KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s graduation time at the Helping Up Mission, a nondenominational Christian ministry for poor and homeless men in Baltimore. On this day, several men are being recognized for reaching new stages of success in their recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Helping Up believes that spirituality plays a key role in the recovery process, and it wants those who work there to reflect its values. The ministry relies largely on private donations, but it has received some public funding as well, and that raises a difficult question: If the mission takes government money, should it still be allowed to only hire people who share its religious beliefs?

BOB GEHMAN (Executive Director, Helping Up Mission): A faith-based organization is only faith-based if it can hire people of the particular faith that it espouses, so if, for instance, we were not able to discriminate in our hiring practices based on our faith and religion, that would change us.

BARRY LYNN (Executive Director, Americans United for Separation of Church and State): I don’t think that there’s any moral or ethical or constitutional justification for a religious group taking government funds, tax dollars, and saying we’re only going to hire the people we want, we’re going to have a religious litmus test for hiring. That’s dead wrong, and it should be stopped.

LAWTON: For decades, religious groups have been partnering with the government to provide a host of social services in the US and around the world. Those partnerships attracted new visibility—and new controversy—after President George W. Bush created his faith-based initiative—

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: People who don’t have hope can find hope.

LAWTON: —in his words “to level the playing field” so that more religious groups could compete for government grants.

A series of laws, regulations and court decisions have tried to ensure that the faith-based partnerships don’t violate the Constitution. For example, tax dollars may not be used to fund proselytizing. But the issue of religious hiring remains one of the most contentious questions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its regulations banned discrimination in hiring but granted faith groups an exemption, allowing them to hire on the basis of religion. But Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says federal funding should change the calculus.

LYNN: Whenever government money enters the picture, then the civil rights rubric of our country is you don’t get to discriminate anymore. If you’re engaged in federal work with federal money, you really have to play by the same rules as everyone else. You don’t get to be a bigot, you don’t get to discriminate, you don’t get to select people for a job or fire people from a job because of their religious beliefs or orientation.

LAWTON: Stanley Carlson-Thies heads the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, which helps faith-based groups protect their identity and practices. He says the law allows religious groups to create an organizational philosophy as other federally funded entities do.

STANLEY CARLSON-THIES (Executive Director, Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance): I think the faith groups see it as, you know, like a Democratic senator hires Democrats for his or her office, and environmental groups hire environmentally sensitive people, and so on, and they say hey, we’re a faith group, it’s faith that motivates us, defines us, so we’re looking for people who are, share that faith.

LAWTON: Carlson-Thies sees this as an issue that pits an individual’s rights against institutional rights. He says for faith groups it’s not discrimination in the traditional sense.

CARLSON-THIES: It’s not that they think of this as you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, we’re going to keep you out. No, it’s more do you share the things that motivate us? Do you have the same set of values? Do you have the same set of behaviors?

LAWTON: On the presidential campaign trail in July 2008, candidate Barack Obama visited a Christian youth program in Zanesville, Ohio, and promised that his administration would continue partnerships between faith-based groups and the government. But he said there would be a few caveats.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: First, if you get a federal grant you don’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them, or against the people you hire, on the basis of their religion.

LAWTON: When President Obama set up his White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, many civil rights groups expected to see all religious hiring preferences banned in federally funded programs. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Joshua DuBois, head of Obama’s faith office, has outlined a different course.

JOSHUA DUBOIS (White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, in speech): With regard to the issue of co-religionist hiring, hiring discrimination hiring, it’s a difficult topic and one that where there are very clear and strong opinions on both sides. The president has decided to take a case-by-case approach, and as difficult legal issues arise he wants me to work with the White House counsel, with the attorney general, to explore those issues and give him a recommendation.

LYNN: A case-by-case basis is like saying, well, maybe Rosa Parks may be in the front of the bus; other African-American women, they get into the back of the bus. There is no way to deal with fundamental civil rights issues on a case-by-case basis.

LAWTON: Both Carlson-Thies and Lynn were on a task force about government partnerships for Obama’s Faith Advisory Council. But the hiring question wasn’t allowed to even be part of the discussion. It’s an issue of deep concern for many faith-based charities, including Helping Up in Baltimore. The residential addiction recovery program has about 400 homeless addicts who live here for at least a year. They go through a 12-step program and receive counseling, medical help, job training, and Bible study. Executive director Bob Gehman says faith is crucial in the program’s effectiveness.

GEHMAN: Many of our men here have tried other programs, and they’ve come to us because they particularly like the faith-based ingredient that we have here. It offers them the kind of hope that they need in order to get beyond all the failures that they’ve had in the past.

LAWTON: That was the case for Michael Anthony Gross, who came here after three decades of cocaine and heroin addiction.

MICHAEL ANTHONY GROSS (Helping Up Mission): When I was in detox, I talked to a gentleman, and he recommended the Helping Up Mission, and he spoke about the spiritual basis that, you know, the program is run on, and I come to know that after all these years that’s what I was missing.

LAWTON: The mission’s internal surveys have found that two years out, almost 80 percent of the men who complete the program are still drug-free and employed. The program accepts men from all religious backgrounds, and leaders say religion isn’t imposed on anyone. The men may opt out of chapel or Bible study, but if they do they must attend another 12-step-style meeting. Tom Bond is Helping Up’s program director, who in 2002 came here himself as a homeless addict.

TOM BOND (Helping Up Mission): The whole faith and recovery both are highly unique. What we do is we just try to kind of create a platform and a vehicle for these guys to succeed and make things available to them and let them figure things out for themselves, not force it on them.

LAWTON: Gehman says the mission has been careful not to use any public money for the explicitly religious parts of the program. But he says hiring people who share the mission’s faith is central to maintaining its identity. If the government makes nondiscrimination a condition, they wouldn’t be able to accept public funding, and he says that would give other groups an unfair advantage.

GEHMAN: It really gives secular organizations a real power-edge, because they’re fully funded. They can build their buildings, they can develop their programs, and the faith-based organizations are left to have to raise their own money, which is becoming increasingly difficult.

LAWTON: Indeed, says Carlson-Thies, if the administration changed the longstanding policy, many charities from across the religious spectrum may be forced to end their partnerships with the government.

CARLSON-THIES: It’s not that we just say, well fine, if you want to walk away, walk away, because this implicates billions of dollars and a big volume of services.

LAWTON: One organization that might be affected is World Vision, the largest US-based relief and development group. World Vision has been taking federal funds since 1983 and last year received more than $300 million in cash and goods from the government. The Christian group wants to maintain the right to consider religion in its hiring. World Vision’s chief legal officer told me his organization has never discriminated among its recipients or engaged in illegal hiring practices. But, he said, if the policy changes and World Vision can no longer partner with the government, “the losers would be children in need around the world and American taxpayers.”

LYNN: Scientific studies certainly don’t prove that World Vision is the only group that can help the poor around the world, nor does it suggest that the best charities at home are those that have a religious title affixed to their name.

LAWTON: Under strong pressure from both sides, the Obama administration has been reluctant to clarify its position or make any changes, and White House officials declined to comment for this story as well. But with several court cases moving in the pipelines, the issue isn’t going away.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: And now we look at the election results and what they mean with David Gibson, religion writer for PoliticsDaily.com, and with Kim Lawton, our managing editor. Kim, you’ve looked at the patterns. What did you see?

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, not surprisingly Republicans made gains among all religious groups, but there were some pretty significant gains. White Protestants voted Republican overwhelmingly. They’ve done that, they usually do that in elections, but even more so this time. The interesting thing for me was around Catholics. In the last two congressional elections, overall Catholics have favored the Democratic candidates. But this time around they went Republican and by significant margins. Catholics have really become in some ways a swing voting bloc. Obviously there are some who always vote Republican, some who always vote Democratic, but there’s this group who keeps swinging, and this time around they really swung Republican.

ABERNETHY: David, why did so many Catholics switch so much from Democrats to Republicans?

DAVID GIBSON (Religion Writer, PoliticsDaily.com): Well, Bob, I think you, know, the governing issues here driving the election were the bread and butter, kitchen table issues of economics and the size of the federal government, and Catholics were swayed by those as well. But I think also there was, you know, a real degree of moral issues going on here—the debate over abortion funding in health care reform A lot of the things that the Christian right were hammering the Obama administration on for a long time—those also came into play. There was a sense that the Obama administration had been pushed over to the cultural left, and that really made a lot of Catholics very anxious and uneasy.

LAWTON: You know, a lot of people say, well, of course these religious groups went Republican because the whole electorate went Republican more so this time around, but I’ve been talking to some strategists who crunch the numbers, and they said, well, yes, that was a pattern throughout the electorate. Religious voters, especially Protestants and Catholics, voted more Republican at much bigger rates and margins than the general electorate.

ABERNETHY: And why?

LAWTON: Well, you know, David said there’s a lot of different issues why. People also say that the Republicans were doing a lot more outreach and specifically targeting some of these faith communities, and there was criticism this time around that the Democrats didn’t do that as much.

ABERNETHY: David, why do you think that was? Two years ago we were all, you all were talking a lot about Democratic outreach to religious voters and how well they were doing. Why not this time?

GIBSON: Good question, Bob. I think it’s really puzzling in many respects why the administration and the Democratic Party apparatus kind of punted on that religious outreach that had been so successful, that was really, I think, to a degree shifting the political culture where you had religious voters. The biggest predictor of how you’ll vote is church-going. Regular church-goers are going to go Republican more than they are going to go Democratic. In 2006, and certainly in 2008, Democrats had begun to shift that. They really, in the last two years, kind of gave up on that. I don’t know if they got complacent or whatever. But there’s some grumbling certainly on the religious left about the lack of Democratic outreach to religious voters, and you saw the results on Tuesday.

ABERNETHY: What about the Tea Party?

LAWTON: Well, clearly there was a big religious base in the Tea Party. Depending on who asked the question and what question they asked, almost half of people who consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement are religious conservatives, so that was a big factor in helping the Tea Party push some of the Republican candidates to victory. Not all of them did win, but it certainly has energized people on the religious right.

ABERNETHY: David, let me turn your attention now to the lame duck session of Congress coming up and particularly to the new Congress coming in, in January. What do you see them doing or failing to do that would be of particular interest to the religious community?

GIBSON: Well, I think two things in the lame duck Congress could possibly come up. One is immigration reform. Harry Reid on the eve of his election said that he was contemplating bringing that up. He said he would bring comprehensive immigration reform up for a vote during the lame duck session. Again, how is that going to work out? How would that play politically? One thing, referring to the Catholic vote that you have to break out, is that Latinos went very strongly for the Democratic Party this time, so you’ve really got, in a sense, two Catholic votes emerging and two votes overall—the white Catholic vote and the Latino Catholic vote. The other issue that could come up in the lame duck is the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, and the Democrats may try and formally rescind that. Those could be two hot-button issues that would get some immediate push back from the right, but also could be supported by the religious left.

LAWTON: And I’m fascinated by some of the battles that could be shaping up in that, because while religious conservatives certainly are concerned about “don’t ask don’t tell,” they don’t want to see that policy changed, but on the other hand when we are talking about immigration, some evangelicals have, although they are fiscally conservative, some evangelicals have been supportive of some immigration reform. And so while the Tea Party really wants to focus on fiscal issues, and on those issues a lot of evangelicals and other religious conservatives are right on board with that conservative fiscal outlook, when it comes to these social issues or things like immigration, some evangelicals might want to support that, and so there are some complexities there.

ABERNETHY: Do you see anything coming up regarding right to life?

LAWTON: Well, I think that that’s always an issue that’s important to religious conservatives. Certainly on the health care bill, that played a role in terms of is there going to be funding for abortion? Or even the Catholic bishops were concerned about possible funding for birth control. So those issues came into play there and are likely to continue as those debates come up again.

ABERNETHY: David, how do you see that?

GIBSON: I think Kim’s exactly right, and I think there’s going to be a big Republican push to repeal health care reform, or to de-fund certain aspects of it, to undermine it in some way, shape, or form. On the other hand, we could have a couple of court cases in the pipeline that could provide a definitive answer to this question of whether there is funding for abortion in the health care reform bill, which experts say there isn’t but folks on the religious right believe that there is. If there’s a definitive answer one way or another that could really be a game-changer as well on that issue.

ABERNETHY: So many people looking at the election returns see a demand for civility, a demand that the Republicans and the Democrats start trying to work together better. To what extent do you see any of that coming?

LAWTON: Well, I hear that. I hear, especially in the religious community, people hoping that there might be some civility. But when you talk to some of the activists and people who were involved in the campaigns, you know, to me what I hear from them is common ground means you vote like I want you to vote, or you vote like I think, and not let’s find a compromise. I don’t hear people in a mood for compromise. I do also hear in the religious moderates and left sort of a renewed commitment to working for their social justice agenda, and so there’s still going to be some political battling ahead.

GIBSON: Kim’s exactly right. I think that the folks on the religious right and the real strong religious right lobby organizations have basically said that the next two years is going to be about 2012. So they are positioning for the next election, because they see that they can only really get their agenda across if they win the Senate and the White House as well. We are in a real winner-takes-all kind of political culture here.

ABERNETHY: David Gibson, religion writer for PoliticsDaily.com, Kim Lawton—many thanks.

School children reciting in unison: “John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe…”

GLENN DENNARD: It literally was a dream. Private school was a dream. It was like man, one day I’d love to be able to. But with the scholarship program, you know, and our few nickels and pennies rubbed in together, we’re able to send every one of our children to private school.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: Glenn and Rhonda Dennard of South Phoenix have six children, five of whom attended private schools. Students at the public schools in Arizona have scored low on standardized tests, and the Dennards felts public schools could not match the opportunities of nearby private schools.

DENNARD: Every one of my children that have now gone to college, and it’s been three, have all said their first year of college was easier than their two or three years of high school in the private school sector. That’s just a blessing.

O’BRIEN: A blessing because the Dennards don’t have much money and could never have afforded private schools without the help of fellow Arizona taxpayers. Arizona allows taxpayers to contribute $500 to private student tuition organizations, or STOs as they are called, and deduct the full amount of their contribution from their state income taxes—a dollar-for-dollar credit. Great for the Dennards and, it turns out, also great for church-run schools in Arizona, which flourished under the program, taking in some $30 million in tuition-credit donations last year alone. Lynn Hoffman is among a group of Phoenix taxpayers who challenged the Arizona program in court, arguing that the tuition tax credit unconstitutionally promotes religion at the expense of the state’s public schools.

LYNN HOFFMAN (Plaintiff): I do not believe that the money that a taxpayer owes to the general fund should be diverted as it is being, I believe, in this case to private parochial schools. We’re just diverting money out of our general fund to private schools, and I’m a public school adherent, and I believe that we should keep the money in the general fund for our public schools.

O’BRIEN: After bouncing around the lower courts for ten years, Hoffman’s challenge reached the US Supreme Court this week, with justices and lawyers debating a question more of semantics than of law: If the money doesn’t come out of the state treasury because it never went into the state treasury, is it still taxpayer money? Attorneys for the state’s largest STO say it is not.

DAVID CORTMAN (Attorney, Arizona Christian STO): We certainly take issue with the premise that this is government money. This is private taxpayer money, just like any other donation. It’s simply not the government’s money until you’ve reached the bottom line of the tax form and no sooner.

O’BRIEN: Attorney Paul Bender, representing the taxpayers challenging the Arizona tuition tax credit, asked the justices, if it’s not the government’s money, whose is it?

PAUL BENDER (Plaintiffs’ Attorney): When you give this money as a credit, you cannot keep that money. You either have to pay it to the state Department of Revenue or you have to give it to an STO. It’s not your money. “Your money” means you can keep it. You can’t keep this money.

O’BRIEN: If the STOs are funded by private, voluntary donations, as the state argues, they can pick and choose which students get scholarships and to which schools. They may also consider the students’ religious beliefs.

BENDER: The Arizona program distributes $30 million a year to people depending on their religion. You can get a scholarship if you’re Catholic from one tuition organization. You can’t get it if you’re Jewish. Another one will give it to Jews, but not to Catholics. That’s unconstitutional. The question is asked to a parent who comes to an STO, one of the religious STOs: “What’s your religion?” You can’t distribute government benefits by asking questions like that.

O’BRIEN: Justice Antonin Scalia appeared to defend the Arizona program and noted that donations to churches are tax deductible even though churches routinely favor their own members—an argument that resonated with STO lawyers.

CORTMAN: It is no different than if you give your charitable deduction to a church, and the church discriminates based on whatever religion it is, whether it’s Jewish or Muslim or whatever it happens to be. Every religious organization—quote, unquote—and I hate to use the word discriminate, but they choose who to affiliate with. This is no different.

O’BRIEN: That most of the money ends up going to Catholic or evangelical Christian schools, Cortman says, is not a problem.

CORTMAN: It’s interesting because statistics show that about 65 percent of the money goes to religious schools, but you have to keep in mind that 65 percent of the private schools are religious.

O’BRIEN: There is another wrinkle in this case that could be even more important than the tuition question. Arizona is also arguing that just because they are taxpayers, the plaintiffs here have suffered no real injury and thus have no right to even challenge the program in court. It’s a position the Obama administration embraced, writing in a friend of the court brief that the injury to taxpayers is “infinitesimally small and conjectural” and defending the Arizona tax credit as a “neutral program of private choice,” all to the dismay and surprise of proponents of strict separation of church and state.

BARRY LYNN (Americans United for Separation of Church and State): It is truly shocking that the Obama administration, through the solicitor general, has taken the position to deny access to the courts for Arizona taxpayers and to support what is unequivocally a direct funding of religious private schools.

O’BRIEN: More than the administration brief, President Obama’s court appointments could change the landscape on the issue of church and state. He replaced retiring Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter, the court’s staunchest advocates of strict separation, with Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, whose views are not as well known. It’s a new court, and this case could provide the first real glimpse of where it stands on church-state issues.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.

According to news reports, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction in the failed Times Square bombing, has told investigators he carried out the attempted bombing to avenge US drone attacks in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.

Shahzad’s assertion adds more fuel to the simmering controversy over the ethics and effects of increasing reliance by both the CIA and the US military on unmanned drones to launch missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, asked (“US pressure helps militants overseas focus efforts,” May 7) : “Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan—notably the Predator drone strikes—actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent? It is a hard question.”

The Times Square drone connection also follows on last year’s deadly attack on the CIA, when a suicide bomber, a Jordanian doctor linked to al-Qaeda, detonated his explosives at an American base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA officers and contractors who were operating at the heart of the covert program overseeing US drone strikes in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions.

CIA director Leon Panetta has called lethal drone technology “the only game in town” for going after al-Qaeda, and Obama administration officials have strenuously defended both the legality of the strikes in Pakistan as well as their effectiveness in killing suspected militants. They also deny the drones are responsible for an unacceptable level of civilian deaths.

“In this ongoing armed conflict, 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 who are planning an attack,’’ Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, told an audience of international legal scholars on March 25, according to the Wall Street Journal (“US defends legality of killing with drones”).

Since President Obama took office, the CIA has used drones to kill some 400 to 500 suspected militants, according to intelligence officials, the Journal reported. The officials say only some 20 civilians have been killed—a figure critics sharply challenge. In 2009, Pakistani officials said the strikes had killed some 700 civilians and only 14 terrorist leaders, or 50 civilians for every militant. A New America Foundation analysis of reported US drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to 2010 says the strikes killed between 830 and 1210 individuals, of whom 550 to 850 were militants, or about two-thirds of the total on average.

More recently, an April 26 story in the Washington Post reported that the CIA has refined its techniques and made technological improvements that are reducing civilian deaths, and this week, in his joint news conference with President Karzai of Afghanistan, President Obama said, “I am ultimately accountable…for somebody who is not on the battlefield who got killed…and so we do not take that lightly. We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties not because it’s a problem for President Karzai; we have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed.”

Earlier this month, in a May 6 interview on National Public Radio, David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who was held captive for months by the Taliban in northern Pakistan, spoke about the US drone strikes and said, “I saw firsthand in north and south Waziristan that the drone strikes do have a major impact. They generally are accurate. The strikes that went on killed foreign militants or Afghan or Pakistani Taliban that went on around us. There were some civilians killed but generally the Taliban would greatly exaggerate the number of civilians killed. They inhibited their operations. Taliban leaders were very nervous about being tracked by drones. So they are effective in the short-term I would say…I don’t think the answer is, you know, endless drone strikes. The answer is definitely not sending American troops into Pakistan, into the tribal areas. That would just create a tremendous nationalist backlash. It has to be the Pakistanis doing it.”

Ethicists and religious leaders are beginning to challenge the morality of the drone program, arguing it violates international law as well as key precepts of just war theory. The Christian Century, for example, editorialized in mid-May (“Remote-control warfare,” May 18) that while the drone attacks have no doubt killed terrorists and leaders of al-Qaeda, “they raise troubling questions to those committed to the just war principle that civilians should never be targeted.”

Taking aim at one of the aspects of drone warfare that make it so popular with the military and with politicians—that it is a risk-free option for the US military because it avoids American casualties—the Century editors said: “According to the just war principles, it is better to risk the lives of one’s own combatants than the lives of enemy noncombatants.”

The “risk-free” idea is also being challenged. In a recent piece in the Jesuit magazine America (“A troubling disconnection,” March 15), Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at Catholic University, wrote that military (as opposed to CIA) drone operators suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at higher rates than soldiers in combat zones. “Operators see in detail the destruction and grisly human toll from their work,” she observed, and she quoted an air force commander who said, “There’s no detachment. Those employing the system are very involved at a personal level in combat. You hear the AK-47 going off, the intensity of the voice on the radio calling for help. You’re looking at him, 18 inches away from him, trying everything in your capability to get that person out of trouble.”

The Christian Century editors also noted that drone attacks on civilians have given militants a recruitment tool, citing an opinion piece by counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and former army officer Andrew McDonald Exum published last year in the New York Times (May 17, 2009). “Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as the drone strikes have increased,” they wrote.

An even more emphatic critic of the use of drones is Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has been persuasive about its legal right to launch attacks in Pakistan,” she wrote in “Flying Blind,” an article also published in America magazine. “Even with the legal right to use military force, drone attacks must also conform to the traditional principles governing the rules of warfare, including those of distinction, necessity, proportion and humanity.’’

O’Connell argues that under the United Nations Charter, resort to military force on the territory of another state, in this case Pakistan, is permitted only when the attacking state is acting in self-defense, acting with U.N. Security Council authorization, or is invited to aid another state in the lawful use of force. “Pakistan did not attack the United States and is not responsible for those who did,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has no basis, therefore, for attacking in self-defense on Pakistani territory.’’

In addition, she contends that while al-Qaeda is a violent terrorist group, “it should be treated as a criminal organization to which law enforcement rules apply. To do otherwise is violate fundamental human rights principles. Outside of war, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning.”

The only basis for the United States to lawfully use force in Pakistan would be if it had the consent of the country’s political leaders. It is not clear whether the US has such a valid invitation, according to O’Connell.

“Pakistan’s president has told US leaders not to attack certain groups that have cooperated with Islamabad,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has done so anyway, insisting that Pakistan use more military force and threatening to carry out attacks itself if the government refuses. None of this can be squared with international law.”

As recently as May 12, the head of an influential religious party which is a junior partner in Pakistan’s ruling coalition denounced the most recent drone attacks as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. “The recurring attacks on targets in tribal areas are blatant aggression against Pakistan and the military should shoot down intruding drones,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party told reporters, as reported in the Gulf News.

The case of western Pakistan presents particular challenges, according to O’Connell: “There suspected militant leaders wear civilian clothes, and even the sophisticated cameras of a drone cannot reveal with certainty that a suspect is a militant. In such a situation international humanitarian law gives a presumption to civilian status.”

In an interview, O’Connell suggests that there is confusion about international law versus domestic national security law and that the scarcity of developed ethical analysis and discussion of drone warfare might have to do with the fact that the drone itself is “just a delivery vehicle.” The real ethical issue, she said, is “the greater propensity to kill” made possible by the “video game-like” quality of drone combat.

Gary Simpson, a theology professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and the author of “War, Peace, and God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition” (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2007), acknowledges that although he hasn’t yet thought about ethics and drone warfare, “the ongoing evolution of weaponry always poses new questions. It changes the questions about proportionality”—referring to the just war principle that the benefits of war must be proportionate to the expected harm— “and the protection of one’s own forces over against the vulnerability of civilian populations.”

The House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held hearings in March and April on the rise of the drones, the legality of unmanned targeting systems, and the future of war, and US Naval Academy ethics professor Edward Barrett testified that while unmanned weapons systems “are consistent with a society’s duty to avoid unnecessary risks to its combatants,” and they can “enhance restraint” on the part of the soldiers engaged in virtual warfare, they also “could encourage unjust wars” and “could facilitate the circumvention of legitimate authority and pursuit of unjust causes.”

It will be interesting to see whether Congress and the White House continue to involve ethicists and religious thinkers in future deliberations on these issues. Last December, just before President Obama gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on themes of just war, the White House gathered religious leaders at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for what was described as a briefing and discussion of the morality of war, according to the Washington Post. White House staff members took notes for the president.

For now, the Obama administration insists the use of drones in Pakistan is imperative in the fight against terrorism, and Amitai Etzioni, an international relations professor at George Washington University, writing recently in the Joint Force Quarterly (“Unmanned Aircraft Systems: The Moral and Legal Case”), has enumerated many of the reasons and offered multiple lines of supporting argument: “The United States and its allies can make a strong case that the main source of the problem is those who abuse their civilian status to attack truly innocent civilians and to prevent our military and other security forces from discharging their duties,” he says, and “we must make it much clearer that those who abuse their civilian status are a main reason for the use of UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and targeted killing against them.”

But others, such as Kilcullen and Exum, argue drone combat exacerbates the problem of terrorism and contributes to the instability of Pakistan. “Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing,” write Kilcullen and Exum. “Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live.”

Missile strikes launched from the comfort of Langley, Virginia, a half a world away from Waziristan, are unlikely to do that and thus, to critics, remain morally problematic.

David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Afghanistan (“The Right War Gone Wrong”) and nuclear disarmament (“Trimming the Nuclear Arsenals”).