Stephen I. Vladeck · January 2014
82 GEO. WASH. L. REV. ARGUENDO 11 (2014)
In Drones: The Power to Kill, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argues for increased oversight and accountability for targeted killing operations undertaken by the U.S. Government against its own citizens. Modeled on the procedures adopted by the government for the detention of terrorism suspects after, and in light of, the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, these mechanisms would include at least some form of limited ex ante judicial review. This Response offers a detailed series of critiques of the means by which Judge Gonzales proposes to achieve increased oversight and accountability. More fundamentally, though, it argues that the buried lede of Judge Gonzales’s article is the view that U.S. courts are not categorically incompetent to review the legality of uses of military force. Thus, Judge Gonzales has penned a defense of judicial review of targeted killings that is far more robust than it might appear at first blush, because it both underscores why the target’s citizenship is irrelevant to the underlying judicial competency question and clarifies that debates over the scope and timing of such judicial review should take place on policy—rather than constitutional—terms. To that end, the Response closes by offering an alternative proposal to maximize vigorous and efficient judicial oversight of targeted killing operations.
