Guest Opinion: The illegality of high tech warBy Robin Hensel and Coleen Rowley on Why has the United Nations Special Rapporteur called drone strikes extrajudicial killing'Why has a Pakistani judge recently filed criminal charges against a former top CIA lawyer who oversaw its drone program and a former station chief in Islamabad over a 2009 strike that killed two people' The Islamabad High Court ruled CIA officials must face charges including murder, conspiracy, waging war against Pakistan and terrorism.
Naturally our comments attracted some dissent, a substantive critique coming from Attorney Larry Frost of Paladin Law PLLC, Bloomington, MN, which in furtherance of a robust debate, I'm reposting directly below our piece with Mr. However, at least two respected law professors, Fionnuala N Aolin (at University of Minnesota Law School) and Philip Alston (Professor of Law at New York University Law School, and former UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, 2004-10) criticized their fellow academics' glossing-over approach since "one can reasonably take the position that the US government and its targeted killing programs breach international and human rights law standards." Both lamented their fellow professors' avoidance of discussing the important issues and sending "a real chill to an important open debate."In our op-ed (below) published Apby the Brainerd Dispatch newspaper (which built upon a related one we wrote in 2012), Robin Hensel and I decided, by contrast, to focus on the illegality of the US' new high tech "warfare." Brainerd is not far from Camp Ripley National Guard base in Minnesota that trains military personnel on the "Shadow" and other smaller drones that started out being used for surveillance but have now become weaponized.
Unfortunately, instead of defending Koh's legal rationales for drone killing on the merits, a number of these law professors, led by Koh's cronies at the State Department, pilloried the NYU students, defending and praising Koh on mostly personal grounds, or for his other legal contributions, almost entirely avoiding discussion of the issues surrounding US' high tech targeted killing.
Law professor Harold Koh, a former Yale Law School Dean and former Legal Adviser to Hillary Clinton's State Department, hired by NYU to teach human rights and international law, recently found himself in the crosshairs when NYU law students posted a "statement of no confidence" in him based on the prior actions he undertook to justify, enable and expand the use of Obama's "extrajudicial killing program." A harsh critic of the Bush Administration, Koh is obviously well liked among those who consider themselves in the liberal legal intelligentsia.
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