When is it okay for my government to kill me? Well, it actually is not all that clear according to a memo released last week to NBC News by the Department of Justice.

This document, or “white paper” as it has come to be known, provides the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration’s most controversial polices – drones and their increased use abroad on suspected members of al-Qaida and Americans who are supposedly linked to al-Qaida, such as Anwar al-Awlaki.

Al-Awlaki was an American who was an alleged member of al-Qaida. However, he was never indicted formally nor charged with any crimes by the United States government.

Operationally speaking, drones have a purpose. It allows for fewer boots on the ground and mitigates the risk of putting our soldiers in harm’s way. This policy of disengagement seems consistent with the Obama administration broader foreign policy strategy.

But drones also raise more questions than they answer – there are the legal ramifications. The legal requirements as spelled out, or rather not spelled out in last week’s “white paper,” are very broad to say the least. This veil of secrecy that has prevented public discourse for so long was finally lifted – sort of.

There is a three part test that is raising a lot of eyebrows because of the lack of specificity and broad strokes in which the document was painted. First, the threat has to be imminent, but imminent is not defined. Second, capture must be infeasible, which more or less means putting troops on ground has undue risk involved. Finally, the drone strike must be carried out according to the law of war principles.

President Barack Obama, like President George W. Bush before him, believes in a strong executive power in terms of the War on Terror, a power let’s not forget given to the president by Congress, which grants the president the ability to kill people associated with al-Qaida as he sees fit. Most people do not have a problem with this reality. Americans seem to love drones.

In fact, a February 2012 ABC News/Washington Post Poll revealed 83 percent of Americans “approved of the Obama Administrations use of unmanned drones against suspected terrorists overseas.”

Does this 83 percent undercut the need for us to have a dialogue about this policy? Are Americans swayed by the idea that drones make it an “over there problem?” Drones are seductive in the short term no doubt, but no one can really say with any certainty their long term implications. The “white paper” supposedly explains how the killing of suspected Americans now aligned with al-Qaida does not violate these Americans constitutional rights, but this has not really been explained as the government hides behind the trope of protecting this information in the interest of national security.

If national security is such a concern, then it is also fair to ask the question of whether or not drone attacks actually makes us safer?  I find it hard to believe that drones are good for our long term interests. These strikes build anti-American sentiment and end up creating more enemies than we are actually killing. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal expressed this sentiment in a recent interview with Reuters.

“The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes … is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”

To provide some context to this claim about the number of drones being used, according to the United Kingdom based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which attempts to monitor the covert drone program, an estimated 2,000-4,000 people in Pakistan have been killed, as many as 1,000 in Yemen and between 50-100 people in Somalia as well as 1,600 civilians in all because of U.S. drone strikes. But again, the real numbers are difficult to discern because of the secrecy involved and how the military classifies causality versus a targeted terrorist.

So are these drone strikes acts of war? Obama needs to answer this question. There are legal, moral and strategic questions that needed to be answered, but with the release of the “white paper” this is really the first time we have been able to debate the topic because of the hush hush that is invoked when talking about the drone program.

Obama wanted his administration to be the most transparent ever, when he took office in 2009, but I am having a tough time discerning how his use of drones is any different that the hush hush invoked by the Bush administration and their use of torture. The use of waterboarding has become one of the legacies of the Bush administration. The question is will drones become a legacy of the Obama administration?