A speech on BDS that Dershowitz and other opponents of academic freedom tried to suppress

Judith Butler, speaking at Brooklyn College, New York City, on Thursday night: Usually one starts by saying that one is glad to be here, but I cannot say that it has been a pleasure anticipating this event. What a Megillah! I am, of course, glad that the event was not cancelled, and I understand that it took a great deal of courage and a steadfast embrace of principle for this event to happen at all. I would like personally to thank all those who took this opportunity to reaffirm the fundamental principles of academic freedom, including the following organizations: the Modern Language Association, the National Lawyers Guild, the New York ACLU, the American Association of University Professors, the Professional Staff Congress (the union for faculty and staff in the CUNY system), the New York Times editorial team, the offices of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Brooklyn College President Karen Gould whose principled stand on academic freedom has been exemplary.

The principle of academic freedom is designed to make sure that powers outside the university, including government and corporations, are not able to control the curriculum or intervene in extra-mural speech. It not only bars such interventions, but it also protects those platforms in which we might be able to reflect together on the most difficult problems. You can judge for yourself whether or not my reasons for lending my support to this movement are good ones. That is, after all, what academic debate is about. It is also what democratic debate is about, which suggests that open debate about difficult topics functions as a meeting point between democracy and the academy. Instead of asking right away whether we are for or against this movement, perhaps we can pause just long enough to find out what exactly this is, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and why it is so difficult to speak about this.

I am not asking anyone to join a movement this evening. I am not even a leader of this movement or part of any of its governing committee, even though the New York Times tried to anoint me the other day—I appreciated their subsequent retraction, and I apologize to my Palestinian colleagues for their error. The movement, in fact, has been organized and led by Palestinians seeking rights of political self-determination, including Omar Barghouti, who was invited first by the Students for Justice in Palestine, after which I was invited to join him. At the time I thought it would be very much like other events I have attended, a conversation with a few dozen student activists in the basement of a student center. So, as you can see, I am surprised and ill-prepared for what has happened. [Continue reading…]

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Islam is not the real issue we are facing in Africa

Eliza Griswold writes: Stretching from west to east across Africa – from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – the Sahel today is a militant’s dream. Despite the French military’s recent routing of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and its allies in northern Mali, the threat of safe haven for the west’s enemies is not going to end there any time soon.

Although, for the moment, the militia have melted from sight, the latest battles in Algeria and Mali are harbingers of a larger catastrophe: the Sahel, the vast grassland north of the equator, has become the latest battleground in the west’s war against Islamist militants.

France’s plans to withdraw its 4,000 troops from Mali in late March are premature. From the air, US surveillance drones and French fighter planes will not be enough to keep peace in the Sahel – which includes Mauritania, southern Algeria, northern Mali, Chad and Sudan, as well as Somalia, where a 2006 Ethiopian invasion, tacitly backed by the US, looked at first like an utter defeat for the Islamists. Six months later, the militants returned to wage exactly the kind of war Ethiopia and the US had feared.

So how does the west avoid repeating the pattern? By understanding the root causes of the troubles that plague the Sahel. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian capital sees heaviest clashes in weeks, frightened residents hide in their homes

The Associated Press reports: Syrian rebels and regime forces fought their most intense clashes in weeks inside the heavily guarded capital of Damascus on Wednesday, activists said, with the sounds of shell blasts echoing through the downtown area and keeping many children home from school while residents hid in their houses.

The opposition fighters blasted army checkpoints with rifles and anti-aircraft guns while government forces shelled the eastern and southern suburbs, trying to repel a new insurgent effort to push the civil war into the heart of the capital, the anti-regime activists said.

Although bordered by rebellious suburbs that have seen fierce fighting, widespread clashes have remained mostly on the capital’s edges, saving it from the destruction that has ravaged other major cities such as Aleppo and Homs.

The military of President Bashar has focused on securing the capital, and the dozens of rebels groups that have established footholds in Damascus suburbs have failed to form a united front, each fighting for its own area with little or no coordination with others. [Continue reading…]

Reuters adds: Syrian government jets bombarded the Damascus ring road on Thursday in a bid to halt a rebel advance which threatens President Bashar al-Assad’s hold on the capital, insurgent commanders and opposition activists said.

Warplanes fired rockets at southern parts of the route where rebels have spent the past 36 hours overrunning army positions and road blocks encircling the heart of the city, the site of key state security and intelligence installations.

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Kuwait, ‘the back office of logistical support’ for Syria’s rebels

The National reports: Ten days before sitting down for a leisurely evening tea recently on the outskirts of Kuwait City, Jamaan Al Harbash was in Aleppo talking with rebels fighting to oust Syrian President Bashar Al Assad from power.

It was the third trip to the war zones of Syria by the former Kuwaiti MP, who no longer escapes the Syrian regime’s notice. Following a journey to the front in October, Syria’s state news agency condemned him for “attempts to spread sedition among the united Syrian people”.

The regime’s censure has not deterred Mr Harbash, who scrolls through his iPhone to show recent pictures of shattered neighbourhoods and a hospital he said was rebuilt with the help of Kuwaiti funds. Amid the scenes of war is a photo of Mr Al Harbash standing with a half dozen fighters of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA).

“The reason I went to Syria was to observe whether the aid we are sending is reaching the general population,” he said.

To many observers, Kuwait’s decision to host a United Nations meeting last week to raise humanitarian aid for Syrians – and its pledge of US$300 million to the effort – were the most overt steps that the country has yet taken to get involved in the crisis.

Until then, Kuwait had appeared largely absent from regional diplomacy on the crisis, while Qatar has funded and hosted the political opposition to Mr Al Assad and Saudi Arabia has reportedly sent arms to anti-regime fighters.

Yet interviews with aid organisations and officials suggest Kuwait has played a no less pivotal role than its Gulf Arab neighbours during the 22-month uprising. This country of 2.6 million people has emerged as a central fund-raising hub for direct financial support to insurgents fighting the Assad regime and for humanitarian aid to rebel-controlled areas, which are said to encompass slightly more than half of the country. [Continue reading…]

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The devil in the (still undisclosed) detail: Department of Justice ‘white paper’ on use of lethal force against U.S. citizens made public

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]

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Letter from Mali: life is beginning to return to normal

Luke Harding writes: Last year Suleiman Kané hid his radio under several crates of fish. He also buried his satellite dish at the bottom of his fishing boat. The Islamists had swept into Gao, and were advancing rapidly across northern Mali. And so Kané stopped listening to music – an offence under sharia law – and avoided the rebels as far as possible.

A year later he and his large family are waiting to go home. The satellite dish is back in its old position, hooked up to a solar panel on the roof. Next to it is a bike, some firewood and a folding chair. His 15-metre-long floating home is moored at Mopti, Mali’s biggest river port. Kané’s two wives, five grownup sons and innumerable grandchildren – two with hacking coughs – are camped on the bank.

It is at Mopti that the shimmering Niger, west Africa’s great river, converges with its tributary, the Bani. West is the languid town of Ségou; north, and a three-day journey by boat, Timbuktu. On the turquoise water, fishermen in wooden pirogues are casting nets. Eagles whirl in the haze. Closer to town, people are washing clothes, mopeds and a shiny blue Mercedes.

French and Malian forces took Timbuktu 10 days ago, turfing out the jihadists who had run the Saharan town since last March. Paris also freed Gao and Kidal. Kané welcomes the return of the French, Mali’s old colonial masters. “I was born in 1939 and I remember the colonial period,” he says. “The French did a good job back then. They were fair.” He adds: “So far as I’m concerned they can stay.”

Everyone here has tales of rebel rule. Isate Kané (no relation to Suleiman) says one of her relatives was killed in Gao by a stray bullet. Kané says she was forced to wear a veil, but didn’t mind too much, since she kept her hands warm under it on chilly mornings. Far worse, she explains, was the predatory sexual behaviour of the jihadists. Most were lighter-skinned Tuareg or Arabs, with one or two black Malians. “One woman crossed the riverbank to bring her fish to market. This was in Gao. Two rebels chased her,” she says. “They wanted to rape her. She ran back to the bank so they shot her with a sniper rifle. She was pregnant.” The rebels took other women as sex-slaves, she says, sometimes killing them. She adds: “Whenever we saw them, we hid.”

Kané and her relatives – about 55 people, crammed on to one slow-moving barge – are waiting to travel north. The women are preparing lunch: a paste made from baobab tree fruit, millet and fish. “We eat fish and sell fish to buy rice,” she says. Nile perch – the Niger’s most delicious variety, known as capitaine – costs 1,500 CFA a kilo (£2); carp is 300 CFA. The Dogon, a tribe of animists, trade fish for baobab fruit, she says.

The river’s inhabitants tend to do the same things their parents have done, with jobs passed down along family lines. The fishermen are Bozo; the boys herding cattle across the waters Fulani; the rice planters Songhai. The Tuareg – blamed by many Malians for the country’s post-independence woes and a series of bitter rebellions against the capital Bamako – are nomads. How can Mali achieve peace? “By killing all the Tuareg,” Kané replies. [Continue reading…]

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Tunisia is no longer a revolutionary poster-child

Rachel Shabi writes: Amid the shock and grief at a terrible murder, there is an angry accusation. When forthright opposition leader Chokri Belaid was gunned down in broad daylight outside his home in Tunis, furious protesters marched on the offices around the country of the ruling Ennahda party. Belaid’s brother, Abdel Majid, accused the Islamist party – which dominates the three-way coalition government – of the murder. Ennahda has denounced the assassination. Chillingly, Belaid, a secularist and vocal critic of Ennahda, warned of the rise of political violence when he appeared on Tunisian TV the night before he was killed.

Jalila Hedhli-Peugnet, president of the NGO Think Ahead for Tunisia, reflected the prevailing sentiment on Wednesday when she told France 24 that Belaid “was not assassinated under the dictatorship of Ben Ali, now he is assassinated under the democracy of Ennahda”. If the government didn’t kill him, she said, it also didn’t protect him from such a tragedy.

Tension has been building, then, within a revolution that is too often billed a success story. Tunisia has not suffered the level of turmoil and violence of Egypt, or the agonising death and displacement of Syria, and so it appears to be handling the transition from dictatorship to democracy well. Other post-uprising countries look to Tunisia as both inspiration and weathervane. But Tunisians themselves bemoan their role as revolutionary poster-child as it can lead to the outside world ignoring or dismissing the very real problems there.

One such problem is the escalating political violence in Tunisia in the past year. A report just released by Human Rights Watch cites attacks on activists, journalists, intellectual and political figures – all the incidents apparently “motivated by a religious agenda”. [Continue reading…]

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The new colonialists

Mother Jones reports: In 2010, a former Wall Street trader flew into war-torn Sudan to negotiate a deal with a thuggish general. He had his eye on a 1 million acre tract of fertile land fed by a tributary of the Nile in the southern section of the country, a region that later claimed its independence as South Sudan. The investor, who planned to profit by developing and exporting agricultural commodities, boasted about how the region’s instability was a principal variable in his financial model: “This is Africa,” he told reporter McKenzie Funk, who shadowed him for a riveting piece in Rolling Stone (PDF). “The whole place is like one big mafia. I’m like a mafia head.”

Over the last decade (and especially during the last four years) wealthy nations have increasingly brokered deals for huge swathes of agricultural land at bargain prices in developing countries, installed industrial-scale farms, and exported the resulting bounty for profit. According to the anti-hunger group Oxfam International, more than 60 percent of these “land grabs” occur in regions with serious hunger problems. Two-thirds of the investors plan to ship all the commodities they produce out of the country to the global market. And droughts, spikes in food and oil prices, and a growing global population have only made the quest for arable land more urgent, and the investments that much more alluring.

In what a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) characterizes as a “new form of colonialism,” investors from the US, UK, and China are gobbling up foreign farmland at “alarming rates” and often with little consultation and compensation of poor small-scale farmers and local populations. [Continue reading…]

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When it views the Middle East, Washington is living in the past

Rami G Khouri writes: We will find out in coming months whether the second term of the Obama administration will herald any significant changes in United States policies in the Middle East. Four main issues should be monitored for any signs of change: the Palestine-Israel and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts; tensions with Iran; the Arab uprisings, revolutions, and constitutional transformations; and socio-economic conditions across the region.

Each of these issues is important in itself. However, viewed from Washington they often get conflated and confused, so American government responses to the various Arab uprisings, for example, often are shaped by officials’ concerns about Iran and Israel.

On a short visit to Washington this week where I had discussions with specialists on the Middle East, my sense is that little has changed in the U.S. capital in the past two years. While the ordinary men and women of the Arab world have launched the most dramatic and consequential change ever in the political configuration of their region, officials and experts in Washington appear to be living in the past, intellectually and politically immobilized, pursuing more or less the same policies of the past several decades. [Continue reading…]

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From Tehran, Hagel and Rumsfeld, Obama and Bush don’t look much different

Alireza Nader writes: The Iranian regime is hardly cheering Hagel on, despite what some of his critics say. Yes, Hagel sounds cautious about a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but such a campaign isn’t what keeps the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, up at night. An American strike would spur the Iranian public to rally around the flag and buck up a wobbling, wheezing theocracy — and an Israeli strike would do so in spades.

The Iranian leadership’s real worry is not American planes but Iranian protesters. Their deepest anxieties revolve around a Persian version of Tahrir Square, a replay of the 2009 Green uprising that wasn’t ended by the regime’s violent repression. Strange as it may sound, the Islamic Republic is a lot more frightened of the imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh than it is of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As such, Hagel’s nomination was greeted in Tehran with a shrug, not a sigh of relief. The Islamic Republic hardly thinks that with Hagel nominated, it’s off the nuclear hook. Iran’s leaders see U.S. “hostility” as institutionalized and systematized, not produced by partisan politics or individual appointments. As Hossein Salami, a top-ranking Revolutionary Guards officer, said of Hagel, “We view the United States as a political and ideological system driven by its strategic interests rather than by individual politicians.”

That was true even in the transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. The Islamic Republic greeted Obama’s election in 2008 with mixed emotions. On the one hand, the Iranian regime worried that Obama’s barrier-breaking achievement and inspiring life story might appeal to the average Iranian in a way unmatched by any previous U.S. president.

On the other, the Iranian regime continued to believe that its lifelong rivalry with the United States is the result of flatly irreconcilable differences: what it sees as Washington’s unshakable opposition to the Iranian revolution, unqualified and limitless support for Israel, and insistence on competing with Iran for influence over the Middle East.

If Obama’s election didn’t change Tehran’s view of U.S. policy, it’s hard to see how Hagel’s nomination could. After all, America’s war-weariness is no secret, and it’s hardly limited to Vietnam veterans such as Hagel. Iranian decision-makers can read The New York Times and watch CNN like anyone else, and they understand the reluctance, both among America’s people and elites, to go to war against Iran over its nuclear program.

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Egyptian Salafi preacher supports rape of women protesters

Al Arabiya reports: An Egyptian Salafi preacher said raping and sexually harassing women protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square is justified, calling them “crusaders” who “have no shame, no fear and not even feminism.”

In an online video posted Wednesday, Ahmad Mahmoud Abdullah, known as “Abu Islam” and owner of the private television channel of “al-Ummah,” said these women are no red line.

“They tell you women are a red line. They tell you that naked women — who are going to Tahrir Square because they want to be raped — are a red line! And they ask Mursi and the Brotherhood to leave power!,” he said.

Abu Islam added that these women activists are going to Tahrir Square not to protest but to be sexually abused because they had wanted to be raped.

“They have no shame, no fear and not even feminism. Practice your feminism, sheikha! It is a legitimate right for you to be a woman,” he said.

“And by the way, 90 percent of them are crusaders and the remaining 10 percent are widows who have no one to control them. You see women talking like monsters,” he added.

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Syria is not Iraq

Shadi Hamid writes: More than a year ago, a real debate began over whether to intervene militarily in Syria. Here in The Atlantic, Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations was one of the first to propose taking military action – or at least thinking seriously about it. When Cook wrote his article (which, in its prescience, is well worth re-reading today), around 5,000 Syrians had been killed. Today, the number is more than 10 times that, and is now over 60,000 according to some estimates. I remember, early on, wondering whether 15,000 would be a “trigger.”

But, apparently, there is no “trigger.” Military intervention in Syria cannot not happen without American support and there is nothing to suggest the United States has any interest in intervening, no matter the number of dead. The Obama administration has cited the use of chemical weapons as a “red line,” but even that red line has managed to shift back and forth several times.

Opponents of intervention have, understandably, tended to focus on the risky – and potentially prohibitively difficult – nature of military action. Yet, the very fact that some “red lines” do exist suggests that the U.S. would be willing to intervene at some point, in spite of those difficulties. The question, then, isn’t so much the difficulty of the operation as much as what is an appropriate red line.

If Bashar al-Assad proceeded to destroy an entire city, killing 100,000 people in the matter of weeks, presumably many of those opposing intervention would decide to support it. But why then and not now? Why exactly is 60,000 people not enough? Sure, the use of chemical weapons should be a red line for national security reasons, but why should strictly national security considerations be a red line, when the killing of tens of thousands isn’t? It is this latter point which sends precisely the wrong message to Arab audiences and the broader international community. Nothing fundamental has changed in U.S. policy since the Arab Spring, even though many of us said, and hoped, that new realities required a new way of doing business. As I wrote nearly a year ago,

What made Libya a “pure” intervention was that we acted not because our vital interests were threatened but in spite of the fact that they were not. For me, this was yet one more reason to laud it.

The memory of the Iraq War obviously looms large. The war, itself, was one of the greatest strategic blunders in the recent history of American foreign policy. But its legacy is proving just as damaging, leading to a series of mistakes that we are likely to regret in due time. [Continue reading…]

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Tunisia: Murder most foul

Al Jazeera reports: Tunisians of all political stripes are in shock after the killing of Shokri Belaid, leader of the Democratic Patriots party.

Of all the political turmoil the country has experienced since the 2010-11 uprising, the slaying of the leftist politician – a well-known opposition figure and vocal critic of the ruling coalition – marks a new low.

The resulting crisis has led to the collapse of the government, and could potentially doom the election that was set to take place later this year.

Many say the killing is unsurprising, and that the Islamist-led government bears a heavy responsibility for tolerating and fuelling a deep partisan divide and a culture of political violence.

A star of the Popular Front, a leftist political alliance of which his party is a member, Belaid had many supporters among those who accused the current government of failing to deliver on social justice and economic development.

He was a figurehead of the protests in Siliana last November, when tensions over unemployment and stalling economic progress erupted. Ali Laarayedh, Tunisia’s interior minister, accused Belaid of inciting the protesters against the police. Belaid in turn said the interior ministry was guilty of tyranny.

Belaid, a lawyer and activist, had also been at the forefront of the early lawyer’s protests in December 2010, which grew to become the uprising that toppled the Tunisian government in January 2011. The Ennahdha movement and most of the country’s opposition parties did not give the uprising their explicit backing until the last days.

Wednesday’s shooting is the second suspected killing of an opposition politician since the uprising, and one of many violent attacks. [Continue reading…]

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Deconstructing the claims that Qatar is supporting al Qaeda in Mali

RUSI Analysis: Claims that Qatar is supporting a range of Al-Qa’ida-affiliated groups in the Sahel are not new. In June 2012 the French satirical magazine Canard Enchaine quoted French Military intelligence sources asserting that Qatar was financially supporting various groups such as Al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and its splinter group the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO). The reports are vague but usually refer to financial support from Qatar, while some refer to Qatari planes landing at Gao disgorging arms and even Qatari Special Forces entering the fray.

None of these accusations ring true given the general thrust of Qatari foreign policy. Ironically, however, it is Qatar’s recent actions particularly in Libya that make these accusations seemingly plausible.

Qatar is one of two states (the other being Saudi Arabia) who officially espouse the austere doctrines of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Al-Wahhab, and last year named its state mosque after him. But Qatar is a box full of contradictions. Alcohol is easily available as is pork. Women can drive (nor has this been an issue) and Qatar has the most visible, outspoken and influential female consort in the history of the Arab world. Western education systems are at the heart of the state and there is not even an official mosque in the entire propose-built, multi-billion dollar ‘Education City’ campus housing six American Universities as well as University College London.

Externally Qatar’s policies can appear confused. Support of America by virtue of the two huge US bases in Qatar and significant (usually unwelcome) outreach to Israel in recent years is contrasted with seemingly amicable relations with Iran and support for Hamas and Hizbullah. More recently a record of enormous investment in London and Paris has been contrasted to escalating support of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East and seemingly murky support of groups in the Sahel. Moreover, Qatar has been outspoken in its sub-state support of various groups in Mali’s regional neighbourhood in the last eighteen months.

A loose narrative has built suggesting that an ever increasingly confident Qatar is now beginning to support a range of ever more extreme Islamists across the region.

Examining exactly what Qatar is doing in Mali is difficult. Qatar never enlightens anyone of its foreign policy strategies or tactics and nor are there sufficient reliable sources of information in and around Mali.

The best one can say is that in addition to a lengthy history of interaction in the region, the Qatar Red Crescent Society increased its capabilities in Mali in 2012 evaluating the state of the plight and the their potential response. This occasionally involved entering Mali from Niger to get to the critical city of Gao. According to an AFP article this in and of itself involved seeking safe passage from the MUJAO, an Al-Qa’ida offshoot.

The very fact that the two organisations came to this safe passage agreement may well be a root cause of much of the subsequent supposition, with many assuming the transit agreement to be a signal of deeper connections. Yet this is what the Red Cross/Crescent does; it sticks to its central tenet of neutrality in a conflict and deals with the realities on the ground by making tactical deals to obtain access when it can. [Continue reading…]

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Obama will allow lawmakers to see secret memo on drone strikes on American

The New York Times reports: The White House on Wednesday directed the Justice Department to release to the two Congressional Intelligence Committees classified documents discussing the legal justification for killing, by drone strikes and other means, American citizens abroad who are considered terrorists.

The White House announcement appears to refer to a long, detailed 2010 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel justifying the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who had joined Al Qaeda in Yemen. He was killed in a C.I.A. drone strike in September 2011. Members of Congress have long demanded access to the legal memorandum.

The decision to release the legal memo to the Intelligence Committees came under pressure, two days after a bipartisan group of 11 senators joined a growing chorus asking for more information about the legal justification for targeted killings, especially of Americans.

The announcement also came on the eve of the confirmation hearing scheduled for Thursday afternoon for John O. Brennan, President Obama’s choice to be director of the C.I.A., who has been the chief architect of the drone program as Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser.

Critics accused Mr. Obama of hypocrisy for keeping the legal opinions on targeted killing secret, noting that in 2009 he had ordered the public release of the classified memos governing C.I.A. interrogations under President George W. Bush. Administration officials replied that the so-called enhanced interrogations had been stopped, while drone strikes continue.

Until Wednesday, the administration had refused to even officially acknowledge the existence of the documents, which have been reported about in the press. This week, NBC News obtained an unclassified, shorter “white paper” that detailed some of the legal analysis about killing a citizen and was apparently derived from the classified Awlaki memorandum. The paper said the United States could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible.

Administration officials said Mr. Obama had decided to take the action, which they described as extraordinary, out of a desire to involve Congress in the development of the legal framework for targeting specific people to be killed in the war against Al Qaeda. Aides noted that Mr. Obama had made a pledge to do that during an appearance on “The Daily Show” last year.

“Today, as part of the president’s ongoing commitment to consult with Congress on national security matters, the president directed the Department of Justice to provide the Congressional Intelligence Committees access to classified Office of Legal Counsel advice related to the subject of the Department of Justice white paper,” said an administration official who requested anonymity to discuss the handling of classified material.

The official said members of the Intelligence Committees would now get “access” to the documents.

Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the president’s move “a small step in the right direction.” But he noted that the legal memo or memos were not being shared with either of the Armed Services Committees, which have jurisdiction over Pentagon strikes, or the Judiciary Committees, which oversee the Justice Department.

The public should be permitted to see at least a redacted version of the relevant memos, Mr. Anders said. “Everyone has a right to know when the government believes it can kill Americans and others,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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