7. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which the US has implicitly invoked to justify strikes, requires that "measures taken by Members in the exercise of [their] right to self-defense . . . be immediately reported to the Security Council." Please elaborate on why the United States uses Article 51 to justify drone strikes but ignores the clause demanding transparency.
8. The majority of prisoners incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay were found to be innocent and were released. These individuals landed in Guantanamo as victims of mistaken identity or as a result of bounties for their capture. How likely is it that the intelligence that gets a person killed by a drone strike may be as faulty as that which put innocent individuals in Guantanamo?
9. You have stated that there is little evidence drone strikes are causing widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits for extremist groups. Do you stand by this statement now, as we have seen an expansion of Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, possibly triple the number that existed when the drone strikes began? Do you have concerns about the "blowback" caused by what General McChrystal has called a "visceral hatred" of U.S. drones?
10. If a civilian is harmed by a drone strike in Afghanistan, the family is entitled to compensation from US authorities. But this is not the case in other countries where the US government is using lethal drones. Why is this the case? Do you think the US government should help people who are innocent victims of our drone strikes and if so, why haven't you put a program in place to do this?
Stay tuned to www.c-span.org at 2:30pm on Thursday to hear the Senators' questions, Brennan's answers and the response from those of us in the audience who don't have many such occasions to express outrage at our government's policy of remote-controlled killing.
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