I just finished up the initial draft of an essay for the Weekly Standard on drone warfare, self defense, and the CIA, riffing off of my chapter in Ben Wittes’s book. One of my observations is that the Obama administration (and really the whole US government) seems to be remarkably sanguine about the other shoe dropping regarding the emerging “soft-law” campaign to undermine both drone warfare and, remarkably, the very idea of CIA covert action. So I was interested to see this closing paragraph in former CIA director Michael Hayden’s Washington Post op ed on the Christmas bomber non-interrogation:
In August, the government unveiled the [High Value Detainee Interrogation Group] HIG for questioning al-Qaeda and announced that the FBI would begin questioning CIA officers about the alleged abuses in the 2004 inspector general’s report. They are apparently still getting organized for the al-Qaeda interrogations. But the interrogations of CIA personnel are well underway.
My prediction is that the something similar will be true, but in the form of investigations and prosecutions in European or foreign courts, or possibly some ICC prosecutor investigation in Afghanistan, of CIA personnel and their role in Predator drone strikes within two or three years after the Obama administration leaves office. Perhaps Intrade could set up a prediction market contract?
Update: Thanks, Glenn, for the Instalanche – and readers might be interested in the related topic of strategizing such a prosecution comes about, in an earlier Opinio Juris post called “Gaming Spain and Universal Jurisdiction.” What a friend at the State Department called “cynical,” I call … game theory!