Tournament: Cedanats | Round: 3 | Opponent: Arizona State Chotras-Rajan | Judge: Anderson
There is a growing chorus of voices bringing attention to the deaths of civilians by drone strikes- from the reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to the UN special reports. But still, not enough Americans are listening. The Rehman family flew 7,000 miles to tell their story at a Congressional hearing and only 5 members of Congress showed up. We need a mobilized community to restrain future use of drones.
Madea Benjamin, founder of CODEPINK in 2013 Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK and the human rights organization Global Exchange. She is the author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. “Drone Victims Come Out of the Shadows” Nov 5 http://fpif.org/drone-victims-come-shadows/?utm_source=feedburnerandutm_medium=feedandutm_campaign=Feed3A+FPIF+28Foreign+Policy+In+Focus+28All+News2929
At each of the over 200 cities I’ve traveled to this past year with my
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victims. Check here to register for the summit or watch the livestream.
Obama never follows through with statements about drones, and there’s still a lot we don’t know.
Byrd 1/15 Lauren, Salon, “Obama’s staggering drone hypocrisy” http://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/the_hypocrisy_of_drones_what_the_obama_administration_says_vs_what_happens_partner/
In 2013, the discussion about the Obama administration’s use of drones as weapons of
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Congress. His family members are just a few of the innocent victims.

Plan
The United States Congress should create a statutory cause of action for damages for those unlawfully injured by targeted killing operations or their heirs that overrides the state secrets and official immunity doctrine and replaces them with carefully considered procedures for balancing the secrecy concerns.
Solvency
The plan creates a deterrent effect and overcomes judicial deference and the government’s ability to assert state secret privileges.
Stephen I. Vladeck 13, Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Scholarship at American University Washington College of Law, senior editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of National Security Law and Policy, Supreme Court Fellow at the Constitution Project, and fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law, JD from Yale Law School, Feb 27 2013, “DRONES AND THE WAR ON TERROR: WHEN CAN THE U.S.TARGET ALLEGED AMERICAN TERRORISTS OVERSEAS?” Hearing Before the House Committee on the Judiciary, http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Vladeck-02272013.pdf
At first blush, it may seem like many of these issues would be equally
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laws of the United States, what does the government have to hide?
Lawsuits are a visible platform advocates can use to generate media attention and public conversations. The conversations that result from the aff spillover to broader conversations about constitutional concerns and human rights issues.
Wexler 13 Lesley Wexler Professor of Law and Thomas A. Mengler Faculty Scholar, University of Illinois College of Law “The Role of the Judicial Branch during the Long War: Drone Courts, Damage Suits, and FOIA Requests” May 8 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2262412

This chapter suggests the judiciary may play an important role in the debate over the
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Even the threat of such a judicial role may influence executive branch behavior.
Courts become rallying points to debate specific applications of broader issues.
Cole 11 David, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center. Where Liberty Lies: Civil Society and Individual Rights After 9/11 Wayne Law Review, Winter, 57 Wayne L. Rev. 1203, lexis

Learned Hand's assertion that as long as "liberty lies in the hearts of men
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can and often do enforce constitutional rights where the political branches would not.
The poorly informed public continues to prop up Obama’s drone policy. Current government justifications enable it to discount alternate media narratives and cast a fog over public debate about drones.
Naiman 13 Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy. Mr. Naiman edits the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and writes on U.S. foreign policy at Huffington Post. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois and has studied and worked in the Middle East. “WikiLeaks and the Drone Strike Transparency Bill” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/wikileaks-and-the-drone-s_b_4282595.html

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently took an important step by passing an intelligence authorization which
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not narrowly targeted on people who are trying to attack the United States.

Mobilizing civil society organizations is the most effective way to restrain executive power.
Cole 11 David, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center. Where Liberty Lies: Civil Society and Individual Rights After 9/11 Wayne Law Review, Winter, 57 Wayne L. Rev. 1203, lexis

The force of ordinary electoral politics also cannot account for the shift in U.
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law will have substantial deterrent effect, with or without actual court decisions.

“Targeted” Killing
Status quo discussions of the impact of drones focus on the body count but gloss over the experiences of the living. A drone attack has a massive psychological effect on those it leaves behind, beyond just physical injury and death.
Bhojani 1/28 H. H. Bhojani spent a few days with Rafiq ur-Rehman and his family when they were in New York for the testimony to Congress about the death of their grandmother by drone strike in Pakistan. “The terrible human price of Obama’s drone war” http://www.salon.com/2014/01/28/the_terrible_human_price_of_obamas_drone_war_partner/

The terrible human price of Obama’s drone war Nabila’s drawings are like any other nine
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the changes are not in a way that is transparent,” says Sonnenberg.

Despite the lies from defense officials, the images from drones are too pixelated to be precise- the public needs to know civilian casualties are commonplace.
Linebaugh 13 Heather Linebaugh “I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on” Dec 29 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military/print
Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program
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affected by observing this combat because they are never directly in danger physically.

Even if casualties are declining, we need to remain vigilant- when we see casualties as statistics or just a side effect of war, we lose restraint and our moral bearing to the world.
Sullivan 13 Andrew Sullivan he won a Harkness Fellowship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and earned a Masters degree in Public Administration, he was the editor of The New Republic, currently founding editor at The Dish “The Damage Done By Drones, Ctd “ Oct 23 http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/23/the-damage-done-by-drones-ctd/
I agree. Unintended collateral civilian casualties are not war crimes, and never have
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not, after all, help the case against al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Dependence on drones perpetuates a binary way of thinking where we don’t consider other options. This has locked us into an endless war.
Bacevich 12 Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Interview wil Bill Moyers, March 23 http://billmoyers.com/wp-content/themes/billmoyers/transcript-print.php?post=5190
Again, one would refer to Afghan history here, that this is simply not
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are indications that we can engage or have some hope in positive change.
Smarter publics are necessary to check government overreaching by exposing the illusions that keep certain institutions in power.
Williams 8 Daniel R, Associate Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law.Penn State Law Review, Summer, 113 Penn St. L. Rev. 55
The classic Frankfurt School diagnosis of American culture is grim and pessimistic. Jurgen Habermas
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Habermas regard "the public sphere as the definitive institution of democracy." 164 

When we see solutions only in terms of war it becomes to easy for the military industrial complex to perpetuate cycles of violence.
Lawrence 9 Grant, “Military Industrial "War" Consciousness Responsible for Economic and Social Collapse,” OEN—OpEdNews, March 27
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama called Afghanistan ''the war we must win.
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will be forced to live the life our present war consciousness is creating.
Impact Framing
You should actively privilege probability in your decision calculus
The likelihood of a scenario should be the combination of the warrants debaters make, the probability their authors assign to a given scenario, and the defense from the other team.
Probability of the impact shouldn’t be evaluated in isolation- statistical analysis tells us that to calculate the final probability of a scenario, the individual probabilities of each internal link should be multiplied together. Each internal link makes the scenario less and less likely.
We should actively transition away from the card=truth currency model of debate- debaters find any number of unreasonable and improbable scenarios and assert that since they read a card that impact is 100 likely. Debates should more heavily privilege a burden of proof, not a burden of rejoinder.
Debate’s current race to hyperbole reduces our ability to discuss and compare actual impacts that aren’t hyperbole. As a critic you must be more skeptical of “risk of a link” logic and more willing to dismiss ridiculously improbable scenarios.
Odekirk 10 Scott, debate coach 8/6/10, Impact Hyperbole: A Dilemma of Contemporary Debate Practice, http://puttingthekindebate.com/2010/08/26/impact-hyperbole-a-dilemma-of-contemporary-debate-practice/
It seems as though debate is stuck in a loop of nuclear wars and no
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to impact defense is an important start to reign in our impact hyperbole.