Neil Macdonald, senior Washington correspondent for CBC News, writes: In 2001, when Israel started killing militant Palestinian enemies (and, often, innocent bystanders) with missiles fired from helicopters hovering so high you could barely see them, foreign reporters were urged by the Israeli government to call the practice “targeted killing.”

Most of us, including many of my American colleagues, preferred the term “extrajudicial assassination.” We felt we were in the news business, not the euphemism business.

Today, 12 years later, the Washington Post carries a front-page headline about the U.S. drone program titled, “Targeted killings face new scrutiny.”

Yet another government document has been leaked, this time a so-called “white paper” in which the U.S. Department of Justice lays out the administration’s justification for killing American citizens it suspects of belonging to Al-Qaeda.

U.S. media outlets, it seems, are perfectly comfortable with the term “targeted killing,” now that it is a major tool for the Pentagon and CIA.

It’s also clear American media outlets are comfortable suppressing news the government does not want published. [Continue reading…]

A PublicMind poll published yesterday declares: “By a two-to-one margin (48%-24%) American voters say they think it is illegal for the U.S. government to target its own citizens living abroad with drone attacks”.

“The public clearly makes an assumption very different from that of the Obama administration or Mr. Brennan: the public thinks targeting American citizens abroad is out of bounds,” said Peter Woolley, professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University and analyst for PublicMind.

The question is, among those who think that targeting Americans is out of bounds, how many are actually aware that Americans have indeed been targeted?

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that they’ve heard a lot about drones (45% compared to 29%) and overall, by a three-to-one margin, those polled support the CIA’s use of drone attacks abroad.

The way I would interpret these numbers is that they indicate that most Americans are unaware that drones have been used to kill Americans, most assume that these attacks help keep America safe and that on the basis of these two assumptions see no reason to investigate the issue more deeply.

The complicity is not simply between the media and the government; it also involves the broad-based indifference that Americans have for what happens outside this country. This is what makes drone warfare such a politically low-cost option for the Obama administration.

Noura Erakat writes: The Senate Armed Services Committee did not mention drones a single time during Senator Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings last week. That oversight, however, says a lot more about the politics surrounding the hearings than it does about the enduring salience of drone technology to U.S. national security policy. The Department of Justice’s “white paper” obtained by NBC on Monday affirms that.

The paper, drafted for some members of Congress and a less detailed analysis than the official, still unreleased, legal memo, provides the most robust legal analysis of the Obama administration’s targeted killing policy to date. Although it makes no mention of any particular target, the white paper is clearly responsive toAnwar Al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born Muslim cleric killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. The 16-paged document explores the lawfulness of killing of a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al-Qaeda or an Associated force on foreign soil in an area outside of active hostilities, who poses an imminent threat, and whose capture is not feasible.

The memo is woefully insufficient as a legal analysis. Even its title, “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or an Associated Force,” makes assumptions that merit thorough examination. Who, for example, qualifies as a Senior Operational Leader? Al-Awlaki never commanded any attacks but was a propagandist who arguably inspired them. Is an associated force a group that shares Al Qaeda’s ideology or must it be a part of a central command structure? Al-Awlaki’s Yemen-based non-state group, Al Qaeda Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was developed independently in the south of Yemen and has national goals distinct from the aims of the transnational Al Qaeda network. [Continue reading…]

Amnesty International [PDF]:

“These [drone] strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise.”
White House Press Secretary, press briefing, 5 February 2013

A newly released document outlining the legal framework relating to an aspect of the US administration’s “targeted killing” programme is silent on human rights and does nothing to alleviate Amnesty International’s concern that the programme as a whole allows for the use of lethal force that violates the right to life under international law.

The US Department of Justice “white paper”, which “sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the US government could use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against a US citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force of al-Qa’ida”, was first made public by NBC News. The document adds little new substance to what various administration officials have already said publicly on this issue. It again ignores the USA’s international human rights obligations, and expands the notion of
“imminent attack” to which the USA might respond with lethal force. It provides no case detail, and considers the lethal force question mainly under US constitutional and statutory law.

The fact that the document makes no express reference to international human rights law is unsurprising – this has become the norm for officials outlining policy and practice under the USA’s notion of a global armed conflict with al-Qa’ida. The silence on human rights is no less regrettable by its predictability.

The Justice Department paper, “an unclassified document prepared for some members of Congress”, apparently summarizing a longer legal memorandum that remains classified and undisclosed, addresses specifically the legality of the “targeted” killing in a “foreign country” of US citizens by the USA. It should not be forgotten that the vast majority of those killed by US forces in such operations in recent years, principally in drone attacks, have been foreign nationals. While the white paper concludes that “the US citizenship of a leader of al-Qa’ida or its associated forces…does not give that person constitutional immunity from attack”, it is not clear whether the case of a US citizen assessed as the possible target for lethal force would receive a greater degree of scrutiny and caution from decision-makers than an identically placed foreign national. As outlined below, there is certainly greater domestic political pressure on the administration to make clear its full legal opinions on the “targeted killing” of US nationals. Amnesty International reminds the US government not to allow the domestic focus on US nationals to distract from a fundamental concept of universal human rights, namely that the right to life, to liberty, and to fair trial of every human being is to be respected without discrimination on the basis of their nationality.

While the White House has responded to the release of the white paper by stressing that it is an unclassified document that contains a set of “general principles” already in the public domain, Amnesty International calls on the US administration to adopt an approach of far greater transparency than it has to date in relation to its use of lethal force in policy and practice. Such an approach should be one that facilitates independent assessment of the lawfulness of particular attacks, accountability for any attacks that are unlawful, and full reparations for victims of violations and their families. [Continue reading – PDF]

On April 29, 2003, two days before George Bush’s famous “mission accomplished” speech declaring the end to major combat operations in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld announced that U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia. The presence of these troops in the Islamic kingdom was one of the catalysts for 9/11.

An al Qaeda fatwa issued in 1998 had said: “for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.”

As we now learn that two years ago the Obama administration turned Saudi Arabia into a spearhead for its targeted killing operations across the region, it seems reasonable to wonder how long it might be before history repeats itself.

If two decades ago overseas military bases were the preeminent symbol of American domination, in much of the world now the most despised expression of American power is surely the drone.

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration’s targeted-killing program has relied on a growing constellation of drone bases operated by the CIA and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command. The only strike intentionally targeting a U.S. citizen, a 2011 attack that killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, was carried out in part by CIA drones flown from a secret base in Saudi Arabia.

The base was established two years ago to intensify the hunt against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the affiliate in Yemen is known. Brennan, who previously served as the CIA’s station chief in Saudi Arabia, played a key role in negotiations with Riyadh over locating an agency drone base inside the kingdom.

The Washington Post had refrained from disclosing the specific location at the request of the administration, which cited concern that exposing the facility would undermine operations against an al-Qaeda affiliate regarded as the network’s most potent threat to the United States, as well as potentially damage counterterrorism collaboration with Saudi Arabia.

The Post learned Tuesday night that another news organization was planning to reveal the location of the base, effectively ending an informal arrangement among several news organizations that had been aware of the location for more than a year.

The New York Times reports: Late last August, a 40-year-old cleric named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber stood up to deliver a speech denouncing Al Qaeda in a village mosque in far eastern Yemen.

It was a brave gesture by a father of seven who commanded great respect in the community, and it did not go unnoticed. Two days later, three members of Al Qaeda came to the mosque in the tiny village of Khashamir after 9 p.m., saying they merely wanted to talk. Mr. Jaber agreed to meet them, bringing his cousin Waleed Abdullah, a police officer, for protection.

As the five men stood arguing by a cluster of palm trees, a volley of remotely operated American missiles shot down from the night sky and incinerated them all, along with a camel that was tied up nearby.

The killing of Mr. Jaber, just the kind of leader most crucial to American efforts to eradicate Al Qaeda, was a reminder of the inherent hazards of the quasi-secret campaign of targeted killings that the United States is waging against suspected militants not just in Yemen but also in Pakistan and Somalia. Individual strikes by the Predator and Reaper drones are almost never discussed publicly by Obama administration officials. But the clandestine war will receive a rare moment of public scrutiny on Thursday, when its chief architect, John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, faces a Senate confirmation hearing as President Obama’s nominee for C.I.A. director.

From his basement office in the White House, Mr. Brennan has served as the principal coordinator of a “kill list” of Qaeda operatives marked for death, overseeing drone strikes by the military and the C.I.A., and advising Mr. Obama on which strikes he should approve.

“He’s probably had more power and influence than anyone in a comparable position in the last 20 years,” said Daniel Benjamin, who recently stepped down as the State Department’s top counterterrorism official and now teaches at Dartmouth. “He’s had enormous sway over the intelligence community. He’s had a profound impact on how the military does counterterrorism.”

Mr. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has taken a particular interest in Yemen, sounding early alarms within the administration about the threat developing there, working closely with neighboring Saudi Arabia to gain approval for a secret C.I.A. drone base there that is used for American strikes, and making the impoverished desert nation a test case for American counterterrorism strategy.

In recent years, both C.I.A. and Pentagon counterterrorism officials have pressed for greater freedom to attack suspected militants, and colleagues say Mr. Brennan has often been a restraining voice. The strikes have killed a number of operatives of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s affiliate in Yemen, including Said Ali al-Shihri, a deputy leader of the group, and the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

But they have also claimed civilians like Mr. Jaber and have raised troubling questions that apply to Pakistan and Somalia as well: Could the targeted killing campaign be creating more militants in Yemen than it is killing? And is it in America’s long-term interest to be waging war against a self-renewing insurgency inside a country about which Washington has at best a hazy understanding?

Several former top military and intelligence officials — including Stanley A. McChrystal, the retired general who led the Joint Special Operations Command, which has responsibility for the military’s drone strikes, and Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director — have raised concerns that the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen are increasingly targeting low-level militants who do not pose a direct threat to the United States.

In an interview with Reuters, General McChrystal said that drones could be a useful tool but were “hated on a visceral level” in some of the places where they were used and contributed to a “perception of American arrogance.” [Continue reading…]