Good for Mr. Koh.

Ready, aim, zap: Hysterical talk against drone attacks on our terrorist enemies
Editorials
Monday, April 5th 2010, 4:00 AM
The U.S. has truly fallen down the rabbit hole when, as terrorists continue to plan and launch attacks against Americans, a top State Department lawyer is forced to defend drone strikes against Al Qaeda.
But defend the strikes Harold Koh did by cogently outlining the legal underpinnings of one of President Obama's top anti-terror tactics.
In the last 14 months, the CIA and military have put remote-controlled aerial vehicles to work with increasing frequency, mostly in the mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
As of February, one tally counted 64 strikes since Obama took office; there were a total of 45 during the entire Bush administration.
The escalation has provoked a storm of criticism from Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights champions who have wandered far afield into trying to litigate wartime proprieties in courts.
Addressing a room full of lawyers who specialize in things international, Koh knocked the objections out of the park one by one.
Some say that any attempt to take out an Al Qaeda leader by definition violates the law of war. Koh replied: "Individuals who are part of such an armed group are belligerents and, therefore, lawful targets under international law. During World War II, for example, American aviators tracked and shot down the airplane carrying the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."
A second challenge regards drone technology, which critics claim is outside the bounds of permissible warfare. Koh set this straight: "The rules that govern targeting do not turn on the type of weapon system used."
No joke: If a U.S. soldier can take out Osama Bin Laden with a rifle, a grenade or even with bare hands, surely it's permissible to snuff him with a bomb guided by GPS and laser.
A third objection, in Koh's words, is that "the use of lethal force against specific individuals fails to provide adequate process and thus constitutes unlawful extrajudicial killing."
His answer was another obvious-as-an-elephant statement: "A state that is engaged in an armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force." Meaning, you don't conduct court hearings on the battlefield.
Koh's muscular statement of a wise Obama policy was all the more remarkable because he had been one of the fiercest legal opponents of Bush administration tactics in the war on terror. Now that the we're-not-at-war types are wringing their hands in Obama's direction, one-time critics in the administration have the duty to talk sense.
Said Koh: "The United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level Al Qaeda leaders." It's unassailable. And some people will never understand.