Obama will not restrict drone strike 'playbook' before Trump takes office

Barack Obama will not tighten the rules governing US drone strikes ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Guardian has learned.

Trump will inherit the apparatus for what Obama calls “targeted killing” – the so-called drones “playbook” formally known as the 22 May 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance or PPG – that has turned drone strikes into Obama’s signature counter-terrorism tactic.

While the White House considers its standards for drone strikes to be scrupulous, much of the rest of the world considers them to represent an arbitrary, secret and dangerous apparatus of secret killing that Trump will soon have at his disposal.

“Maybe on the left no one would believe that Trump has a steady hand, but Obama has normalized the idea that presidents get to have secret large-scale killing programs at their disposal,” said Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA.

Begun under George W Bush, drone strikes were vastly accelerated and codified by Obama beyond officially declared war zones. Official estimates claim they have killed nearly 2,600 “terrorists”, though human rights activists consider that to be an undercount.

The footprint of the drones has become increasingly widespread, situated in airfields from Tunisia to Niger to Cameroon, they represent the outgrowth of a legal theory which was embraced by both presidents Bush and Obama, who considered the war on terrorism’s battlefield to be global.

For Obama, the drone has been a calibrated, restrained instrument of death, an alternative to grueling all-out war. Trump will now be the one capable of harnessing its power.

The process Obama set for drone strikes was codified in 2013, but the PPG was kept secret until Jameel Jaffer, formerly of the American Civil Liberties Union, and his colleagues sued to compel its disclosure. In August this year, the 18-page top secret document was declassified.

Jaffer, now the director of the Knight First Amendment Center at Columbia University, has compiled the PPG and several other once-secret documents relevant to Obama’s institutionalization of targeted killing into a new book, The Drone Memos. The Guardian is publishing three of those documents, including the declassified PPG, as well as Jaffer’s introduction to his book.

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The PPG instructs that lethal force against “an identified high-value terrorist” shall be “as discriminating and precise as reasonably possible”. In all but “extraordinary circumstances”, such force requires “near certainty that the action can be taken without injuring or killing” civilians.

A senior administration official said: “As the president has said, ‘near certainty’ is the ‘highest standard we can set’.”

Yet critics of targeted killinghave pointed to several other aspects of the document that raise alarm.

Those who implement the killings, the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), do not necessarily need to know who they kill. Instead, the PPG instructs: “When using lethal action, employ all reasonably available resources to ascertain the identity of the target.”

Similarly, the document permits killing “terrorist targets other than identified high-value individuals”. Should the CIA or JSOC wish to convince the president to do so, they must aver that they have “near certainty that the target is present”, civilians won’t be harmed, “capture is not feasible” and “no other reasonable alternatives exist”.

Drone strikes and counter-terrorism raids are supposed to occur outside the US, per the documents. But US citizens are not immune, despite the constitution’s prohibition on taking an American’s life without due process of law. The PPG entrusts the US justice department – soon to be in Trump’s hands – with performing “a legal analysis to ensure that such action may be conducted against the individual consistent with the laws and constitution”.

In 2011, the CIA executed a US citizen turned al-Qaida propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki; it then killed his 16-year old son in what the former attorney general Eric Holder stated was a strike that did not “specifically” target the teenager. The administration has confirmed killing two other Americans overseas in drone strikes.

No court reviews these decisions. Only “the appropriate members of the Congress”, an undefined term, learn of them.

A senior official told the Guardian this week that the protections for civilians within the PPG exceed those set by the law of armed conflict.

“We are continually working to refine, clarify and strengthen our standards and procedures for using force to keep the nation safe from terrorist threats,” said the official, who would not be quoted by name.

It is unknown whether Trump will also rely on drone strikes. On the campaign trail, he spoke more often about bombing “the shit” out of enemies than performing something more akin to assassination. “I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left,” he told an Iowa audience in November 2015.

Observers consider use of drones less significant than the codification of targeted killing itself, whose rules Trump is free to revise.

Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “Does he either personally allow for lowered rules of engagement and higher numbers of potential civilian casualties, or does he allow commanders to do that in the field?”

Last year, Obama claimed drone strikes had killed between 64 and 116 civilians in 473 drone strikes between 2009 and 2015. Human rights groups consider that estimate of civilian-casualty figures to be far too low. But the secrecy that still surrounds drone strikes – both official and imposed by the hazards of reporting from dangerous places – complicates a more thorough independent accounting.

Speaking in London last week, a former state department official urged Obama to place additional checks around what he called “the most awesome assassination machine ever known to man”.

Jeremy Shapiro, a senior state department official during Obama’s tenure, told an audience at the European Council on Foreign Relations that before the 2012 election, the Obama administration expressed alarm at potentially passing the apparatus of targeted killing to a successor.

“When people looked at it, they thought ‘Christ, this is scary’ – what if we give this to the Republicans?”

Disclosure: Naureen Shah, an employee of Amnesty International USA quoted in this story, is a colleague of the lead reporter’s wife.