As Benjamin Wittes put it at Lawfare:



If there was a unifying theme of President Obama's speech today at the National Defense University, it was an effort to align himself as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration's operational flexibility in actual fact. To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has -- but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.

With that in mind, let's take a closer look at the most misleading passages in the speech. Some concern descriptions of what Team Obama is supposedly doing already; others pertain to what it purportedly will do.



1) President Obama spoke as if he wants to persuade Congress to end the Authorization to Use Military Force. Wittes notes that "Obama does not need Congress to narrow or repeal the AUMF or to get off of a war footing. He can do it himself, declaring hostilities over in whole or in part." Instead, his administration has been taking steps to institutionalize semi-targeted killing, and Pentagon officials have talked about fighting the enemy for another ten or twenty years. Suffice it to say that the actual course he'll take for the rest of his term is decidedly unclear.



2) Obama spoke as if Congress is exercising "strong oversight" of his semi-targeted killing program. "After I took office, my Administration began briefing all strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan to the appropriate committees of Congress," he said. "Let me repeat that - not only did Congress authorize the use of force, it is briefed on every strike that America takes." Later he says that "the establishment of a special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action," which he opposes, "has the benefit of bringing a third branch of government into the process." This elides the fact that, prior to a drone strike, only the executive branch is part of the process. If Obama were to wrongly kill someone, Congress would only find out after the fact, and even that would be uncertain, because we have no idea what is included in a "briefing." The Obama Administration's bygone claim that civilian casualties were in the single digits, and Senator Feinstein's outrageously low estimate of civilian casualties, are both reason to doubt the quality of information being forwarded in those briefings. And the fact that oversight committee members have had to fight hard for information about targeted killing, including basic information like its legal rationale, gives the lie to the fact that oversight is generally "strong."

3) Obama claims that targets of drone strikes are only killed when they present an imminent threat to America. I've written at length about how the Obama Administration's working definition of imminence bears little resemblance to the word's actual meaning. And the facts bear out the evident problems with the rhetoric. Thousands of people have been killed in drone strikes since Obama took office. It just isn't credible to argue that all of them constituted an imminent threat. But for drone strikes, how many attacks on Americans are we to believe there would've been? The imminence standard was reasserted in the document released Thursday that set forth the criteria for drone strikes going forward. We'll have to see what "imminence" means in practice.

