Glenn Greenwald’s Mitt Romney Surrogacy

[joshcryer]

181. "sovereignty violation" is a tricky one.

What happens is that sovereignty really means "your ability to protect your sovereign space." (And to a possibly more significant extent, your willingness to be bribed to allow foreign entities into your sovereign space.)

Pakistan is well within its right to complain, so is Yemen, so are any countries in which drones are being utilized in their space against belligerents. But in these cases the Yemeni's are in the pockets of the US, as well as Pakistan kind of wants us to do its dirty work for them. The complaining simply isn't happening.

I personally do not believe in sovereignty. I have stated before that if, for instance, a country, say, Argentina, wanted to come to the US and grab all of the retired dictators hanging out here, they would be well within their rights to do so with a seal team. Of course, the US would not take kindly to that, and would strike back. This is going off topic though, as international law does respect it.

As far as international law is concerned a complaint has to be leveled to the United Nations. It has not happened (in fact, Pakistan just keeps sending "formal complaints" and weakly saying that they are against the drone attacks). So the sovereignty issue is moot, as far as I can tell. If these countries really wanted the drones to stop it would be stopped within hours of a meeting with China and Russia.

Obviously you can't magically just say that anyone in a target zone is a belligerent and that is why NATO is continually apologizing when they kill a wedding. Now, you can say that the law isn't being effectively applied, and I would probably even agree with you.

But since there exist no evidence to those ends, I cannot say it is illegal within the confines of the law as it exists. When your legality is behind closed doors at secret hearings that will be classified for 25 years or more, it's impossible to have real transparency and the law is really just a farce.