Question: So one issue that Judge Garland would likely never be able to consider if
he were confirmed concerns the President’s authority to conduct drone strikes away from
active battlefields.
And these are strikes that you have continuously authorized on the basis of vague legal standards
that you unilaterally deem to be satisfied in each case without ever appearing before
a court, and in the process killing hundreds of innocent civilians as well as, in some
cases, American citizens.
So my question is, how are these killings morally and legally justified?
And what kind of message does this drone program send about America’s values to the world,
the American people, and to law students like myself who refuse to put our trust in an opaque
process?
THE PRESIDENT: I think that’s a great question — although I will say that I will dispute
some of the underlying premises that you asserted as facts.
But I think it’s an important topic, and it’s a fair one.
When I came into office, we were still in the midst of two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, al Qaida was still highly active.
And drone technologies began to develop in parallel with — had developed prior to my
presidency, but started to really accelerate in terms of the technology and the precision
with which strikes could be taken.
And the challenge for me as Commander-in-Chief has consistently been how do you think about
this new technology in a way that is consistent with morality, ideals, laws of war, but is
also consistent with my first priority as President and Commander-in-Chief, which is
to keep all of you safe, including you.
And so I think it’s fair to say that in the first couple of years of my presidency,
the architecture — legal architecture, administrative architecture, command structures — around
how these were utilized was underdeveloped relative to how fast the technology was moving.
So another way of saying this is our military or our intelligence teams started seeing this
as really effective.
And they started just going because the goal was let’s get al Qaeda, let’s get these
leaders.
There’s a training camp here.
There’s a high-value target there.
Let’s move.
And it was — the decision-making was not ad hoc, but it was embedded in decisions that
are made all the time about a commander leading a military operation, or an intelligence team
trying to take out a terrorist.
And there wasn’t enough of an overarching structure, right?
So you may recall — but if not, I’m sure we can send it to you — I gave a speech
at the National Defense University in which I said that we have to create an architecture
for this because the potential for abuse — given the remoteness of these weapons and their
lethality, we’ve got to come up with a structure that governs how we’re approaching it.
And that’s what we’ve done.
So I’ve put forward what’s called a presidential directive.
It’s basically a set of administrative guidelines whereby these weapons are being used.
Now, we actually did put forward a non-classified version of what those directives look like.
And it says that you can’t use these weapons unless you have near certainty that there
will not be civilian casualties; that you have near certainty that the targets you are
hitting are, in fact, terrorist organizations that are intending to do imminent harm to
the United States.
And you’ve got all the agencies who are involved in that process, they have to get
together and approve that.
And it goes to the highest, most senior levels of our government in order for us to make
those decisions.
And what I’ve also said that we need to start creating a process whereby this — whereby
public accountability is introduced so that you or citizens or members of Congress outside
of the Intelligence Committee can look at the facts and see whether or not we’re abiding
by what we say are these norms.
And we’re actually — there’s a lot of legal aspects to this because part of the
problem here is, is that this drone program initially came through the intelligence side
under classified programs, as opposed to the military.
Part of what I’ve also said is I don’t want our intelligence agencies being a paramilitary
organization.
That’s not their function.
As much as possible this should be done through our Defense Department so that we can report,
here’s what we did, here’s why we did it, here’s our assessment of what happened.
And so slowly we are pushing it in that direction.
My hope is, is that by the time I leave office there is not only an internal structure in
place that governs these standards that we’ve set, but there is also an institutionalized
process whereby the actions that the U.S. government takes through drone technology
are consistently reported on, on an annualized basis so that people can look.
And the reason this is really important to me — and this was implied in your question
— is there is a lot of misinformation about this.
There is no doubt — and I said this in an interview I think recently — there is no
doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone strikes.
It is not true that it has been this sort of willy-nilly, let’s bomb a village.
That is not how folks have operated.
And what I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any
drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional
war.
So the irony — let’s take an example like the bin Laden raid.
This was as precise, as effective an operation that I don’t think anybody would dispute
was in the national security interests of the United States.
And we put our best people in there who operate as precisely and as effectively as any group
of individuals probably ever have in the history of the planet.
And they executed their mission flawlessly.
But there were a number of people who were killed in that who you might describe as not
the targets of the mission — members of bin Laden’s family, for example.
Now, that would be counted as a civilian casualty under the standards from which you drew your
information.
And if you calculated it as a percent, there was actually a pretty high civilian casualty
rate for this extraordinarily precise mission.
Now, imagine during the height of the Iraq war, or when we were still actively fighting
in Afghanistan, the number of civilians who were killed in normal military operations.
We talk about the number of U.S. troops that were killed in Iraq.
The number of Iraqis that were killed — primarily by AQI and those we were fighting, but also
by U.S. military that was trying to be as careful as possible in chaotic situations,
like Fallujah or Ramadi — were in the tens of thousands.
So part of my job as President is to figure out how I can keep America safe doing the
least damage possible in really tough, bad situations.
And I don’t have the luxury of just not doing anything and then being able to stand
back and feel as if my conscience is completely clear.
I have to make decisions because there are folks out there who are genuinely trying to
kill us and would be happy to blow up this entire room without any compunction, and are
actively trying to find ways to do it.
And I wish I could just send in Iron Man — (laughter) — no, no, I don’t mean that as a joke.
I just mean I wish that the tragedy of war, conflict, terrorism, et cetera, did not end
up creating circumstances where we, wielding kinetic power, don’t end up hurting anybody
who shouldn’t have been hurt.
But what I try to do is to set up the system as best as I can.
And I think it is very important for those who are critics of the U.S. government — and
this includes folks on the outside — to examine the incredible progress that we’ve
made over the course of a couple of decades.
Because this conversation didn’t even exist, it did not even cross the minds of people
in the White House as recently as 30 or 40 years ago.
I mean, it wasn’t even a factor.
And we anguish over this in a very serious way.
But what I do think is a legitimate concern is, is that the transparency issues.
I think that the way that this got built up through our intelligence and what’s called
our Title 50 programs meant that it did not — it wasn’t subject
to the same amount of democratic debate as when we are conducting what are called Title
10 Department of Defense conventional operations.
And that’s done a disservice not only to the public being able to examine where we
made mistakes and create corrective action, it’s actually also done a disservice to
the incredibly dedicated men and women in intelligence and in operations who perform
these operations who are subject to accusations that somehow they’re irresponsible and bloodless
and going around blowing up children, which is not the case.
And our popular media I think has been able to just project a whole bunch of scenarios
that are generally not accurate.
I guess I should stop there.
(Laughter.)
But thank you for the question.
It was a legitimate one.