THE killing of bad guys also kills debate about the act and manner of such killing. The topic comfortably shifts from assassination to the personality of the assassinated. Every now and then, with ritualistic frequency, there is a report of some bad guy being killed in a drone strike followed reflexively by passivity. However, what is actually sinister is rarely what news reports touch upon: the drone campaign in Pakistan, which is still ongoing and unabated. Somehow that escapes the attention of those who determine what is newsworthy. It’s sort of like the Sherlock Holmes dog that didn’t bark.

An honest and free press, if something of the sort exists, would report the death of the bad guy or the press’s favourite term: ‘suspected militant’. They would add that, in the absence of on-the-ground investigative journalists, we are to believe that the assassinated was indeed the man the CIA claims he was because we have to take the word of those who killed him. The killer, the witness, the jury, and the news-breaking entity are all the same.

The Bush administration preferred the term ‘global war on terror’. President Obama likes to describe America as being in an ‘armed conflict with Al Qaeda, Taliban, and associated forces, in response to the 9/11 attacks, exercising its inherent right to self-defence under international law’. Article 2.4 of the UN charter specifically forbids nations from the use of force in international relations. However, the use of force is permitted under conditions: authorisation by the UN Security Council pursuant to Chapter 7 and that of self-defence under Article 51 in the event of an armed attack.

US media gloss over civilian casualties.

The notion of self-defence is invoked in fighting the ‘terrorists’. However, the same international norms that require the protections of civilians are never invoked. International laws are cherry-picked, invoking those that justify such actions but not the ones that make them illegal and immoral.

‘War’ and ‘armed conflict’ are two names for the same thing in international law. Along with rights, an armed conflict brings with it a certain set of obligations. The Geneva Conventions were put in place following World War II. The world saw the horrors of that war in terms of the enormous loss of life.

The first Geneva Convention protects wounded and sick soldiers who are no longer involved in hostilities; the second protects shipwrecked naval soldiers; the third treaty protects prisoners of war; while the fourth protects civilians (as opposed to soldiers only) under circumstances of armed conflict and military occupation.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 form the foundation of international humanitarian law, which applies during times of war or armed conflicts to limit its effects. We have seen case after case of innocent civilians killed in drone strikes in Fata. A justification is provided the following day through news reports labelling those killed ‘suspected militants’.

The mainstream US press do not question whether the target of a drone strike posed an imminent threat to the security of the United States, whether the force used was proportional, whether there was a moment of deliberation and whether there was a military necessity. These are ignored as unwanted and irrelevant demands of international humanitarian law.

For a variety of reasons, the CIA rather than the US Air Force runs the drone campaign in Fata. For one, Pakistan is not a declared battlefield. Secondly, the CIA is a civilian organisation which didn’t acknowledge the presence of a drone campaign up until May 2009, because the CIA has to have plausible deniability. Moreover, the paramilitary actions of the CIA are covered by the ‘Authorisation for the Use of Military Force’, passed by the US Congress just days after 9/11 in order to fight against those who “planned, authorised, committed or aided” the 2001 attacks and to prevent future attacks against the United States by such entities. While a law that was enacted for US military forces is invoked in justifying a civilian agency’s paramilitary actions, international humanitarian law is not invoked in restraining those actions.

Since the United States is fighting a stateless enemy, the war will be taken to them anywhere. To borrow from one of Jeremy Scahill’s books’ subtitle, “the world is a battlefield”. In theory, law instead of force should be used everywhere. In reality, force is used everywhere while law is used only in justifying that force.

All these relevant legal issues are carefully ignored in the reporting about drone strikes. What passes for the ‘free press’ in the United States is sort of like a store called ‘low price shoes’. It doesn’t necessarily mean the store offers low prices compared to the market, it’s just the name of the store. The free press is free because it says so. That’s the closest it comes to being free.

The writer is a freelance contributor.

Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2016