Obama’s allies often scolded critics of his drone program — whether they protested strikes in countries like Pakistan and Somalia that we were not at war with, killing U.S. citizens without trial, or the many attacks that did in fact kill civilians, sometimes a dozen at a time — for their supposed ignorance and naivete. When Senator Rand Paul filibustered John Brennan’s CIA Director nomination in 2013 to speak about the threat posed by the expansion of drone strikes, he was derided by liberal commentators and Democratic senators alike: MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell lambasted his “paranoia” about the precedent Obama was setting, Senator Dianne Feinstein called one of his deliberately outlandish hypotheticals “stupid,” and Adam Weinstein of Mother Jones called Paul a racist for using filibustering tactics, as arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond had done.
Attorney General Eric Holder tried to reassure Paul that killing U.S. citizens outside of combat, on U.S. soil, would be unconstitutional. Holder had to split such hairs because he had argued a year prior that since “due process” and “judicial process” were not the same, no court action was needed to authorize the killing of U.S. citizens whom the government had deemed terrorists. That was how the Obama administration justified the killing of the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader within Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and his son, Abdulrahman, a 16-year-old from Denver who at the time of his own killing in a subsequent strike was having dinner with his cousin. The Department of Justice initially said that Abdulrahman was not the target of the strike in Yemen that took his life, which was instead aimed at a separate AQAP commander who happened to be nearby. U.S. officials then tried to claim that Abdulrahman had been a “military age-male” even though he was a minor, a categorization regularly used by the Obama administration to automatically designate potential combatants in a given area without knowing their innocence or guilt. When those deflections did not work, Obama adviser and former Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took to making comments that are indistinguishable from a War Department statement today: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children.”
Trump expanded the scale of American drone strike attacks even further in his first term, using them, as in the assassination of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, to kill officials in the militaries of sovereign states. Trump vetoed congressional legislation meant to hinder his ability to strike Iranians unilaterally on grounds that echoed the Obama administration’s legal reasoning: attempts to demand prior authorization overlooked “the President’s need to respond to threats beyond imminent attacks on the United States and its forces.”