This arti­cle was pro­duced by a part­ner­ship between In These Times and For­eign Pol­i­cy in Focus.

Trump may be driving it more recklessly, but he's still operating a machine the Obama administration built.

Bare­ly a month after Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump announced plans to deep­en and extend the now 16-year-old U.S. war in Afghanistan, reports sur­faced of plans to expand anoth­er sig­na­ture Oba­ma-era pol­i­cy: the drone war.

Specif­i­cal­ly, The New York Times report­ed in late Sep­tem­ber that the admin­is­tra­tion is relax­ing Oba­ma-era restric­tions on who can be tar­get­ed and remov­ing a require­ment that strikes receive high-lev­el vet­ting before they’re car­ried out. Accord­ing to the paper, the new rules would also ​“ease the way to expand­ing such gray-zone acts of spo­radic war­fare” into new coun­tries, expand­ing the pro­gram’s already glob­al footprint.

Across admin­is­tra­tions, the use of drones has increased expo­nen­tial­ly through­out the course of the war on ter­ror. Even before the rule change, Mic­ah Zenko of the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions esti­mat­ed that the pace of drone strikes and spe­cial forces raids had increased from one every 5.4 days under Pres­i­dent Oba­ma to one every 1.25 days under Pres­i­dent Trump.

In addi­tion to increas­ing the pace of these oper­a­tions, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has also loos­ened guide­lines designed to pro­tect civil­ians in areas like Yemen and Soma­lia, and over­seen a notable increase in civil­ian casu­al­ties in war zones like Iraq and Syria.

In this envi­ron­ment, rescind­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion’s already lax restric­tions on drone attacks — cou­pled with Trump’s overt and express dis­re­gard for human rights and the rule of law — is clear­ly cause for con­cern. But that also should­n’t be a path­way toward nor­mal­iz­ing the Oba­ma administration’s own use of drones.

Instead, we need to under­stand the excess­es of the war on ter­ror as a tra­jec­to­ry: The abuse of pow­er under one admin­is­tra­tion leads to the abuse of pow­er under anoth­er. Trump may be dri­ving it more reck­less­ly, but he’s still oper­at­ing a machine the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion built.

Licensed to Kill

The con­tro­ver­sy over drones dur­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion reached an ear­ly flash­point in 2011, when a drone pilot assas­si­nat­ed a U.S. cit­i­zen in Yemen by the name of Anwar Al-Awla­ki — fol­lowed, two weeks lat­er, by the U.S. killing of his 16-year-old son.

It was anoth­er two years before Oba­ma’s Depart­ment of Jus­tice released a white paper that detailed its legal argu­ment sanc­tion­ing Al-Awlaki’s mur­der. As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaf­fer explained, the paper said the gov­ern­ment would only tar­get ​“immi­nent” threats, and only when ​“cap­ture was infea­si­ble.” But in prac­tice, Jaf­fer not­ed, the admin­is­tra­tion used an extreme­ly expan­sive def­i­n­i­tion of ​“immi­nent” that ​“deprives the word of its ordi­nary meaning.”

“With­out say­ing so explic­it­ly,” Jaf­fer wor­ried, the gov­ern­ment was effec­tive­ly claim­ing ​“the author­i­ty to kill Amer­i­can ter­ror­ism sus­pects in secret,” vir­tu­al­ly any­where in the world.

That same year, respond­ing to increas­ing crit­i­cism, Oba­ma him­self gave a speech attempt­ing to clar­i­fy the bound­aries of this par­tic­u­lar tac­tic. ​“America’s actions are legal,” the pres­i­dent assert­ed of the drone war, which he claimed was being ​“waged pro­por­tion­al­ly, in last resort, and in self-defense.”

So it was per­fect­ly legal, in the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion’s view, to launch 10 times more strikes than the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, accord­ing to the Bureau of Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism, in a vast arc extend­ing from Libya to the Philippines.

Mean­ing­less Standards

But if the war on ter­ror has taught us any­thing, it’s that legal­i­ty is mal­leable — and nev­er trans­par­ent. It’s taught us that account­abil­i­ty is impos­si­ble when the laws obscure the crime.

In his 2013 speech, for instance, Oba­ma ref­er­enced a set of pres­i­den­tial pol­i­cy guide­lines on drone strikes. Yet these weren’t released until August 2016, more than three years after Obama’s attempt at ​“trans­paren­cy.” Two of those guide­lines stat­ed that there must be ​“near cer­tain­ty” that a law­ful tar­get is present before a strike is approved, as well as a ​“near cer­tain­ty that non-com­bat­ants will not be injured or killed.”

Yet it was nev­er clear what this meant. ​“The [Unit­ed States] has nev­er described what post-strike stan­dards, pro­to­cols, and mech­a­nisms exist to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ver­i­fy com­pli­ance with this pol­i­cy stan­dard,” Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al not­ed in a crit­i­cal 2013 report.

Indeed, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion seemed to take an expan­sive view of who counts as a ​“law­ful tar­get.” It embraced a prac­tice of launch­ing ​“sig­na­ture strikes” where the tar­gets were unknown alto­geth­er to the peo­ple who approved them. Such tar­get­ing was based on behav­iors deemed to be indica­tive of ter­ror­ist activ­i­ty, though what exact­ly that means was nev­er clear either.

In fact, the White House appar­ent­ly did­n’t des­ig­nate many vic­tims as ​“law­ful tar­gets” until after they’d been killed. ​“It in effect counts all mil­i­tary-age males in a strike zone as com­bat­ants,” the Times report­ed in 2012, ​“unless there is explic­it intel­li­gence posthu­mous­ly prov­ing them innocent.”

That’s why gov­ern­ment esti­mates of civil­ian causal­i­ties have been rou­tine­ly low­er than counts by NGOs. For exam­ple, the U.S. gov­ern­ment esti­mat­ed civil­ian deaths at between 64 and 116 in Pak­istan, Yemen, Soma­lia and Libya com­bined between Jan­u­ary 2009 and Decem­ber 2015. The Bureau of Inves­tiga­tive Journalism’s esti­mate was sub­stan­tial­ly high­er — between 380 and 801, using rel­a­tive­ly con­ser­v­a­tive criteria.

Worse still, there’s been no account­abil­i­ty for the gov­ern­ment offi­cials respon­si­ble for civil­ian deaths. “[N]o such amends exist for civil­ians harmed by US drones in Pak­istan,” the Cen­ter for Civil­ians in Con­flict report­ed in 2012. And no one in Pak­istan or Yemen had received ​“apolo­gies, expla­na­tions or mon­e­tary pay­ments as amends from the U.S. government.”

In oth­er words, not only was the White House­’s com­mit­ment to avoid­ing civil­ian deaths a large­ly sym­bol­ic ges­ture, there was in fact no appa­ra­tus for jus­tice at all. If legal­i­ty is an asser­tion, and if breach­es of the law have no con­se­quences, what could ever make the drone war illegal?

Under­ly­ing Violence

These are a mere hand­ful of the seri­ous moral, eth­i­cal, and legal prob­lems sur­round­ing Oba­ma’s use of drones. They point to incon­sis­ten­cies, per­for­ma­tive jus­tice and a whole­sale lack of account­abil­i­ty — all of which char­ac­ter­ized the mod­est restric­tions Trump is now rolling back on the glob­al killing program.

Across all admin­is­tra­tions, the log­ic that main­tains a seem­ing­ly insignif­i­cant line between legal and ille­gal tac­tics in the war on ter­ror has a great deal to do with Islam­o­pho­bia. The vic­tims are all Mus­lims, or those racial­ized as Mus­lims, and are most­ly out of sight and out of mind.

Most Amer­i­cans don’t see the vio­lence and can’t com­pre­hend it — a fact that’s abet­ted not only the esca­la­tion of drone war­fare, but also the end­less wars in the greater Mid­dle East and the ero­sion of civ­il lib­er­ties at home under the war on ter­ror more gen­er­al­ly. And it’s why Mus­lim vic­tims have few prospects for accountability.

It is this sys­tem of oppres­sion that ulti­mate­ly under­lies drone war­fare, whether under Bush, Oba­ma, or Trump. It’s what allows the vio­lence to esca­late each year as the war on ter­ror con­tin­ues — and Octo­ber 7 marked the start of its 17th year.

Human rights safe­guards are meant to be absolute, not rel­a­tive. Obama’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty affil­i­a­tion doesn’t make his drone war­fare pro­gram any less ille­gal than Trump’s brutish brand of Repub­li­can pol­i­tics. It was Oba­ma’s skirt­ing of these stan­dards, in fact, that enables Trump to be all the more brutal.

We must demand stan­dards for the war on ter­ror that are based on inter­na­tion­al human rights and human­i­tar­i­an law. As Trump’s abus­es become increas­ing­ly clear, let’s re-imag­ine what the pro­tec­tion and preser­va­tion of human rights looks like and work to ensure that it’s our stan­dard regard­less of who’s in power.