China: drone poupa criminoso brutal que matou 13 soldados. Nos EUA, teria sido executado do ar.
"A ordem era capturá-lo vivo, não fazemos como os EUA".
Today's news that Chinese authorities now have advanced navigation and weaponry to kill suspected criminals in a manhunt was as notable for what China can do — target a Myanmar drug kingpin suspected in the killing of 13 Chinese soldiers, unmanned, and from above — as for what it didn't: actually assassinate him with a drone.
A look inside China's search for the notorious Naw Kham in today's Global Times reveals that a plan "to use an unmanned aircraft to carry 20 kilograms of TNT to bomb" the hideout of the Golden Triangle's most wanted gang lord "was rejected, because the order was to catch him alive," as Liu Yuejin, director of China's Public Security Ministry's anti-drug bureau, told the paper. But those with an eye on President Obama's foreign policy and targeted killing program say that the U.S. Justice Department's recently leaked and much critiqued "white paper" justifying drone targets would have allowed for China, if it used America's new legal boundaries with its own killer technology, to execute Kham from the sky. To be clear, most U.S. drug enforcement involving drones centers on unarmed surveillance aircraft, and the Obama administration has yet to make public the full 50-page legal memo on which the "white paper" is based, despite Obama's insistence in his State of the Union address that he would be "even more transparent."
But perhaps the biggest concern from critics with the white paper is that a lethal strike overseas could target "an associated force" or an individual who "present[s] an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States" as long as "capture is infeasible." That remains pretty blurry, but given the ongoing difficulty and overseas nature of the Chinese chase for Kham — "the first time that Chinese police were conducting a manhunt for criminals who were all foreigners based overseas," Global Times reports — capture seemed difficult... until China turned the other way in the ramping of a drone war and apprehended him in November anyway.
