DRONE STRIKES: Washington debates oversight

DRONE STRIKES: Washington debates oversight

Lawmakers are divided over whether the Obama administration's drone program requires more oversight. Figures like John McCain, left, call more oversight an "encroachment" on executive power, while some like Rand Paul, right, call the program "unseemly."

Lawmakers are deeply divided over whether the Obama administration's program of targeted drone strikes needs greater oversight â€" and those divides don't fit neatly along party lines.

The debate â€" which first broke into the open last week with the disclosure of documents outlining the legal rationale for strikes targeting even Americans â€" raged hot on Sunday ahead of President Obama's State of the Union address this week.

“It just makes me uncomfortable that the president, whoever it is, is the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner, all rolled into one,” Maine Sen. Angus King said on CNN's "State of the Union."

King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, called for some kind of drone court, similar to the secret courts that authorize domestic wiretapping.

"I’m not suggesting something that would slow down response," King said. "But where there is time to submit it to a third party, a court, in confidence, and get a judgment that, yes, there’s sufficient evidence, that feels to me like that’s, its not full compliance with the Fifth Amendment. ...  But some independent check on our executive is healthy for the system.”

RELATED: BRENNAN DEFENDS DRONE STRIKES, EVEN ON AMERICANS

But Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, one of Obama's fiercest critics in Congress, said that kind of oversight would be an "encroachment" on presidential power.

"What we really need to do is take this whole program out of the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency and put it into the Department of Defense, where you have adequate oversight, you have committee oversight, you have all the things that are built in as our oversight of the Department of Defense," McCain said on "Fox News Sunday."

"Since when is the intelligence agency supposed to be an air force of drones that goes around killing people?" McCain asked. "I believe that it has to be the Department of Defense."

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, a tea party leader who is trying to move the GOP away from its traditionally hawkish foreign policy, called it "unseemly" that the president can authorize strikes even on American citizens.

“The president, a politician, Republican or Democrat, should never get to decide someone’s death by flipping through some flash cards and saying, ‘You want to kill him? Yeah, let’s go ahead and kill him,'" Paul said on CNN.

RELATED: U.N. TO PROBE U.S. DRONE USE

Even Obama's former defense secretary, Robert Gates, said there's "merit" to the idea of greater legal checks on the program. Emphasizing that he's a "big advocate of drones," Gates said on CNN: "I think just as an independent confirmation or affirmation, if you will, is something worth giving serious consideration to.”

But Obama also has staunch defenders, in both parties.

"He's kept us safe with the best military in the world and the best intelligence agencies," Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"The policy's unfolding," Durbin said of the drone program. "But at least the president is engaged in this conversation, to establish this legal architecture. That is a dramatic change from the past."

And Michigan Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said the program gets "plenty of oversight."

“I, as chairman, review every single airstrike that we use in the war on terror, both from the civilian and the military side when it comes to airstrikes,” Rogers said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

“There is plenty of oversight here," Rogers added. "There’s not an American list somewhere overseas for targeting, that does not exist. … The oversight rules have been consistent.”

danh@nydailynews.com