The Drone Memos
Professor René Provost and the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism welcome Jameel Jaffer (Columbia U.) who will discuss his book, The Drone Memos: Targeted Killings, Secrecy and the Law.
About The Drone Memos
The Drone Memos collects for the first time the legal and policy documents underlying the U.S. government’s controversial practice of “targeted killing”—the extrajudicial killing of suspected terrorists and militants, typically using drones.
The documents—including the Presidential Policy Guidance that provides the framework for drone strikes today, Justice Department white papers addressing the assassination of an American citizen, and a highly classified legal memo that was published only after a landmark legal battle involving the ACLU, the New York Times, and the CIA—together constitute a remarkable effort to legitimize a practice that most human rights experts consider to be unlawful and that the United States has historically condemned.
Jaffer, who led the ACLU legal team that secured the release of many of the documents, evaluates the “drone memos” in light of domestic and international law. He connects the documents’ legal abstractions to the real-world violence they allow, and makes the case that we are trading core principles of democracy and human rights for the illusion of security.
About Jameel Jaffer
Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, Jaffer oversaw the ACLU’s work relating to national security for almost a decade and litigated some of the most significant cases concerning U.S. counterterrorism policy after 9/11.
A prominent commentator and speaker on issues relating to civil liberties and human rights, Jaffer has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Index on Censorship, and the Harvard Law Review Forum. He is the author of The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law (The New Press) and co-author with Amrit Singh of Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond.
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression awarded Jaffer the Vox Libera Award in 2015 and Foreign Policy magazine listed him as one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in 2012.
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