of Niger, during a French-led campaign against Islamist insurgents across five African countries. Armed drone technology has spread to 39 nations. (AFP/Getty Images/Pascal Guyot)

This, plus the lack of casualties among those who carry out the strikes, helps targeted killing missions stay secret, contributing to the long-lasting nature of current conflicts, Antrobus said.17

“They are being used outside of wars and expanding the boundaries of wars,” says Michael Merryman-Lotze, director of the Palestine-Israel program at the American Friends Service Committee, one of many nongovernmental organizations that oppose targeted killings.

In addition, experts and policymakers say drones' rapid technological advances — including the development of autonomous drones or even swarms of drones that can find and attack targets — will alter warfare even more dramatically. The extent of human responsibility for the actions of these machines will need to be considered and defined, they say.18

“The weapon illustrates the need to carefully consider what risks the United States is willing to accept,” said Zak Kallenborn, author of a recent report on such drones for the U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies.19

Despite these perils, most experts expect targeted killings to continue. “The scope or rules of engagement may change slightly,” Byman says. “But this tactic is now ingrained in an entire generation of military intelligence officers.”

As military analysts, government officials, human rights advocates and others debate the legality and effectiveness of targeted killings, here are some of the questions they are asking:

Are drone strikes outside war zones legal?

As targeted killings using drones have proliferated, a debate has emerged about when — if ever — they are within the bounds of law. Top officials in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have said killing members and leaders of terrorist organizations overseas is legal, based on a document drawn up after 9/11 that declared the right to target those acting on behalf of al Qaeda and similar groups.

Going back to the George W. Bush administration, the United States has viewed such people as combatants who can be killed in self-defense under the laws of war rather than treated as civilian criminals, who would require arrest. But unclassified American documents also state conditions that need to be met for the United States to kill someone out of self-defense, mainly that they present an imminent threat and cannot be apprehended, and that civilian deaths are to be avoided.

“America does not take strikes to punish individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat,” Obama said in a now-famous 2013 address to the National Defense University in Washington. The speech was the first official public disclosure of the targeted killing program.20

But this definition of imminent threat is flexible and does not necessarily mean immediate, making the targeting of many suspected terrorists legal, says Georgetown's Byman.

“What imminence is about is [whether] there is any evidence of someone plotting attacks, whether it's for tomorrow or next year,” Byman says. “If you know an attack is coming at some point, it doesn't matter when, that target is legitimate.” This is what made the strike on Iranian Gen. Soleimani legitimate, he says, because the force he commanded was providing general training for terrorist attacks.

Most of the policy debates about targeted killings in the United States have occurred in closed meetings and classified memos. In Israel, which has carried out more targeted killings than any other Western country, the country's highest court ruled in 2006 that targeted killings are legal if they meet certain criteria, including that targets are participating in ongoing hostilities; the government has reliable information for identification; it has no other way to deal with the person; and the attack avoids harm to surrounding civilians and is proportional.21

“This case gave legitimacy to the principle of targeting killings,” says the University of Haifa's Statman.

He says that when Israel or any country is dealing with a terrorist group that presents a threat, it is impossible to meet the group on a battlefield, so legally and morally it is acceptable to find and target their members while they are home or anywhere else.

“The only way to defend yourself is by killing their fighters,” he says.

But others disagree and say that targeted killings outside of war are not lawful.

“Lethal force outside of armed conflict violates international human rights law,” says Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and a lecturer at Columbia University's School of Law. Under the rules of self-defense, only someone who presents a direct and imminent threat — meaning timely and immediate — can be killed, she says. And most targeted killings do not meet these narrow criteria, Shamsi says, including that of Soleimani.

In January 2020, mourners in the holy Iraqi city of Karbala carry the coffins of Iranian military commander Qassim Soleimani and eight others killed in a U.S. drone strike. The attack intensified the debate over whether such killings are legal. (AFP/Getty Images/Mohammed Sawaf)

The University of Pennsylvania's Finkelstein argues the bar is high to kill an individual: It is not enough that someone was involved in past attacks, is expressing a desire to carry out a future attack or is considering joining a group whose objective is to attack the United States.

“The use of lethal force must be preventative in all cases, and it must prevent something imminent,” she says. For example, Finkelstein says, the killing of Soleimani was illegal because the United States did not provide proof that he was planning an immediate attack — an argument the United Nations also makes.

“Absent an actual imminent threat to life, the course of action taken by the U.S. was unlawful,” said Special Rapporteur Callamard about the assassination of Soleimani.22

Shamsi adds that a targeted killing must also be an act of last resort and prevent an event that would have had a “significant cost of human life.”

In addition, the burden of proof that such killings actually do eliminate immediate threats lies on the U.S. government, she says, something it has failed to provide in most cases.

“We have virtually never seen the backup and evidence for anything that meets this scenario,” Shamsi says. “A fundamental problem is not only the letter violation of the law, but also the secrecy. It has become an internal bureaucratized system, without any judicial review.”

Regarding Israel, Shahaf Rabi, former founding director of the Israeli Center for the Study of Targeted Killings at the University of Massachusetts, says that Israel often does not follow all of the guidelines set out by the 2006 high court ruling that made targeted killings legal. Rabi, along with colleague Avery Plaw, wrote that “the state's compliance with the safeguards set out in the 2006 targeted killing judgments remains doubtful, especially with regards to the independent ex-post targeted killing investigative committee,” to look into civilian deaths.23

Do targeted killings reduce civilian and other casualties?

Some analysts argue that targeted killings by drone or airstrike reduce civilian casualties because they are precise and avoid the use of ground troops, who can encounter resistance and use violence against people other than the targets. But others disagree, saying many civilians have been killed by accident during drone strikes, especially in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan.24

New America's Sterman concedes that thousands of civilians have died in America's targeted killing campaign, but says that drone strikes often present less risk to bystanders than alternatives such as special forces operations.

“They actually often are a relatively precise tool,” Sterman says. “It definitely depends on the specifics, but a ground operation involves a lot more risks and are less often called off when they run into challenges the way drone strikes are.” He pointed out that special forces raids and operations in Yemen under President Donald Trump killed many bystanders.25

Michael O'Hanlon, director of research on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, says that when the United States needs to act, killing via drone strikes is often the least threatening option when it comes to hurting local civilians.

“The precision can be quite impressive,” he says. “They are seen as the least bad option for handling some types of threats.”

Yahli Shereshevsky, a postdoctoral researcher on international law at Hebrew University, says that the remote nature of drones and the fact that a pilot's life is not at risk can help reduce civilian casualties because the drone will only fire at a well-defined target and does not need to fire out of self-defense.

“In the battlefield, fighters make mistakes because of pressure, so they sometimes kill out of fear,” he says. “But with drones you can say this is not the case, so you use less force, and it can be more precise.”

But others argue that targeted killings carried out with drones are more likely to kill or injure civilians than other methods, mainly because intelligence is sometimes wrong. For example, a U.N. report that analyzed classified information said drone attacks in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011 were 10 times more likely to result in civilian casualties than airstrikes by planes or helicopters.26

“The biggest misnomer is that it's targeted,” Reprieve's Gibson says. “The missile may hit X, but if the intelligence is wrong, then it's the wrong X. [And it's the] wrong people that are killed.”

She argues that nations are more likely to make mistakes with unmanned drones.

“If you need to put a pilot in a plane, you will think twice if it's really worth it,” Gibson says. “But your risk calculation changes dramatically with drones.”

For those living in areas where the United States and others have carried out targeted killings by drone, the fear over pending strikes is constant, and many who witness strikes suffer emotionally.

“It's not only those who die that are affected,” Gibson says. “There are entire communities that are traumatized, either from seeing strikes, hearing them, or losing relatives or others they know, in them,” she says. “You have communities that live with drones overhead, and they don't know if it will strike today or tomorrow.”

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Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch, says the debate over which counterterrorism methods — whether targeted killings or military operations such as invasions and arrest raids — kill fewer civilians is in itself not constructive or conclusive.

“It's impossible to know if a particular drone strike results in fewer casualties than a ground operation would,” she says. A larger problem, Prasow says, is that the secretive nature of the United States' targeted killing program helps hide the actual human cost. Since 2019, when Trump revoked an Obama-era regulation to annually report the number of civilians killed in drone strikes outside of war zones, the United States does not even report the number of deaths in most strikes.27

“What we do know is that targeted killings have caused significant numbers of civilian casualties, and that the harm is often compounded by the fact the strikes are often unacknowledged and survivors receive little or no redress,” Prasow says.

Are targeted killings effective in combating terrorism or Iran's nuclear weapons program?

Supporters of targeted killings say assassinating individuals can prevent imminent terrorist attacks, disrupt terrorist organizations and, in Iran's case, slow its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. But others say such strikes can draw the United States and other nations deeper into conflicts, empower terrorist groups, raise the risks of retaliation and decrease political clout in any negotiations. And they say killing Iranian officials and scientists will not make a difference in the nuclear program because the know-how is already there.28

Georgetown's Byman argues that targeted killings — and the threat of targeted killings — limit the power and abilities of terrorist groups. Killing their leaders or other senior members is especially effective in limiting their ability to carry out attacks and grow as a group.

“These groups don't have an infinitely deep bench of leaders,” Byman says. “Experience matters, and if you keep losing experienced people on a regular basis it degrades an organization.” He also points out that the constant threat of being taken out by an armed drone or airstrike hampers the abilities of terrorist leaders to effectively lead, because they are forced to hide and limit all phone, internet and other communications.

“Everything they do makes them vulnerable, so they can't really communicate or organize,” Byman says. “So they lose the ability to control their organization.”

New America's Sterman cites evidence from terrorist groups themselves, including intercepted and recovered statements from Qaeda personnel in Pakistan lamenting the difficulties of operating there under the threat of drone strikes.

“These drone attacks have knocked out the ability of al Qaeda to plot from Pakistan,” Sterman says. “And there is a pretty good case to make that drone strikes in Yemen have been somewhat effective at putting holes in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” But he added that the actual likelihood or ability of these groups to attack American targets is often questionable.

“So whether these killings actually translate into broader strategic success is less clear,” Sterman says.

Regarding Iran, Amos Yadlin and Assaf Orion at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University argue that the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists damages leadership and morale in the nuclear weapons program, setting it back, even if remaining scientists retain the knowledge and know-how.

“The damage to the nuclear weapons effort, which experts consider to be very significant, is not necessarily due to the loss of scientific knowledge, but due to the loss of project leadership, managerial experience, and access to Iran's top political echelon,” Yadlin and Orion wrote shortly after the assassination of lead Iranian nuclear scientist Fakhrizadeh. “It is possible that his departure will lengthen the time Iran needs for a nuclear weapons breakout…. Those with such leadership, management, and professional abilities are few and far between, and their loss leaves a void that is difficult to fill.”

It could also make it harder for the Iranian regime to recruit additional scientists, who would fear being targeted and killed, they argue.29

Other experts say targeted killings do not achieve such goals and could actually strengthen groups by stirring up animosity toward the United States and others, which helps them recruit members.30

“The backlash effects have superseded any possible deterrence or incapacitation effects,” says the University of Central Missouri's Carson. She says high-profile targeted killings, especially, can lead to more support for terrorist groups.

“While I cannot speak to the individual motivations of terrorists, there is anecdotal evidence that the killing of certain individuals has the ability to rally additional support for a cause,” she says.

Merryman-Lotze, of the American Friends Service Committee, says that even if terrorists who were planning attacks are killed, that often does not solve the bigger problem.

“The cost of carrying these operations out is often the stability of the country,” he says, pointing to places such as Yemen and Libya. “There's a lot of repercussions that we need to consider. The terrorist may be killed, but it could lead to further trauma in the place.”

Sterman echoes some of these concerns: “The U.S. drone efforts, although they took out individuals, may have also contributed to the broader breakdown in Yemen.”

On the one-year anniversary of the Soleimani assassination, National Public Radio's international news editor, Greg Myre, said the killing has not changed Iranian-U.S. relations or altered the region.

“The U.S. and Iran are still in this tense standoff,” Myre said. “And we really have a perfect example here. Just in recent days, an Iraqi militia that's believed to be controlled by Iran fired 21 rockets into the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the U.S. Embassy is based on Dec. 20. And that's exactly the kind of activity that Qassim Soleimani was accused of orchestrating. And it's still taking place now a year after his death.”31

As far as Iran's nuclear program, targeted assassinations are not setting it back, said Bruce Reidel, a former CIA and U.S. Defense Department official who is now at the Brookings Institution, in a comment made just days after Fakhrizadeh was killed.32

“No individual is crucial in a nuclear program like this anymore,” Reidel told The New Yorker. “The Iranians mastered that technology 20 years ago. This guy was important, no question, but he was not crucial to it. Nobody is crucial to it anymore. That's why describing this as a devastating blow is nonsense.”

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Background

The Hague Conventions

While philosophers and religious leaders have long debated the morality of war and lethal force, it was not until the mid-19th century that nations began formulating a body of law to govern military action. After a number of international meetings, often spearheaded by czarist Russia, the Hague peace conferences in 1899 and 1907 drew dozens of countries, including the United States, to meet and formalize for the first time modern multinational agreements on the laws and conduct of war.33

But these agreements, which came to be known as the Hague Conventions, dealt only with conflicts that took place between states, leaving civil war and other nonstate fighting unaddressed.34

Beginning in the late 19th century, nations gathered for a series of conferences, including this one in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1907, to formulate a body of law known as the Hague Conventions dealing with warfare between states. (Getty Images/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group)

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1910s, armed Zionist movements began to target Arab officials for assassination in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, often in revenge for violent attacks. They also targeted other Jewish community leaders who did not support establishing a Jewish state. David Ben Gurion, the future Israeli prime minister who emerged as the political leader of the Zionist movement in the 1920s, when Palestine became a British-ruled area, at first opposed such methods and even punished those who tried to carry them out.35

But after World War II and the Holocaust, in which more than 6 million Jews and others were murdered, members of the Haganah Zionist militia in 1946 killed several leaders of the German Templer community in Tel Aviv, who had fought for the Nazis in the war in Europe and then returned to their homes in the Holy Land. Ben Gurion's views, as a result, changed — perhaps because of targeted killings' apparent effectiveness.

The killing of the Templers “had an immediate effect,” said Rafi Eitan, who participated in those assassinations as a teenager and soon after founded the targeted killing unit of the Mossad, Israel's international intelligence agency. “The Templers disappeared from the country, leaving everything behind, and were never seen again,” he said. The Templers' abandoned Tel Aviv neighborhood became the headquarters of the military and intelligence service of the state of Israel, which was formally established in 1948; these institutions remain there today.36

“Jus ad Bellum”

After World War II and the formation of the United Nations in 1945, formalized principles of international human rights law and regulations outlining the appropriate interstate use of force began to emerge.

These use-of-force rules were known as “jus ad bellum.” Article 51 of the U.N. charter required that any lethal force a country takes outside its borders in self-defense must be directed against an “imminent threat”; meets standards of “necessity,” meaning that the nation has no available alternative course of action, and that the attack be in “proportionality,” meaning that force can only be used to the extent needed.37

The Geneva Conventions, which outline human rights during war, were also updated and finalized in 1949. They prohibit, even during war, the premeditated killing of individuals for what they have done or may do on the battlefield — another concept along with jus ad bellum that critics later used to argue that targeted killings violate international legal norms.38

In the 1950s and '60s, Israel continued to engage in targeted killings, often relying on undercover missions to kill individual militants in neighboring Egypt and Jordan who organized continuing violence against the Israeli military and civilians, despite an armistice agreement signed between their governments in 1949.

Israel also killed Egyptian officials associated with these attacks, and later carried out complex operations against German scientists suspected of helping Egypt develop advanced missiles; this operation resulted in the killing of at least one of the scientists. In addition, Israel targeted leaders of the emerging Palestinian national movement, which began carrying out attacks against Israeli civilians by the mid-1960s.39

By this point, undercover missions in enemy territory, including targeted killings, became a key component of national security policy. But it remained a secretive practice, and the government did not officially acknowledge the organization — or even the existence — of the institutions involved, including the Mossad, the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency and various military spy units that controlled the special forces that carried out the operations.40

Patrice Lumumba, the first popularly elected president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was assassinated in 1961, a killing that some historians believe the CIA helped carry out. (Getty Images/The LIFE Images Collection/Bob Gomel)

The CIA, the U.S. intelligence agency founded in 1947, began targeting foreign officials in the 1950s and 1960s, most famously Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Many historians and analysts have also attributed the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least partially to the CIA. But many of these attempts, including the ones on Castro, failed. Many U.S. officials were appalled at the idea of targeted assassinations, and after a series of congressional investigations into the CIA's alleged killings and assassination attempts, Republican President Gerald Ford issued an executive order in 1976 banning assassinations.41

The order, however, did not define an assassination.42

This ambiguity left the door open for U.S. intelligence officials to occasionally target, or to discuss targeting, individuals, especially as terrorism emerged as a global threat in the 1980s. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who served from 1982 to '89 during the Reagan administration, argued that fighting terrorism could require “preventative or pre-emptive actions” against terrorism suspects before they strike, an idea the United States only fully embraced two decades later.43

But several missions began to test this approach, including Operation El Dorado Canyon, when in 1986 the CIA, with the help of Israeli intelligence, bombed a residence of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who they accused of orchestrating terrorist attacks on Americans, hoping to kill him and his family.44

A few years later, Hays Parks, the top official in the U.S. Army's legal department, wrote a memorandum arguing that targeting suspected terrorists in certain situations, “where such individuals or groups pose an immediate threat to United States citizens or the national security of the United States,” did not amount to assassination, and therefore did not violate Ford's executive order or international law.45

These arguments provided a basis for future justifications for targeted killings.46 The United States then went on to target (unsuccessfully) Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden under the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. But such actions were controversial, with many officials denying their existence at the time.47

Post-9/11 Targeted Killing Program

Until 2001, U.S. officials also voiced disapproval of Israel's targeted killing program. It was the only acknowledged one in the Western world and had accelerated with the outbreak in 2000 of the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, during which Israel killed more than 200 suspected Palestinian terrorists, mainly with bombs from helicopters and airplanes, over four years.48

“They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk said in July 2001.49

But after al Qaeda's attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force against terrorism. Combined with a series of memos and other documents, it backed a practice of killing members of terrorist organizations if they could not be captured.50

Vice President Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other members of the U.S. national security team receive live updates in May 2011 in the White House Situation Room during the successful raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden. (Getty Images/Tribune News Service/The White House/Pete Souza)

The post-9/11 targeting killing program has relied on drones for up to 95 percent of its operations. The first reported successful drone strike against a suspected Qaeda-affiliated terrorist occurred in Yemen on Nov. 3, 2002, shortly after the United States had declared Yemen an additional battleground against al Qaeda. (The strike killed six suspected terrorists.)51

Before this attack, the United States used drones solely for surveillance. The United States undertook a program to arm drones after a spy drone spotted bin Laden in 1998 but forces could not unleash cruise missiles on his location with confidence because they were not sure if he remained there.52

Nevertheless, considerable internal disagreement remained over how and when to use these deadly drones, with the CIA ultimately controlling the drones everywhere except inside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the military operated them.53

Obama expanded the use of targeted killings during his eight years in office. From 2009 to 2017, his administration carried out at least 563 drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, up from 57 in these countries under Republican George W. Bush. Obama officials, after 2010, also began leaking information to the media hinting at the existence of the program and its operations, which had long been kept secret from the public.54

One killing immediately revealed to the public was that of bin Laden, who was shot dead by Navy SEALs in a 2011 raid in Pakistan. Government lawyers had worked for weeks before the raid to craft documents outlining why it was legal to kill rather than arrest bin Laden. The authorization to use force against those behind the 9/11 attacks, limiting innocent civilian casualties and knowing for certain whether bin Laden was dead were among the reasons cited for making it a mission to kill rather than capture. The legal team also wrote that the United States could legally violate Pakistan's sovereignty to carry out the operation without telling them by relying on an exception to sovereignty based on the argument that Pakistan may not be able or willing to quash the threat posed by bin Laden.55

By this time, human rights groups concerned about the growing number of civilian casualties — as well as international legal experts and members of Congress who said they had been kept in the dark over the program — began criticizing targeted killings and demanding more information.56

The United Nations also criticized U.S. drone use, and in 2010 it started calling for international agreements to limit armed drones and targeted killings, many of which violate international law.57

In a 2013 report, Christof Heyns, then the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, warned that armed drones' relative ease of use would lead states to carry out longer and more numerous conflicts, risking an end to the notion that war should be something temporary or limited.

“The expansive use of armed drones by the first States to acquire them, if not challenged, can do structural damage to the cornerstones of international security and set precedents that undermine the protection of life across the globe in the longer term,” Heyns wrote.58

During his second term, Obama began to speak more openly about the program, defending its precise nature and releasing figures on civilians killed, although those White House figures fell far below those compiled by human rights groups.59

Further public scrutiny of targeted killings came after a 2011 American drone strike in Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki, who was a U.S. citizen, a Yemeni national and a suspected Qaeda operative. In 2014, in response to a lawsuit brought by The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union against the U.S. government, a federal appeals court in New York released a partially redacted government memo justifying the targeting of Awlaki, and exposing more details of the targeted killing program, including the CIA's official role.60

The memo said that although targeting the New Mexico-born Awlaki carried a risk of depriving him of his liberties, “the continued and imminent threat of violence or death” that he presented to Americans outweighed his rights and justified his killing, although the memo did not detail what sort of threat he posed.61

Ultimately, the court dismissed a lawsuit brought by Awlaki's family against the Obama administration, saying it could not rule on matters of “military planning.”62

The Trump Era

When Trump entered the White House in 2017, he expanded the targeted killing program, especially in Somalia, where he ordered 40 airstrikes in 2020 alone, up from 41 carried out by Bush and Obama combined from 2007 to 2016. He also walked back transparency measures that Obama had introduced, stopping for example the release of the number of civilians killed in strikes each year. This change was mainly possible because Obama's measures were executive actions rather than legislated rules that would have continued to apply beyond his presidency.63

Eventually, the United States came to use targeted killings to counter Iran. This was especially the case after 2018, when the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in which several countries had lifted some economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for that regime's agreement to limit its nuclear program. Under Trump, the United States killed leaders of Iranian-backed militias that had targeted American troops and civilian contractors in Iraq.64

And, in a move that drew sharp domestic and international criticism, as well as raising fears of retaliation, the Trump administration in January 2020 used a drone to kill Iranian Gen. Soleimani while he was in Iraq, marking the first time that the authorization of military force following the Sept. 11 attacks was applied against a state official. Unlike most other U.S. targeted killings, this one was not secret.65

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Current Situation

Policy Review

Since President Biden entered the White House in January, administration officials and members of Congress have been taking steps to review and possibly change or limit the targeted killings program and the ongoing military force authorizations that support it.

The administration, which apparently has not carried out any targeted killings since one was reported in Iraq in January, now requires that the military and CIA seek White House permission before carrying out drone strikes outside the war zones of Syria and Afghanistan, officials have told The New York Times. This is a possible departure from the Trump-era policy that allowed military and intelligence officials to decide on their own whether to target individuals.66

The change has halted drone strikes but is only temporary, as Biden reviews policy.

“This review includes an examination of previous approaches in the context of evolving counterterrorism threats in order to refine our approach going forward,” said Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the White House's National Security Council. “In addition, the review will seek to ensure appropriate transparency measures.”67

Avril Haines, Biden's director of national intelligence, who served in the Obama administration and was one of the architects of the drone program, supports returning to Obama-era rules that required the government to report the number of civilian casualties in drone strikes.68

The Biden administration is also considering tightening the requirements for ensuring that women and children are not in strike areas and requiring more surveillance before and during strikes. And it is weighing whether the United States should follow general rules for strikes, giving the operators freedom to make decisions, which was Trump's approach, or whether each strike should be approved in a more centralized manner, as was the policy under Obama since 2013.69

But until the administration releases an official statement or announces a change in policy, legal and human rights experts are expressing concern.

“The U.S. still claims the authority and power to kill terrorism suspects in violation of international human rights law,” the ACLU's Shamsi says. “Until this changes, our reputation for adherence to law and the norms that safeguard this are in tatters.”

At the same time, some congressional Republicans oppose the suspension of drone strikes and the policy review.

“This action is yet another bureaucratic impediment created by the Biden administration that will give our enemies an advantage over the United States and our allies,” Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said in March.70

A young woman runs off as a fighter approaches a man outside a tent at a refugee camp near the Yemeni city of Marib on March 28. President Biden announced the United States will end support for Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. (AFP/Getty Images/Contributor)

The United States also continues to expand the infrastructure needed to continue the drone program, including developing a CIA base in Niger dedicated to drones. Although no drone strikes from the base have been reported, the military is using it to surveil suspected terrorist groups in places such as Mali and Libya, and it appears prepared to expand drone strikes in Africa's Sahel region if policy permits.71

On a related note, some also worry that even though Biden has announced the United States will end support for Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen — support that started under Obama when Biden was vice president — drone strikes and other targeting of suspected terrorists could continue or even increase, because Biden stipulated that the United States could still defend American and Saudi interests and continue fighting al Qaeda and linked groups there.72

“I'm cautiously optimistic,” says Gibson of Reprieve. “But I am also disappointed that Biden did not address this issue of targeted killings and implied that anti-terrorism operations would continue.”

Congressional Debates

In Congress, some lawmakers are renewing efforts to repeal two laws the United States relies on to justify targeted killings: the 2001 authorization to fight terrorism globally and the 2002 authorization for military force in Iraq. They say these declarations are outdated and should not be used to allow targeted killings in multiple countries.

Administrations have cited the 2001 authorization, written with the main goal of fighting bin Laden and al Qaeda, 41 times for attacks in 19 countries.73 These authorizations of force allow the president to order killings without having to consult Congress, as long as officials cite some link to anti-terrorism.

“This approach has essentially written Congress out of its role of deciding war powers,” the ACLU's Shamsi says.

The effort is somewhat bipartisan. While Democrats such as Rep. Barbara Lee of California want to cancel the authorizations to end the conflicts, Republican support for the issue stems from a desire to limit the White House's power and put the authorization for military action more firmly in Congress. Both sides of the aisle hope that the Biden administration will examine the issue.

“I think there is a bigger window of opportunity right now,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican and retired Air Force brigadier general who served as a commander in Iraq. Bacon said the authorizations are out of date and cannot be used to justify current military operations. “I can't say I have math behind it,” he said. “It's just my gut.”74

Human rights organizations are lobbying lawmakers on the issue, with 25 prominent organizations sending a letter to Biden in February, urging him to end the authorizations, which they say have been stretched beyond their limits to create “endless war.”75

“We want a revocation of that and a move back from the idea that we can carry out attacks anywhere we want in the name of a global war on terror,” says Merryman-Lotze of the American Friends Service Committee.

The fallout from the Trump administration's killing of Soleimani, along with the alleged Israeli killing of nuclear scientist Fakhrizadeh, also continues and is among the contributing factors to Iran's refusal to return to negotiations limiting its nuclear capacity. The killing of Soleimani — using a tool reserved for suspected terrorists on a state official — also shows how enemies can blur, New America's Sterman says.

“It shows that the conflict with Iran is not entirely separate from the war on terror,” he says. “It's a concerning sign that the conflicts can expand and enemies can blur together.”

Although Biden said during his campaign that he would re-enter the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, Tehran is stepping up its uranium enrichment and says it will not return to negotiations until the United States lifts debilitating economic sanctions.76

Many former top U.S. officials have condemned those targeted killings and say Biden must do everything possible to return to the table with Iran — or face the prospect of war with the Islamic Republic.

“War with Iran would be an unmitigated disaster,” a group of more than 40 former national security, military and diplomatic officials wrote to Biden. “While there is no question that the U.S. would prevail, military conflict with Iran would incur unacceptable costs to the United States and ultimately fail to advance U.S. national security. We must urgently reverse course, beginning by rejoining” the 2015 nuclear pact.77

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Outlook

An End to “Forever Wars”?

Many experts expect Biden to continue targeted killings to some extent, but say the policy governing them will likely more closely resemble Obama's than Trump's. For example, they expect more transparency, and for the White House and military to have authority over the majority of such operations instead of the CIA.

“Generally, the personality of the president doesn't change these things,” says New America's Sterman. “But I think we may see more transparency requirements and more requirements to report on civilian deaths.”

But some analysts see the chance for a larger change, especially because Biden has pledged to end the “forever wars” in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where drone killings have played a large role.78

Even though many of the same people from Obama's administration, which expanded drone strikes, are serving in the Biden administration, “we are waiting to see whether and how they learned a lesson about their approach, and how that approach perpetuates forever wars,” the ACLU's Shamsi says. “It remains to be seen.”

Analysts and legal rights advocates also worry about the use of drones on the domestic front, as more law enforcement agencies adopt them, mainly for surveillance assistance.79 Finkelstein of the University of Pennsylvania worries that armed drones could be deployed to track or target people inside the United States, especially as the label of “domestic terrorism” is used more often to describe extremist movements across the political spectrum, including in events such as the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

“I'm concerned about the future,” Finkelstein says. “When this way of dealing with security threats becomes a common practice, it's hard for it not to leak into other areas.”

Analysts predict the gap between militaries will continue, especially as new technology emerges.

“Drones are part of that larger trend of military disparity, which will continue,” Georgetown's Byman says.

Drones and technology used for surveillance are also becoming more advanced, incorporating elements of artificial technology and machine learning.80 But the University of Haifa's Statman says that new technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI) or smarter drones will not necessarily mean more civilian casualties, as many fear.

“These AI-based robots might make mistakes, but humans are even more prone to error,” Statman says. “We will be relying more on AI and robots for everything in our lives, so I see no reason to be more worried about them in war.”

The United Nations has called for limits on the development and use of drones, and more oversight and international standards for when targeted killings are appropriate.81 But some say this is unlikely to happen.

“There is a huge difference in opinion between various experts on what is considered a proportional attack,” Statman says. “When people will assess as proportional or disproportional is often tied to their opinion on whether the conflict itself is justified.”

New methods will likely emerge for targeted killings, however, says Hebrew University's Shereshevsky, especially with the growth of cyberwarfare.

“Maybe there will be targeted cyberattacks, targeting people by turning off their electricity, or causing their self-driving car to crash,” Shereshevsky says. “You can imagine many things. But the new era of fully autonomous technology raises the ability to find and target people. The question will be how much humans will control the decision-making.”

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Pro/Con

Are targeted killings legal?

Pro Abraham Bell Professor of Law, University of San Diego. Written for CQ Researcher, April 2021 Targeted killings have always been lawful under international law. Modern international law emerged in Renaissance Europe, and its earliest versions assumed that states could legitimately kill. The laws of war that emerged then (and persist until today) approve the killing of enemy combatants — not only of soldiers, but of everyone who participates in combat on behalf of the enemy. Under modern laws of war, states may kill innocent people as well, so long as the innocents are “collateral damage” to enemy combatants in an amount that is not “excessive.” Within the bounds of these rules, states can and do target specific enemy targets for killing. For instance, during World War II, Allied forces famously targeted and killed Reinhard Heydrich, the acting Reich-protector of Bohemia and Moravia for Nazi Germany, and Marshal Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Some have objected to targeted killings in open-ended conflicts against nonstate armed forces, such as the United States' targeted killings of Qaeda terrorists. Such objections rest on a misunderstanding of the relationship between the law governing the conduct of combat and the rules that tell states when they are permitted to initiate military action. The same targeting rules apply to all combat, no matter whether the armed conflict was lawfully initiated. Even if it initially had no right to engage in armed conflict against al Qaeda or the Taliban, the United States still has a right to target specific Qaeda or Taliban combatants today. A more difficult question arises where the targeted killing takes place outside armed conflict. Here, too, it has been clear for centuries that states may employ their militaries to kill combatants outside formal war. International law uses a variety of terms to describe occasions where military force is legitimately used outside armed conflict, such as “frontier incidents,” armed reprisals and self-defense. In such cases, targeted killings are as legal as in armed conflict. Perhaps the most frequent controversy over targeted killings is over identifying targets. Critics argue that persons such as Brig. Gen. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps should not have been considered legitimate targets because they had prominent civilian roles; in addition to his rank in Iran's military nuclear program, Fakhrizadeh was a physics professor at Imam Hossein University. But this too misapprehends relevant international law. International law classifies civilians with combat roles or actively involved in combat as legitimate targets.

Con Claire Finkelstein Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania. Written for CQ Researcher, April 2021 Extrajudicial killings outside of active military hostilities have grown exponentially since the 9/11 attacks, particularly using drones. Drone technology has provided many advantages in the fight against violent nonstate actors. Compared with in-person “kill or capture” missions, drones have reduced the risk to our military in the fight against terrorists, minimized the collateral damage our strikes inflict, and reduced invasiveness to sovereign nations with whom we were not at war. Despite these benefits, the legal framework for targeted killings remains nebulous, and it is still unclear what conditions must be satisfied before lethal force can be used outside the context of armed conflict. International law requires that we attempt to capture rather than kill nonstate actors who pose an imminent risk of harm, unless capture is “infeasible.” But defining terms like “imminence” or “infeasibility” remains an elusive task, one largely left to the subjective judgment of presidents who have enjoyed discretion over such operations without much congressional or judicial oversight. The recent killing of Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani made matters murkier still. This was the first time the United States had openly killed a state actor outside the context of armed conflict. In the absence of a clear justification grounded in the law of national self-defense, there is no basis for thinking such strikes legal under international law. Lack of clarity surrounding the use of targeted killing of nonstate actors is arguably responsible for this expansion, since it allowed previously clear rules to be manipulated for the sake of short-term gain. An additional worry is that these practices have effaced the distinction between war and crime, given that we have weakened the line between combatants and civilians and thus eroded the protected status of civilians under the laws of war. If we continue down this path, we will begin to weaken the constitutional guarantees protecting domestic criminal suspects as well. The results could be disastrous. We currently imagine, for example, that targeted killing would never be deployed on U.S. soil. Radicalization of the U.S. population, however, creates a grave risk that previously clear distinctions will no longer hold. We might thus find drones with lethal capacity deployed in domestic law enforcement, just as we have already seen with regard to surveillance. For this and many other reasons, we need legal clarity in the domain of targeted killing, and we should dial back our use of this technique except in cases where that clarity has been achieved.

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Discussion Questions

Here are some questions to think about regarding targeted killings:

• Why are targeted killings on the rise? Who pioneered these operations and why?

• What is a targeted killing? Do you believe they are legal under international law?

• What do critics say about targeted killings? And what do its defenders argue in response?

• Are targeted killings the best way to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons? If not, what would be more effective?

• Do you support using armed drones to carry out targeted killings, rather than human-piloted aircraft? Why or why not?

• How are drones changing the nature of war? What do ethicists argue about the costs of this type of warfare?

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Short Features

U.S. Faces Growing Drone Competition

Armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — better known as drones — are changing the nature of warfare and leading to what some experts warn is an arms race, with the United States facing increasing competition from China, Turkey and other countries.

“It's a rapidly expanding type of weapon,” says Seth Frantzman, an Israeli-based journalist and the author of the forthcoming book Drone Wars. “While just a handful of countries admit to having them, many others want to get them. It's a logical evolution of a military platform because it's basically a missile that can hover around.”

The global military drone market is growing more than 12 percent a year, with analysts expecting it to be worth $24 billion by 2027. More than 100 countries have military drone programs, and 39 have armed drones.1

In addition to carrying out targeted killings, drones are used to gather intelligence and attack strategic positions, enemy troops or weapons caches. These unmanned weapons can be deployed quickly and for long periods of time without endangering pilots, according to experts and critics alike.

An MQ-9 Reaper is readied for a training flight at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nev. The Reaper and other drones are changing the nature of warfare, many experts say. (Getty Images/Ethan Miller)

“The existence of this tool makes certain forms of endless war possible,” allowing countries to carry out anti-terrorism and other operations without risking soldiers' lives, says David Sterman, senior policy analyst at the New America think tank.

The world's leading drone-makers are mainly in the United States, Europe and Israel, and they sell this technology to militaries that are already strong and advanced.2

“Drones are part of the larger trend of military disparity” between stronger and weaker nations, says Daniel Byman, professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.

For years, as part of the Missile Technology Control Regime — an informal agreement among 35 nations to limit the proliferation of missiles — the United States refrained from exporting missile-carrying drones, such as the Reaper and the Predator, even to allies. The restriction was born of fear that such drones could fall into the wrong hands, be used on civilians for political reasons or erase Israel's military advantage over its rivals in the Middle East.

But in 2020, the Trump administration reinterpreted the agreement, opening the door to selling drones to allies. Due to this change, a U.S. deal to sell Reaper drones to the United Arab Emirates is pending, as the new Biden administration reviews it.3

In addition, other countries, such as Turkey and China, are now producing or buying armed drones.4

“The idea that this can be kept in a box is done,” Frantzman says. “We are still waiting to see who really becomes the superpower in this; the United States could fall behind.”

In fact, this threat of competition was one reason the Trump administration liberalized the drone export policy, a policy first initiated but not finalized under President Barack Obama, Frantzman says. For years, American allies, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, have been buying drones from China, which began exporting armed drones in 2014.5

As far back as 2017, the Pentagon expressed worry about this development: “China faces little competition for sale of such systems, as most countries that produce them are restricted in selling the technology,” said a Pentagon statement.6

In addition to improving the ability of advanced militaries to fight from afar, drones are an increasingly attractive option for poorer countries, because they are cheaper than planes, says Franz-Stefan Gady, a research fellow for cyber, space and future conflict at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. He noted that Azerbaijan, due largely to drones purchased from Israel and Turkey, dominated Armenian forces in a 44-day conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh that ended with a cease-fire in November.7

Nonstate actors, including alleged terrorist groups such as Hezbollah in the Middle East and the Houthis in Yemen, are also using more drones.8

“UAVs are a cheap man's air force,” Gady says. “They are a much more economical way to fight wars. However, they are no panacea to every tactical problem. For example, a key vulnerability are the data links of UAVs that can be jammed. And they can still only carry a fairly limited amount of munitions that are not effective for every target.”

Although experts expect armed drones to proliferate quickly, they say the bigger challenge and next area for growth — mainly among wealthy nations — is developing defense systems against drones. Success, however, is far from certain, they say.

“Often the problem is, you cannot put systems in enough places, and because drones can be small and move slowly, it's hard for defensive systems to pick them up,” Frantzman says. “So for now, the drone seems to be doing better than defense systems against them. Countries will need to invest a lot in this.”

— Sara Toth Stub

[1] “Military Drone Market Size to Hit USD 23.78 Billion by 2027,” Fortune Business Insights, Nov. 11, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/23z6s648; Nick Cumming-Bruce, “The Killing of Qassim Suleimani Was Unlawful, Says U.N. Expert,” The New York Times, July 9, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/3uxj9sew.

[2] “Military Drone Market Size to Hit USD $23.78 Billion by 2027,” ibid.

[3] “UAE confident F-35 jets sale will go through, says ambassador,” Al Jazeera, Feb. 2, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/n7rbk9s.

[4] Sébastien Roblin, “Cheap drones from China, Turkey and Israel are fueling conflicts like Armenia and Azerbaijan's,” NBC News, Oct. 14, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/d8zh7bx9.

[5] Jeremy Page and Paul Sonne, “Unable to Buy U.S. Military Drones, Allies Place Orders With China,” The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/fvckh3us.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Robyn Dixon, “Azerbaijan's drones owned the battlefield in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of warfare,” The Washington Post, Nov. 11, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/8u6bsp9f.

[8] Dan De Luce, “Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen ramp up drone, missile attacks on Saudi Arabia,” NBC News, March 12, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/z8cke4y6; “Hezbollah claims to fly drone into Israel undetected, film border bases,” The Times of Israel, Dec. 5, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/4akxwxts.

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Assassinations of Iranians Draw Criticism, and Praise

In November, Iran's top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, died in a carefully planned ambush. According to one recent account, he was shot with a 1-ton Israeli machine gun smuggled into the country.9

No one has officially claimed responsibility for the assassination — but Iranians and many intelligence analysts blame Israel and believe the Trump administration knew about the operation in advance.10

Although many details about Fakhrizadeh's death remain unclear, assassinations have come to play a larger role in Israeli and U.S. attempts to counter Iran and its nuclear weapons development program. Debate continues over the killings' effectiveness, legality and political repercussions, especially as President Biden seeks talks with Iran to limit its nuclear capabilities, its activities in Iraq and its human rights abuses.

The funeral of top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is held in Tehran, Iran, in November. He was killed in a targeted hit, blamed on Israel. (Getty Images/Anadolu Agency/Iranian Defense Ministry)

Since 2007, Israel's Mossad intelligence organization has killed at least five Iranian nuclear scientists, media reports say.11 According to a 2018 book by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, Meir Dagan, the former Mossad director who initiated the plans to kill Iranian scientists, said bluntly in an interview that one killing is insufficient, as the threat of death must be constant to have an effect on the nuclear program.

“Sporadic eliminations are worth nothing,” Dagan said.12

In his book, Bergman argued that killing the scientists has set the Iran's nuclear program back years. Human knowledge and leadership were lost, he said, and the Iranians were forced to invest an immense effort in inspecting equipment for possible sabotage. “These efforts greatly slowed down other aspects of the nuclear project, even bringing some to a standstill,” Bergman wrote.13

But others say the killings have had little effect, and that actions such as the 2015 international agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in which Iran agreed to limit uranium enrichment in return for softening economic sanctions, have done more to curb Iran's capabilities.

“The Iranian project was too extensive and mature for a few killings to substantively affect it,” wrote Shlomo Brom and Shimon Stein, senior researchers at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies. “In the case of the Fakhrizadeh assassination, it is doubtful … the killing will significantly serve the objective of damaging and delaying the Iranian nuclear project.”14

The United States first used the tactic against Iran in January 2020, when it assassinated Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani near Baghdad, striking his convoy with a drone. The attack also killed several of his allies in Iraq-based militias.15

“Because there have been many other targeted killings, in a way it made it easier to apply this to Soleimani, or the U.S. became more willing to apply it,” says David Sterman, senior policy analyst at New America, a Washington think tank. “The war on terror and all the drone killings opened the space for the United States to target an Iranian government official. So they approached him more as a terrorist rather than a government official. But the primary story here is the Iranian-U.S. conflict, not terrorism.”

While Soleimani's killing did not trigger a widely expected major backlash, some analysts say it, along with the more recent killing of Fakhrizadeh, has led Iran to increase its enrichment of uranium and refuse to renew talks with the United States about limiting its nuclear program. The Trump administration pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018.16

And some warn that the killings could lead to a dangerous escalation of violence and jeopardize long-accepted rules of engagement.

Assassinating scientists differs from the thousands of targeted killings of suspected terrorists and militants Israel has carried out over the years, says Daniel Statman, a professor of political philosophy and ethics at the University of Haifa in Israel. Scientists, he says, do not likely present an immediate threat to life, and international rules of conventional warfare forbid the killing of researchers and scientists working for sovereign states.

“These are not exactly fighters, they are civilians. [Assassinations] might lead to undermining conventions that have been around for years,” Statman says. “The international community has a strong interest in making sure people take these limitations on fighting very seriously, and this could lead to the other side doing the same thing to our scientists.”

For the United States, targeting Soleimani, a government official, marked a turn away from targeted killings that focused mainly on nonstate actors, such as members of terrorist or militant organizations, says Claire Finkelstein, director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania's law school.

“We are at an inflection point,” she says.

In 2019, the United States designated as a terrorist organization the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards' military unit that Soleimani oversaw. But despite this designation, Soleimani also remained an official of the sovereign Iranian government. “Being a state actor should take precedence over being a non-state actor,” Finkelstein says.17

Meanwhile, Iran's current top nuclear scientist, Ali Akbar Salehi, recently told the PBS News Hour that Iran plans to continue enriching uranium — unless the United States returns to the original deal brokered in 2015, whose terms Biden has indicated he wants to renegotiate. Salehi also said he did not fear for his life.

“I don't worry about it, because we believe in destiny. Destiny is in the hand of God,” he said. “Eventually, we have to die, sooner or later. OK. You die as a martyr, so much the better.”18

— Sara Toth Stub

[9] Stephen Farrell, “Iranian nuclear scientist killed by one-ton automated gun in Israeli hit: Jewish Chronicle,” Reuters, Feb. 10, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/25fdx5pd.

[10] Chas Danner, “What We Know About the Assassination of Iran's Top Nuclear Scientist,” New York Magazine, Nov. 27, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2e8vzptn.

[11] Oliver Holmes, “Iranian scientist's death only the latest in long line of attacks blamed on Israel,” The Guardian, Nov. 27, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/8zd77kv6.

[12] Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (2018), p. 581.

[13] Ibid., p. 609.

[14] Shlomo Brom and Shimon Stein, “Does the Cost of the Fakhrizadeh Assassination Outweigh the Benefits?” Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University, Dec. 2, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/4k78vf79.

[15] Karen Zraick, “What to Know About the Death of Iranian General Suleimani,” The New York Times, Jan. 3, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/u4xs9pe9.

[16] Sune Engel Rasmussen and Laurence Norman, “Iran's Nuclear Scientist: How Will the Killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Affect Tehran's Nuclear Program?” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 1, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/bxmv4jr5.

[17] Miriam Berger, “What is Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps that Soleimani Helped to Lead?” The Washington Post, Jan. 4, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ff8vjhdr.

[18] Nick Schifrin, “Iran's top nuclear scientist discusses the potential for a nuclear deal with the U.S.,” PBS News Hour, March 9, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/33mnx8ds.

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Bibliography

Books

Bergman, Ronen, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, Random House, 2018. An investigative journalist outlines the history of Israel's targeted killing program, from pre-1948 militias to the modern day.

Frantzman, Seth J., Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future, Bombardier Books, June 2021. A journalist explores the development, current uses and the future role of unmanned drones in warfare.

Meisels, Tamar, and Jeremy Waldron, Debating Targeted Killing: Counter-Terrorism or Extrajudicial Execution? Oxford University Press, 2020. Two academics examine the legal and ethical debates around targeted killings.

Senn, Martin, and Jodok Troy, eds., The Transformation of Targeted Killing and International Order, Routledge, 2019. Two scholars present a collection of essays on the political, ethical and legal issues involved in modern targeted killings.

Articles

Atherton, Kelsey D., “Trump Inherited the Drone War but Ditched Accountability,” Foreign Policy, May 22, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/vas552uk. A journalist argues that President Donald Trump expanded the use of drones and made the program more secretive.

Banka, Andris, and Adam Quinn, “Killing Norms Softly: U.S. Targeted Killing, Quasi-secrecy and the Assassination Ban,” Security Studies, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/xw78yub. Two academics explore how leaks to the press lend legitimacy to secret military programs, including targeted killings.

Callamard, Agnes, “The Targeted Killing of General Soleimani: Its Lawfulness and Why It Matters,” Just Security, Jan. 8, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/7mxxv9pf. The U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions analyzes the legal issues surrounding the U.S. killing of an Iranian general and the precedent it sets.

Carson, Jennifer Varriale, “Assessing the Effectiveness of High-Profile Targeted Killings in the ‘War on Terror’: A Quasi-Experiment,” Criminology and Public Policy, February 2017, https://tinyurl.com/42e9z3jj. In a comprehensive study, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Missouri argues that the United States' targeted killings since Sept. 11, 2001, have yielded “negligible” results.

Ryan, Missy, and Souad Mekhennet, “In a first, Yemenis seek redress for U.S. drone strikes at Inter-American rights body,” The Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/f9s4bcvb. A news article details how Yemeni families are challenging U.S. drone strikes in an international human rights court.

Sabbagh, Dan, “Targeted killings via drone becoming ‘normalised’ — report,” The Guardian, Jan. 19, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2rvk6fmh. The public is increasingly accepting of targeted killings as they become more common, argues the group Drone Wars, which opposes the use of drones.

Savage, Charlie, and Eric Schmitt, “Biden Secretly Limits Counterterrorism Drone Strikes Away from War Zones,” The New York Times, March 3, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/aunrfx46. The Biden administration is considering tightening Trump-era rules for targeted drone strikes.

Wright, Robin, “Why the Assassination of a Scientist Will Have No Impact on Iran's Nuclear Program,” The New Yorker, Nov. 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/t8u57pc. A foreign-affairs journalist argues that the recent killing of a top Iranian nuclear scientist will not limit that nation's arms program.

Yadlin, Amos, and Assaf Orion, “The Assassination of Fakhrizadeh: Considerations and Consequences,” INSS Insight, Dec. 2, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/vt63bjkj. Two researchers at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank, write that the killing of the nuclear scientist could slow the progression of Iran's nuclear program.

Reports and Studies

“Use of armed drones for targeted killings,” U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, United Nations Digital Library, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2mtfxfz8. The U.N.'s special rapporteur on arbitrary executions looks at the increase in targeted killings and the proliferation of armed drones, and recommends the United Nations adopt international regulations.

Bergen, Peter, David Sterman and Melissa Salyk-Virk, “America's Counterterrorism Wars,” New America, March 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2pnreye3. A comprehensive report by a Washington think tank tracks U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, including the number of civilian casualties.

Burt, Peter, “Joint Enterprise: An overview of US-UK co-operation on armed drone operations,” Drone Wars UK, June 2020, https://tinyurl.com/d2773jda. A report by an anti-drone group details how the British military has joined U.S. drone missions and adopted American tactics.

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The Next Step

Biden Administration

Schmitt, Eric, and Christoph Koettl, “Remote C.I.A. Base in the Sahara Steadily Grows,” The New York Times, March 8, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y87na5an. A CIA base in Niger is expanding its ability to launch armed drone strikes, but there is no public evidence it has conducted a strike against terrorism suspects yet.

Sen, Sudhi Ranjan, “India to Buy First U.S. Armed Drones to Counter China, Pakistan,” Bloomberg, March 9, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/79c94wck. India plans to buy 30 armed drones from the United States as the Biden administration seeks closer military ties with the Asian nation.

Stone, Mike, “Exclusive: Biden wants to keep Trump policy that boosted armed drone exports,” Reuters, March 25, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3h8epyff. The administration will continue to sell drones abroad, even to countries whose human rights records are under scrutiny, according to sources.

Israel

“Lebanon's Hezbollah group says it shot down Israeli drone,” The Associated Press, Feb. 1, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4p5pf272. The militant group Hezbollah shot down an Israeli drone after vowing to avenge the killing of one of its fighters in an Israeli strike in Syria.

Khoury, Jack, “Hamas Says Gaza Fishermen's Deaths Caused by Explosive-laden Israeli Drone,” Haaretz, March 11, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/7ctnej9c. Three fishermen in Gaza died in an explosion after snaring an armed Israeli drone in their nets.

Kirkpatrick, David D., Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman, “Killer Robot? Assassination of Iranian Scientist Feeds Conflicting Accounts,” The New York Times, Dec. 9, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ymvk5yrd. Political factions in Iran disagree about the details surrounding the killing of one of the country's top scientists, believed to be the work of Israel, as each wants to avoid responsibility for the security lapse.

Terrorists

“Saudi energy ministry condemns terrorist drone attack on Riyadh oil refinery,” Arab News, March 26, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4sn3n3fn. The perpetrators of a drone strike on an oil refinery in Riyadh have yet to be officially confirmed, but Jordan believes a Houthi terrorist group was responsible.

Barakat, Matthew, “Former Air Force analyst pleads to leaking secrets about drone program,” The Associated Press, WTSP, April 1, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/scztbnpj. A former Air Force intelligence analyst pleaded guilty to leaking classified documents about drone strikes conducted against al Qaeda and other terrorist targets.

Cooper, Helene, and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Airstrikes in Syria Target Iran-Backed Militias That Rocketed American Troops in Iraq,” The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/49see9z4. The Biden administration authorized airstrikes against a militia in Syria that had recently attacked American and allied personnel in Iraq.

Yemen

“Yemen's Houthis say they launched drone attacks on Saudi capital,” Al Jazeera, April 1, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/vmjsmba2. A Houthi spokesman says the group sent four drones to attack Riyadh, but Saudi officials have not confirmed the story.

Al-Batati, Saeed, “Senior Houthi leader killed in Arab coalition airstrike on Marib,” Arab News, March 21, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/5c7y3hum. Major Gen. Zakaria Yahiya Al-Shami, at the top of the Arab coalition's most wanted list, was killed while leading rebel Houthis in an offensive.

Frantzman, Seth J., “Reports say Iran has expanded ‘kamikaze drone’ base in Yemen,” The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/b8cbtxcs. Iran has reportedly sent to Houthi rebels “suicide drones” that operate like cruise missiles.

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Contacts

American Civil Liberties Union
125 Broad St., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004
212-549-2500
aclu.org
Group whose work includes advocating for Americans hurt or killed in targeted killing overseas.

Bureau of Investigative Journalism
PO Box 76421, London EC2P 2SH, United Kingdom
+44 203 892 7490
thebureauinvestigates.com
Independent reporting organization that tracks drone strikes and deaths.

Drone Wars UK, Peace House
19 Paradise St., Oxford, OX1 1LD, United Kingdom
+44 1865 243688
dronewars.net
Nongovernmental organization that maintains a database of countries with armed drones.

European Forum on Armed Drones
Sint Jacobsstraat 12, 3551 BS Utrecht, The Netherlands
+31 30 233 33 46
efad.org
European group focused on research about armed drones and advocating limits on their use in an effort to end armed conflicts.

Human Rights Watch
350 Fifth Ave., 34th Floor, New York, NY 10118-3299
hrw.org
International nonprofit whose work includes tracking civilian deaths in drone strikes.

Institute for National Security Studies
40 Haim Levanon St., Tel Aviv, Israel
+972 3 640 0400
inss.org.il
Think tank at Tel Aviv University that focuses on Israeli security, including the role of targeted killings.

New America
740 15th St., N.W., Suite 900, Washington, DC 20005
202-986-2700
newamerica.org
Think tank that tracks U.S. drone strikes.

U.S. Department of Defense
1400 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301-1400
703-697-5131
defense.gov
Federal department that oversees the armed forces and weapons research.

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Footnotes

[1] Missy Ryan and Souad Mekhennet, “In a first, Yemenis seek redress for U.S. drone strikes at Inter-American Rights Body,” The Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3hjy9wxk.

[2] “Who Has What: Countries that have Conducted Drone Strikes,” New America, March 23, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/8cweyjcw.

[3] “Drone Warfare,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, accessed March 8, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/5cvph66r.

[4] Nick Cumming-Bruce, “The Killing of Qassim Suleimani Was Unlawful, Says U.N. Expert,” The New York Times, July 9, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/3p4bxkae.

[5] “Targeted Killings,” International Committee of the Red Cross, https://tinyurl.com/netpab24; Kelsey D. Atherton, “Trump Inherited the Drone War but Ditched Accountability,” Foreign Policy, May 22, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/r7f4bpw4; Peter Bergen, David Sterman and Melissa Salyk-Virk, “America's Counterterrorism Wars,” New America, March 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/58k344mr.

[6] Jane Arraf and Falih Hassan, “U.S. Airstrike Kills Top ISIS Leader in Iraq,” The New York Times, Jan. 29, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/u63tattx; Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, “Biden Secretly Limits Counterterrorism Drones Strikes Away From War Zones,” The New York Times, March 3, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/pbs63ms.

[7] Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, “Obama's Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes Than Bush,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Jan. 17, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/uned55rr; Atherton, op. cit.; “Strikes in Pakistan,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, accessed March 8, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/23f86bw3; “Strikes in Yemen,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, accessed March 8, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4dybbn3u; and “Strikes in Somalia,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism,” accessed March 8, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/ekyjt4s2.

[8] “Strikes in Afghanistan,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, accessed March 8, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4aczfkhh.

[9] Michael Eisenstadt, Kori Schake and David Deptula, “U.S. Strategy Toward Iran: Restoring Deterrence, Enabling Diplomacy,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Feb. 14, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/3ca4fcpc.

[10] “United States, Use of Armed Drones for Extraterritorial Killings,” International Committee of the Red Cross, https://tinyurl.com/senx7res.

[11] Dina Smeltz et al., “Rejecting Retreat: Americans Support US Engagement in Global Affairs,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2019, p. 16, https://tinyurl.com/3f7umpt5.

[12] Dan Sabbagh, “Targeted killings via drone becoming normalised — report,” The Guardian, Jan. 19, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/us3tzcj8; Angela Charlton and Krista Larson, “France says it carried out first armed drone strike in Mali,” The Associated Press, Dec. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/827nx8v9; Peter Burt, “Joint Enterprise: An overview of US-UK co-operation on armed drone operations,” The European Forum on Armed Drones, June 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2bfe7kht; and Marcus Müller, “The Fog of Drone War: Lessons from the U.S. and European Armed Drone Policy,” American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, April 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/d7kpx4w.

[13] Müller, ibid.

[14] David M. Halbfinger, Ben Hubbard and Ronen Bergman, “The Israel-Iran Shadow War Escalates and Breaks Into the Open,” The New York Times, Aug. 28, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/mph2mnb6; David E. Sanger, “Assassination in Iran Could Limit Biden's Options. Was that the Goal?” The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/uft4x39x; and Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (2018), p. xxii.

[15] Laurenz Gehrke, “German SPD under attack after shooting down armed drones,” Politico, Dec. 18, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yv9tsa2a.

[16] Sophy Antrobus, “How Are Drones Changing Warfare?” Gresham College, Nov. 11, 2020, 7:24, https://tinyurl.com/3smyv2w5.

[17] Ibid., 12:09–12:24.

[18] David Hambling, “U.S. Army's New Drone Swarm May Be a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” Forbes, June 1, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/sad9fs.

[19] Ibid.

[20] “Remarks by the President at the National Defense University,” The White House, May 23, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/mwn5cznb.

[21] Shahaf Rabi and Avery E. Plaw, “Do Israeli Targeted Killings Comply with High Court of Justice's Guidelines?” Israel Law Review, June 2020, p. 56, https://tinyurl.com/drhmtw97.

[22] “UN Rights Rapporteur Calls U.S. Killing of Top Iranian General ‘Unlawful,’” RadioFree Europe Radio Liberty, July 7, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/jx65dmr7.

[23] Rabi and Plaw, op. cit.

[24] Cumming-Bruce, op. cit.

[25] Ryan and Mekhennet, op. cit.

[26] Cumming-Bruce, op. cit.

[27] “The Secret Death Toll of America's Drones,” The New York Times, March 30, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/2w8hxt98; Atherton, op. cit.

[28] Robin Wright, “Why the Assassination of a Scientist Will Have No Impact on Iran's Nuclear Program,” The New Yorker, Nov. 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/6ywm8s.

[29] Amos Yadlin and Assaf Orion, “The Assassination of Fakhrizadeh: Considerations and Consequences,” INSS Insight, Dec. 2, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/5fnhfae2.

[30] Jennifer Varriale Carson, “Assessing the Effectiveness of High-Profile Targeted Killings in the ‘War on Terror’: A Quasi-Experiment,” Criminology and Public Policy, February 2017, https://tinyurl.com/42e9z3jj.

[31] Peter Kenyon and Greg Myre, “A Look Back at What Happened After the Killing of Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani,” NPR, Jan. 1, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y2tyfxzs.

[32] Wright, op. cit.

[33] “Treaties, State Parties and Commentaries,” International Committee of the Red Cross, https://tinyurl.com/4394fp5r.

[34] Nobuo Hayashi, “The Role and Importance of the Hague Conferences: A Historical Perspective,” United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2017, p. 4, https://tinyurl.com/3dvv6n6x.

[35] Bergman, op. cit., pp. 8-10.

[36] Ibid., pp. 16-17.

[37] Frans Viljoen, “International Human Rights Law: A Short History,” UN Chronicle, https://tinyurl.com/rkzavjws; Agnes Callamard, “The Targeted Killing of General Soleimani: Its Lawfulness and Why it Matters,” Just Security, Jan. 8, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/7mxxv9pf.

[38] John Daniszewski, “Was the drone attack on Iranian general an assassination?” The Associated Press, Jan. 4, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/4cz8jcx4.

[39] Bergman, op. cit., pp. 63-71.

[40] Ibid., pp. 31, 35.

[41] Stephan Weissman, “The Lumumba Assassination and CIA Accountability,” Wilson Center, April 9, 2012, https://tinyurl.com/adzryh5t; Luca Trenta, “The U.S. has blurred the lines on assassinations for decades,” The Conversation, Aug. 26, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/8uynu7ud.

[42] Trenta, ibid.

[43] Andris Banka and Adam Quinn, “Killing Norms Softly: U.S. Targeted Killing, Quasi-secrecy and the Assassination Ban,” Security Studies, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/e5522m; Tim Weiner, “George P. Shultz, Top Cabinet Official Under Nixon and Reagan, Dies at 100,” The New York Times, https://tinyurl.com/8fymhwxc; and Bernard Weinraub, “U.S. Calls Libya Raid a Success; ‘Choice is Theirs,’ Reagan Says; Moscow Cancels Shultz Talks,” The New York Times, April 16, 1986, https://tinyurl.com/3a5bvkj4.

[44] Walter J. Boyne, “El Dorado Canyon,” Air Force Magazine, March 1, 1999, https://tinyurl.com/5h2xc294.

[45] Seymour Hersh, “Target Qaddafi,” The New York Times, Feb. 22, 1987, https://tinyurl.com/4n4mnpak; “Memorandum of Law,” Department of the Army, Nov. 2, 1989, https://tinyurl.com/2p7unehb.

[46] Trenta, op. cit.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Daniel L. Byman, “Targeting Killing, American-style,” Brookings, Jan. 20, 2006, https://tinyurl.com/45x2n6j9; Banka and Quinn, op. cit.

[49] Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” The New Yorker, Oct. 19, 2009, https://tinyurl.com/jrzxzuy.

[50] Charlie Savage, “Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen,” The New York Times, Oct. 8, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/rvdha3pf; Atherton, op. cit.

[51] Cora Currier, “Everything you need to know about drone strikes,” ProPublica, PBS, Jan. 11, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/vn8kh9a8; “Yemeni, Reported U.S. Covert Actions 2001-2011,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, accessed Jan. 23, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2ps4npzw.

[52] Chris Woods, “The Story of America's Very First Drone Strike,” The Atlantic, May 30, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/dbnnd8v7.

[53] Mayer, op. cit.

[54] Banka and Quinn, op. cit.; Mayer, ibid.

[55] Charlie Savage, “How 4 Federal Lawyers Paved the Way to Kill Osama bin Laden,” The New York Times, Oct. 28, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/efxm464.

[56] Mayer, op. cit.

[57] Charlie Savage, “U.N. Report Highly Critical of U.S. Drone Attacks,” The New York Times, June 2, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/6c7za8yh.

[58] “Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions,” United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 13, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/h9676kxc.

[59] Purkiss and Serle, op. cit.

[60] Greg Miller, “Legal memo backing drone strike that killed American Anwar al-Awlaki is released,” The Washington Post, June 23, 2014, https://tinyurl.com/y32825sb; Charlie Savage, “Court Releases Large Parts of Memo Approving Killing of American in Yemen,” The New York Times, June 23, 2014, https://tinyurl.com/8bbftujf.

[61] Miller, op. cit.

[62] Pete Yost, “Judge dismisses lawsuit over drone strikes in Yemen that killed American Anwar al-Awlaki,” The Washington Post, April 4, 2014, https://tinyurl.com/yhk849d4.

[63] Atherton, op. cit.

[64] Dan Lamothe and Mustafa Salim, “U.S. Strikes in Iraq and Syria target Iranian-backed militia, Pentagon says,” The Washington Post, Dec. 29, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/4m4kx696; David Brennan, “Joe Biden Must Rejoin Iran Nuclear Deal To Avoid ‘Unacceptable’ War, Former Officials Say,” Newsweek, Feb. 5, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/aksjvauv.

[65] Atherton, op. cit.

[66] Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, “Biden Secretly Limits Counterterrorism Drone Strikes Away From War Zones,” The New York Times, March 3, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/pbs63ms.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Brianna Rosen, “To End the Forever Wars, Rein in the Drones,” Just Security, Feb. 16, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/sjms6jvd.

[69] Savage and Schmitt, op. cit.

[70] Eric Schmitt and Christoph Koettl, “Remote CIA Base in the Sahara Steadily Grows,” The New York Times, March 8, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y87na5an.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Rebecca Kheel, “Biden's Move on Yemen Sparks New Questions,” The Hill, Feb. 13, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/47pe5fj3; Joseph Hincks, “Leading Aid Official David Miliband on What Joe Biden's Pivot Means to Yemen,” Time, Feb. 5, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/5y5p47vv.

[73] Andrew Bacevich, “Has Biden forgotten he's commander in chief? Here's America's national security to-do list,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 3, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2y8jkaca.

[74] Jennifer Scholtes and Connor O'Brien, “Adios AUMF? Democrats press Biden for help in revoking old war powers,” Politico, Jan. 21, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3dfz8xpt.

[75] Ellen Mitchell, “Group of 25 prominent nonprofits urge Congress to pull war powers,” The Hill, Feb. 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4sa46tfb.

[76] David E. Sanger, “Assassination in Iran Could Limit Biden's Options. Was That the Goal?” The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/uft4x39x; Kali Robinson, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?” Council on Foreign Relations, Feb 25, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y2ub8srs; and David Brennan, “Joe Biden Must Rejoin Iran Nuclear Deal to Avoid ‘Unacceptable’ War, Former Officials Say,” Newsweek, Feb. 5, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/aksjvauv.

[77] Brennan, ibid.

[78] Gerald F. Seib, “Biden's Opposition to ‘Forever Wars’ Being Tested in Afghanistan,” The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/8xfervj8.

[79] “Domestic Drones,” American Civil Liberties Union, https://tinyurl.com/yh23nfu3.

[80] Will Knight, “Anduril's New Drone Offers to Inject More AI into Warfare,” Wired, Sept. 10, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/wyfjww94.

[81] “All drone strikes ‘in self-defence’ should go before Security Council, argues independent rights expert,” United Nations, July 9, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/t3k2yjzt.

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About the Author

Sara Toth Stub is a Jerusalem-based U.S. journalist who has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, U.S. News & World Report and other publications. She covers business, culture and travel. Her most recent CQ Researcher report was on the natural gas industry.

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