Civil liberties groups have been pressuring the administration to offer justification for what has been described as a top-secret “targeted kill” programme in which Americans who have joined al Qaeda or other militants are deemed legitimate targets to be killed overseas.
US Attorney General Eric Holder plans to address the issue and the underpinning legal principles for using lethal force during remarks at Northwestern University School of Law on Monday afternoon in Chicago, the source said Sunday on condition of anonymity.
The Obama administration has stepped up using unmanned aerial drones against terrorism suspects including the September killing of Anwar alAwlaki, the US-born cleric who went into hiding in Yemen who had been directing al Qaeda militants to launch several attacks against the United States.
US officials have refused to talk much publicly about the programme but some officials said last year that Americans like Awlaki could be placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior US government officials which then informs the president of its decisions.
Holder will likely couple the justification with another argument that the administration has repeatedly made about terrorism: both traditional criminal courts and military tribunals work to prosecute terrorism suspects, the source said.
The speech will be the latest attempt by the administration to address the issue, an unusual break from past precedent of eschewing virtually any discussion about the top-secret programme.
Defence Department lawyer Jeh Johnson last month referred to the so-called “targeted kill” programme, saying that it pursued legitimate military targets overseas and rejected suggestions that the US was engaged in assassination.
“Under well-settled legal principles, lethal force against a valid military objective, in an armed conflict, is consistent with the law of war and does not, by definition, constitute an ‘assassination’,” Johnson said at Yale Law School.
The American Civil Liberties Union on February 1 sued the Obama administration in federal court, demanding that Holder’s Justice Department release what it believes are legal memoranda justifying targeting Americans overseas using lethal force.
The ACLU called such power a “breathtaking assertion” and warned that it would be available to future presidents as well.
“At bottom, the administration is asserting the unreviewable authority to kill any American whom the president declares to be an enemy of the state,” Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said in a statement.
US officials have linked Awlaki to several plots against the US, including the 2009 Christmas Day attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a US commercial airliner as it arrived in Detroit from Amsterdam with a bomb hidden in his underwear.
When the bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a US prison, authorities said that Awlaki himself approved and directed the plot from Yemen.
Civil liberties groups have complained that such militants should be captured and prosecuted in a US courtroom where practical. They also fiercely oppose using military courts for terrorism cases.
The Obama administration has run into difficulties trying prosecute terrorism suspects in the US court system, facing criticism over giving terrorism suspects full legal rights and whether they addressed security for the trials sufficiently.
Republicans in Congress and even some of Obama’s fellow Democrats have demanded that they be tried in military tribunals and blocked moving terrorism suspects from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the federal prison system.
Administration officials have insisted that terrorism suspects can be successfully prosecuted and incarcerated in both legal systems and said that the Abdulmutallab case was an example of the traditional courts working effectively.
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Citizenship is a status defined by and can be changed by the government to suit its needs, in this case US is making changes to it so it suites thier requirment of fulfilling thier illegal missions of killing inocents by drone strikes all over the globe. Not a news to any one really.
When you a citizen and declare war on your own country you can't use that same citizen status to protect you from retaliation --- not rocket science.
What is citizenship
A privilege accorded to an individual by the state who conforms to the ideals of the state and the society in which he/she lives in. By birth, an individual assumes the nationality and through life attains citizenship. Citizenship comes with rights as well as responsibilities. As such, Awlaki and all his compatriots lost their citizenship through their self professed actions, even though they retained their nationality.
However, who has the final say in this in the US? The responsibility given to the state is based on people's trust in the institutions. While I am glad Awlaki is no more, I am equally uncomfortable when US(or any state) institution extend that trust to eliminate a national on the grounds of lost citizenship.
The power to extinguish a citizenship is given to courts in our modern world, as in capital punishment and not with executive branch. Paradoxically, in almost all nations the executive branch is given the power to pardon an individual (by default, reinstate citizenship) whom the courts have decided "uncitizen".
Does the power to confer pardon also come with parallel power to execute. I don't think so, and that why we have evolved a court system. The monarchy who executes and pardon an individual is dead and gone in the present world.
But what if the Awlakis take refuge in an another nation where the traditional system of reasoning, logic, and conclusion typical for courts are non reachable, as we are seeing today in the uniqueness of WoT?
Do they now come under military rules of engagement and if so, who has the authority to decide? What and who will prevent the misuse of power?
I have no answers to my own questions, and I doubt anyone can provide any ethical framework of the law, besides legislative cover. Ironically, legislative law does not make it constitutional.
Is capital punishment ethical? What do you do with serial rapists, child molesters, serial killers, and Awlaki and OBL types who claim no nationality or citizenship except their own?