Law professor claims CIA operators of drones would be guilty of war crimes under U.S. view of law

The CIA pilots are not combatants and as the professor points out the U.S. govt. seeks to prosecute its adversaries who engage in similar types of actions. Another prof. claims drone use is lawful only within combat zones. However, the US uses them mostly in non-combat zones. No doubt the authorities think that anywhere they fire a missile is ipso facto a combat zone!

What bothers me about all these arguments is the frame in which they occur. None of these eminent legal minds seem to have a single critical neuron in their brain about the framing issue. All dutifully consider the war on terror to be a garden variety of war so that the laws of warfare apply. No one ever makes similar uncritical assumptions about the war on crime or on drugs and certainly not on the war on poverty!This is from this site.

Loyola Law School professor David Glazier, a former Navy surface warfare officer, said the pilots operating the drones from afar could - in theory - be hauled into court in the countries where the attacks occur. That's because the CIA's drone pilots aren't combatants in a legal sense. "It is my opinion, as well as that of most other law-of-war scholars I know, that those who participate in hostilities without the combatant's privilege do not violate the law of war by doing so, they simply gain no immunity from domestic laws," he said.

"Under this view CIA drone pilots are liable to prosecution under the law of any jurisdiction where attacks occur for any injuries, deaths or property damage they cause," Glazier continued. "But under the legal theories adopted by our government in prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, these CIA officers as well as any higher-level government officials who have authorized or directed their attacks are committing war crimes."

The drones themselves are a lawful tool of war; "In fact, the ability of the drones to engage in a higher level of precision and to discriminate more carefully between military and civilian targets than has existed in the past actually suggests that they're preferable to many older weapons," Glazier added. But employing CIA personnel to carry out those armed attacks, he concluded, "clearly fall outside the scope of permissible conduct and ought to be reconsidered, particularly as the United States seeks to prosecute members of its adversaries for generally similar conduct."

... Mary Ellen O'Connell, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, was much more blunt in her statement. "Combat drones are battlefield weapons," she told the panel. "They fire missiles or drop bombs capable of inflicting very serious damage. Drones are not lawful for use outside combat zones. Outside such zones, police are the proper law enforcement agents, and police are generally required to warn before using lethal force." "Restricting drones to the battlefield is the most important single rule governing their use, O'Connell continued. "Yet, the United States is failing to follow it more often than not."