Psycho Trump Relaxed Already Lax Guidelines on Drone Assassinations and Attacks

During the Trump administration, the Times and other media reported that the Trump rules weakened even the loose policy safeguards put in place by the Obama administration in 2013, which were also released in response to litigation in 2016. Despite redactions, the newly-revealed Trump rules show how far that administration went in casting aside any meaningful constraint on the United States’ use of lethal force abroad without meaningful oversight by Congress or the judiciary, and with devastating consequences for people’s lives. 

Trump’s rules are in many ways an unsurprising extension of U.S. government logic and policy justifications for killing couched in legal language. Over now four administrations, the U.S. government has sought to justify an unlawful lethal strikes program that has exacted an appalling toll on Muslim, Brown, and Black civilians in different parts of the world. Now, almost 20 years into the U.S. government’s war-based approach, it’s clear that U.S. legal or policy justifications for this program do not actually demonstrate adherence to domestic or international law, they fundamentally undermine it. 

(snip) the Trump killing rules applied to all parts of the world outside the United States, including countries in which there is recognized armed conflict. With this sweeping application, the Trump rules may have destabilized the entire 20-year-old cobbled-together U.S. lethal force regime—and possibly set it up to further fail as a matter of law and practice. Like the Obama rules, the Trump rules authorized lethal strikes in countries where Congress has not authorized force and human rights law strictly prohibits extrajudicial killing. Unlike the Obama rules, the PSP applied to recognized conflicts, likely requiring commanders to obtain permission to apply humanitarian law, with its more permissive killing rules—or perhaps even act under a mix of the made-up rules.