Do we want drone-architect John Brennan as CIA chief?

A separate report this week by the Open Society Justice Initiative (“Globalizing Torture”) adds fuel to the fire by detailing the extent of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program around the world after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Among other things, the report concludes: “By engaging in torture and other abuses associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition, the US Government violated domestic and international law…’

Whatever the outcome of today’s confirmation hearing, the release of the white paper has already brought some welcome transparency to the Obama administration’s policies on drones and torture.

But transparency and some hard questioning for Brennan at a confirmation hearing aren’t enough to really address the policy and the questions it raises.

Last year the law schools of Stanford University and New York University collaborated on a nine-month study of drone strikes in Pakistan. Contrary to the claims of Brennan and the Justice Department's white-paper legalisms, the report cites substantial civilian casualties, questionable legality, and evidence that the attacks helped terrorist groups attract recruits.

At today’s confirmation hearing, the CIA director candidate should be asked not only about the killing of Americans, but also about civilian victims of drone strikes, extraordinary renditions, and torture. He should explain why it was right to kill three Americans in Yemen, depriving them of their Fifth Amendment protection of life through due process of law. He should explain why the CIA should be running a semisecret gameboy war based on the legal rationalizations of a white paper that ignores international law and relies on “trust me” authorizations by unnamed executive branch officers.

Will continued drone attacks on foreigners (and Americans) suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda make America safer – or will they engender what Gen. Stanley McChrystal has called a “visceral hatred” of the US? Are those attacks really, as the attorney general insists in the white paper, “consistent with the laws and values” that earlier Americans helped institutionalize as part of the UN Charter back in 1945?

If not, do we really want Mr. Brennan to direct the CIA? 

L. Michael Hager is cofounder and former director general of the International Development Law Organization in Rome.

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