四 川 铁 FourRiverIron

"Civil liberties groups have questioned the government's authority to kill an American without trial" - Hell I question the American government authority to kill anybody, with a trial or without a trail.

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U.S. strike kills American al-Qaida cleric in Yemen

Sept. 30, 2011 06:30 AM

Associated Press

SANAA, Yemen - In a significant new blow to al-Qaida, U.S. airstrikes in the mountains of Yemen on Friday killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American militant cleric who became a prominent figure in the terror network's most dangerous branch, using his fluent English and Internet savvy to draw recruits for attacks in the United States.

Yemen's Defense Ministry also Friday said another American militant, Samir Khan, who produced an English-language al-Qaida Web magazine, died in the U.S. airstrike that killed American-Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

The strike was the biggest U.S. success in hitting al-Qaida's leadership figures since the May killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. But it raises questions that other strikes did not: Al-Awlaki was an American citizen who has not been charged with any crime. Civil liberties groups have questioned the government's authority to kill an American without trial.

The 40-year-old al-Awlaki was for years an influential mouthpiece for al-Qaida's ideology of holy war, with his English-language sermons urging attacks on the United States widely circulated among militants in the West.

But U.S. officials say he moved into a direct operational role in organizing such attacks as he hid alongside al-Qaida militants in the rugged mountains of Yemen. Most notably, they believe he was involved in recruiting and preparing a young Nigerian who on Christmas Day 2009 tried to blow up a U.S. airliner heading to Detroit, failing only because he botched the detonation of explosives sewn into his underpants.

Khan, in his 20s, was an American of Pakistani heritage from North Carolina who produced "Inspire," an English-language Web magazine which spread al-Qaida ideology and promoted attacks against U.S. targets, even running articles on how to put together explosives.

In one issue. Khan wrote that he had moved to Yemen and joined al-Qaida's fighters, pledging to "wage jihad for the rest of our lives."

Washington has called al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, as the branch in Yemen is called, the most direct threat to the United States after it plotted that attack and a foiled attempt to mail explosives to synagogues in Chicago.

In July, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said al-Awlaki was a priority target alongside Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's successor as the terror network's leader. The Yemeni-American had been in the U.S. crosshairs since his killing was approved by President Barack Obama in April 2010 - making him the first American placed on the CIA "kill or capture" list. At least twice, airstrikes were called in on locations in Yemen where al-Awlaki was suspected of being, but he wasn't harmed.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said American forces targeted a convoy in which al-Awlaki was travelling with a drone and jet attack and believe he's been killed. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Yemeni government announced that al-Awlaki was "targeted and killed" around 9:55 a.m outside the town of Khashef in mountainous Jawf province, 87 miles (140 kilometers) east of the capital Sanaa. It gave no further details.

Local tribal and security officials said al-Awlaki was travelling in a two-car convoy with two other al-Qaida in Yemen operatives from al-Jawf to neighboring Marib province when they were hit by an airstrike. They said the other two operatives were also believed dead. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.

Al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, began as a mosque preacher as he conducted his university studies in the United States, and he was not seen by his congregations as radical. While preaching in San Diego, he came to know two of the men who would eventually become suicide-hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The FBI questioned al-Awlaki at the time but found no cause to detain him.

In 2004, al-Awlaki returned to Yemen, and in the years that followed, his English-language sermons - distributed on the Internet - increasingly turned to denunciations of the United States and calls for jihad, or holy war. The sermons turned up in the possession of a number of militants in the U.S. and Europe arrested for plotting attacks.

Al-Awlaki exchanged up to 20 emails with U.S. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, alleged killer of 13 people in the Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at Fort Hood. Hasan initiated the contacts, drawn by al-Awlaki's Internet sermons, and approached him for religious advice.

Al-Awlaki has said he didn't tell Hasan to carry out the shootings, but he later praised Hasan as a "hero" on his Web site for killing American soldiers who would be heading for Afghanistan or Iraq to fight Muslims.

In New York, the Pakistani-American man who pleaded guilty to the May 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt told interrogators he was "inspired" by al-Awlaki after making contact over the Internet.

After the Fort Hood attack, al-Awlaki moved from Yemen's capital, Sanaa, into the mountains where his Awalik tribe is based and - it appears - grew to build direct ties with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, if he had not developed them already. The branch is led by a Yemeni militant named Nasser al-Wahishi.

Yemeni officials have said al-Awlaki had contacts with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused would-be Christmas plane bomber, who was in Yemen in 2009. They say the believe al-Awlaki met with the 23-year-old Nigerian, along with other al-Qaida leaders, in al-Qaida strongholds in the country in the weeks before the failed bombing.

Al-Awlaki has said Abdulmutallab was his "student" but said he never told him to carry out the airline attack.

The cleric is also believed to have been an important middleman between al-Qaida militants and the multiple tribes that dominate large parts of Yemen, particular in the mountains of Jawf, Marib and Shabwa province where the terror group's fighters are believed to be holed up.

Last month, al-Awlaki was seen attending a funeral of a senior tribal chief in Shabwa, witnesses said, adding that security officials were also among those attending. Other witnesess said al-Awlaki was involved in negotiations with a local tribe in Yemen's Mudiya region, which was preventing al-Qaida fighters from travelling from their strongholds to the southern city of Zinjibar, which was taken over recently by Islamic militants. The witnesses spoke on condition of anonumity for fear of reprisals and their accounts could not be independently confirmed.

Yemen, the Arab world's most impoverished nation, has become a haven for hundreds of al-Qaida militants. The country has also been torn by political turmoil as President Saleh struggles to stay in power in the face of seven months of protests. In recent months, Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida have exploited the chaos to seize control of several cities in Yemen's south, including Zinjibar.

A previous attack against al-Awlaki on May 5, shortly after the May raid that killed Osama bin Laden, was carried out by a combination of U.S. drones and jets.

The operation was run by the U.S. military's elite counterterrorism unit, the Joint Special Operations Command - the same unit that got bin Laden. JSOC has worked closely with Yemeni counterterrorism forces for years, in the fight against al-Qaida.

Top U.S. counterterrorism adviser John Brennan says such cooperation with Yemen has improved since the political unrest there. Brennan said the Yemenis have been more willing to share information about the location of al-Qaida targets, as a way to fight the Yemeni branch challenging them for power. Other U.S. officials say the Yemenis have also allowed the U.S. to fly more armed drone and aircraft missions over its territory than ever previously, trying to use U.S. military power to stay in power. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

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Cleric al-Awlaki's killing stirs debate on executive power

by Peter Finn - Sept. 30, 2011 01:31 PM

Washington Post

WASHINGTON - The killing in Yemen on Friday of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, by an American drone strike that also killed a second citizen, violently punctuates a legal debate about the limits of executive power to kill the nation's own citizens as a counterterrorism measure.

The Obama administration has spoken in broad terms about its authority to use military force against al-Qaida and associated forces beyond "hot" or traditional battlefields such as Iraq or Afghanistan. But it has refused to reveal its exact legal analysis for targeting Awlaki and last year invoked the state-secrets privilege to argue successfully that a lawsuit brought in U.S. District Court by Awlaki's father should be dismissed.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights argued on behalf of Awlaki's father that that there is no "battlefield" in Yemen and that the administration should be forced to publicly articulate its legal standards for killing any citizen outside the United States who is suspected of terrorism.

Otherwise, the groups argued, such a killing would amount to an extrajudicial execution and would violate the Fifth Amendment to the constitution, which guarantees citizens the right to due process.

"International human rights law dictates that you can't unilaterally target someone and kill someone without that person posing an imminent threat to security interests," said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

"The information that we have, from the government's own press releases, is that he is somehow loosely connected, but there is no specific evidence of things he actualized that would meet the legal threshold for making this killing justifiable as a matter of human rights law."

A White House official refused Friday to discuss any legal findings that underlay the targeting of Awlaki.

But the administration almost certainly concluded that the radical cleric was a legitimate military target who isn't protected from lethal force because of his citizenship.

Officials have designated al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula as an associated force covered by the 2001 act of Congress authorizing military force. They have asserted that Awlaki is part of this enemy force and posed an imminent threat because of his operational role in the terrorist group.

The decision to place Awlaki on a capture-or-kill list was taken in early 2010, after intelligence officials concluded that he played a direct role in the plot to blow up a civilian aircraft over Detroit.

Officials said Awlaki instructed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab not to detonate the bomb he had hidden in his underwear until the plane was over the United States. Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who goes on trial in Detroit next week, unsuccessfully attempted to explode the device seven minutes before the plane landed.

Awlaki, who left the United States in 2002 and lived in the United Kingdom for two years before moving to Yemen, first acted as propagandist for al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, but officials insist he has become more and more involved in constructing and directing terrorist plots. And they described him Friday as director of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

In court papers filed to support dismissal of the case brought by Awlaki's father, the Director of National Intelligence said the cleric recruited individuals, facilitated training and focused AQAP on mounting attacks against the United States.

Robert Cheney, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in national security law, said the government probably still considered Awlaki's Fifth Amendment rights but concluded that he was deliberately hiding in place where neither the United States nor Yemen could realistically capture him.

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Obama's anti-terror successes offset by job worries

by Chuck Raasch - Sept. 30, 2011 01:31 PM

Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON - With Friday's reported killing of two men widely believed to be among al-Qaida's biggest threats to the U.S., President Barack Obama further burnished his anti-terror record. Politically, however, it may do little to improve his overall standing with an American public overwhelmingly worried about jobs and the economy.

The drone attacks that reportedly killed American-born Anwar al-Awlaki and top lieutenant Samir Khan, in Yemen, continued a year of anti-terror successes by the Obama administration. A native of New Mexico, al-Awlaki was suspected to be behind several failed plots to kill Americans. Khan grew up in the United States, and he produced an English-language al-Qaida Web magazine.

Speaking at a retirement ceremony for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, Obama said al-Awlaki's death is "a major blow to al-Qaida's most active operational affiliate," but that he leaves behind "a dangerous, though weakened terrorist organization." U.S. authorities were on alert for retaliatory strikes, and there was a more visible security presence on bridges and highways leading into the nation's capital Friday morning.

The White House initially would confirm only al-Awlaki's death; initial claims of Khan's killing originated from Yemeni authorities.

The latest operation came less than five months after Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden. In the ensuing months, top al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia have been killed by U.S. or allied forces. The expanding list has raised optimism that the United States is winning the war against al-Qaida, and it has discredited 2008 presidential campaign predictions that Obama would be weak on terrorism.

Peter Brookes. a senior fellow for national security affairs at the Heritage Institution and former deputy defense secretary under Republican George W. Bush, said he considered al-Awlaki the leader of the "most dangerous affiliate of al-Qaida out there" and that he was "very significant from an operational standpoint."

But, he cautioned: "It is a tactical victory. We don't know what tomorrow brings. We cannot become complacent."

With the headlines dominated by economic malaise and political acrimony over what to do about it, Obama has not been able to engender the political boost from these anti-terror victories that might be expected in a more stable economic environment. The president's job approval rating was 46 percent in Gallup's survey the week before bin Laden's death. It rose to 49 percent in late May, but fell to 39 percent in the latest Gallup Poll, which was completed before al-Awlaki's killing was announced.

Politically, Obama might be a victim of his administration's anti-terror successes. While they have helped boost Americans' opinions of Obama's foreign policy, economic worries have been a bigger drag.

In a Sept. 8-11 Gallup Poll, 76 percent of respondents said economic-related issues were their top worries. Only 1 percent listed terrorism.

"Obviously the economy is at the top of peoples' minds, but the success of this administration on terrorism is reflected in the level of anxiety that people feel about it," said Mieke Eoyang, national security director for the centrist think tank, Third Way. "You see it in the polling, where he has gotten stronger in the national security area. . . . But it is a double-edge sword. The better he does on terror the less people think about it."

Republicans had mixed responses to Friday's news. Some, like presidential candidate Mitt Romney and House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., praised Obama and the U.S. intelligence community. But others, like former GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer, said Obama had simply continued and capitalized on Bush's anti-terror policies.

And praise was further blunted by claims from Obama's left and right that he violated the law by ordering the killing of an American citizen without legal due process.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the targeted killing of an American - suspected terrorist or not - "violates both U.S. and international law." Libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said that al-Awlaki was "born here, he's an American citizen, he was never tried or charged for any crimes.

"To start assassinating American citizens without charges - we should think very seriously about this," he told reporters in New Hampshire.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that the U.S. had eliminated a "terrorist who was actively plotting" to kill Americans, but he declined to answer the legal questions raised by the ACLU and Paul.

---

Contact Chuck Raasch at craasch@gannett.com, follow him at twitter.com/craasch or join in the conversation at www.facebook.com/raaschcolumn.

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Ron Paul criticizes Obama for U.S. role in killing of Awlaki

By Michael Muskal

September 30, 2011, 10:01 a.m.

Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination, on Friday criticized the Obama administration’s action in killing Anwar Awlaki, the American-born cleric who advocated jihad against the United States.

Paul was the strongest critic on the Republican side in condemning the attack, which was praised by other candidates including Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a libertarian like Paul, also questioned the tactic of killing a U.S. citizen without due process.

Awlaki, a prominent voice in Yemen’s Al Qaeda affiliate, and Samir Khan, an editor of a jihadist magazine, were killed in an air attack in Yemen by what U.S. and Yemeni officials say was an operation that involved U.S. military and intelligence assets. The attack is part of a campaign against Islamic terrorists that included the killing of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in May in Pakistan.

After a campaign stop at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, Paul told reporters that Americans need to think about such actions because Awlaki was born in the United States and was entitled to the same rights as all U.S. citizens.

"No, I don't think that's a good way to deal with our problems,” Paul said in a videotape of the questioning by reporters. Awlaki “was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the ‘underwear bomber.’ But if the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys. I think it's sad.”

Paul went on to compare the situation to Timothy McVeigh, convicted of blowing up a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The attack killed 168 people and injured more than 800 people.

“I think, what would people have said about Timothy McVeigh? We didn't assassinate him, who certainly had done it,” Paul said. McVeigh “was put through the courts then executed. … To start assassinating American citizens without charges, we should think very seriously about this.”

Paul argued that the killing of Awlaki was different from the attack on Bin Laden because Bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

“I voted for authority to go after those individuals responsible for 9/11,” Paul said. “Nobody ever suggested that he [Awlaki] was participant in 9/11.”

Paul has been running behind the leaders in the GOP race for the presidential nod, but has been as high as third or fourth in many national polls, running at around 10%. Johnson has been far back in the pack, running in the very low single digits.

In an interview with Fox News, Johnson made the same points as Paul, warning that killing an American citizen without due process set a dangerous precedent despite the need for the United States to remain vigilant against terrorism.

Paul and Johnson represent the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, but other parts of the Republican Party have advocated a foreign policy based on a more robust U.S. role abroad. Perry, the leader in most polls for the GOP nomination though his star has faded in recent days, praised the attack.

“I want to congratulate the United States military and intelligence communities – and President Obama for sticking with the government's long-standing and aggressive anti-terror policies – for getting another key international terrorist,” Perry said in a prepared statement.

Perry went on to call the death of Awlaki an “important victory in the war on terror.”

[Updated at 10:01 a.m. Sept. 30: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney also praised the Obama administration in a prepared statement.

“I commend the president, the members of the intelligence community, our service members, and our allies for their continued efforts to keep Americans safe," Romney stated.]

Ironically, the libertarian opposition to the attack was similar to the argument by the American Civil Liberties Union in its disapproval.

"The targeted killing program violates both U.S. and international law,” ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a prepared statement. “As we've seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts.

"The government's authority to use lethal force against its own citizens should be limited to circumstances in which the threat to life is concrete, specific and imminent. It is a mistake to invest the president – any president – with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country,” he stated.

A secret memo OK'd the killing of Awlaki

A secret memo OK'd the killing of Awlaki

by Peter Finn - Oct. 1, 2011 12:00 AM

Washington Post

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials.

The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Awlaki, the officials said.

"What constitutes due process in this case is a due process in war," said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closely held deliberations within the administration.

The administration has faced a legal challenge and public criticism for targeting Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, because of constitutional protections afforded U.S. citizens. The memorandum may represent an attempt to resolve, at least internally, a legal debate over whether a president can order the killing of U.S. citizens overseas as a counterterrorism measure.

The operation to kill Awlaki involved CIA and military assets under CIA control. A former senior intelligence official said that the CIA would not have killed an American without such a written opinion.

A second American killed in Friday's attack was Samir Khan, a driving force behind Inspire, the English-language magazine produced by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. An administration official said the CIA did not know Khan was with Awlaki, but they also considered Khan a belligerent whose presence near the target would not have stopped the attack.

The circumstances of Khan's death were reminiscent of a 2002 U.S. drone strike in Yemen that targeted Abu Ali al-Harithi, a Yemeni al-Qaida operative accused of planning the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. That strike also killed a U.S. citizen. The Obama administration has spoken in broad terms about its authority to use military and paramilitary force against al-Qaida and associated forces beyond "hot," or traditional, battlefields such as Iraq or Afghanistan. Officials said that certain belligerents aren't shielded because of their citizenship.

The Justice Department has refused to disclose the exact legal analysis it used to authorize targeting Awlaki, or how it considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights argued on behalf of Awlaki's father last year that that there is no "battlefield" in Yemen, and that the administration should be forced to articulate publicly its legal standards for killing any citizen outside the United States who is suspected of terrorism.

Otherwise, the groups argued, such a killing would amount to an extrajudicial execution and would violate U.S. and international law.

"International human rights law dictates that you can't unilaterally target someone and kill someone without that person posing an imminent threat to security interests," said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "The information that we have, from the government's own press releases, is that he is somehow loosely connected, but there is no specific evidence of things he actualized that would meet the legal threshold for making this killing justifiable as a matter of human rights law."

Awlaki death rekindles legal debate on targeting Americans

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Awlaki death rekindles legal debate on targeting Americans

The slaying of two Americans renews questions about whether killing U.S. citizens is legal under rules of war or constitutes an extrajudicial execution in violation of U.S. and international law.

Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer

September 30, 2011, 10:38 p.m.

The killing of two Americans by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen has reignited a debate about whether targeting U.S. citizens — even terrorists — is legal under the rules of war or constitutes an extrajudicial execution that ignores their rights.

The Obama administration contends that U.S.-born radical cleric Anwar Awlaki was a legitimate target because he played an "operational" role in Al Qaeda, alleging that, among other plots, he directed a 2009 Christmas Day plan to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner.

"Awlaki was the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," President Obama said Friday. "In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans."

But some human rights advocates and legal scholars said the administration had never produced evidence to back up that claim. They said the 40-year-old cleric was an influential recruiter and motivator, but there was little evidence to directly link him to belligerent operations against the United States.

The attack also killed Samir Khan, 25, a U.S. citizen and anti-American propagandist who ran an

Al Qaeda-linked website that called for attacks on the United States.

Diane Marie Amann, a University of Georgia law professor who has monitored terrorism trials for the National Institute of Military Justice, said the debate over whether Awlaki's killing was legal hinges on whether the war against Al Qaeda is an armed conflict or an international police action.

"Viewed through the lens of ordinary criminal justice, for the government to kill a suspect rather than put him on trial is summary execution, clearly forbidden by U.S. and international law alike," Amann said. "Viewed through the lens of armed conflict, the result is different, however: The laws of war permit a state to kill its enemies."

An array of international law experts defended the legality of the airstrike, illustrating the conflicting interpretations of law in the fight against terrorism.

"There is strong linkage between Awlaki and the Christmas Day bomber," said Duke law professor Scott Silliman, a former Air Force staff judge advocate, referring to the young Nigerian reportedly groomed by Awlaki before his botched attempt to detonate explosives smuggled aboard the plane in his underpants.

"We do know there were also some email links between Awlaki and Maj. [Nidal Malik] Hasan at Ft. Hood," Silliman said, in reference to the U.S. Army psychiatrist accused in the Nov. 5, 2009, shootings that left 13 dead at the U.S. military base in Texas.

"When you put that together, and with some indications in the intelligence community that he was the head of or at least very active in the leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, I think it was clear he was more than just a propagandist. That type of activity puts him in the category of a legitimate target."

Amos Guiora, a University of Utah law professor and author of a forthcoming book on targeted killings, said U.S. military and intelligence agencies were within their rights to eliminate Awlaki. He said the operation appeared to have been carried out with appropriate preparation and care to avoid civilian casualties, despite the ostensibly unintended killing of Khan, who was with Awlaki at the time.

"This attack appears to have met the criteria of proportionality, military necessity and the absence of alternatives to be in full accordance with a state's right to aggressive self-defense," said Guiora, a former Israel Defense Forces legal advisor involved in targeted killing decisions in the Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s.

Constitutional rights advocates have clashed with that point of view throughout the so-called war on terrorism pronounced by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The killing of Awlaki was "the latest of many affronts to domestic and international law," said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, disparaging the claimed executive power to kill any U.S. citizen deemed a threat.

Ben Wizner, national security litigation director for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that lethal force beyond the battlefield is lawful "only as a last resort to counter an imminent threat of deadly attack."

Much of the legal and ethical dispute festers because the administration has invoked state secrecy to prevent disclosing to either the public or judiciary the evidence it says it holds pointing to Awlaki's operational involvement.

Micah Zenko, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow on conflict prevention, said the known evidence linking Awlaki to Al Qaeda operations is slim but that the intelligence agencies and military special forces involved in such a strike would be unlikely to disclose any detail that could compromise intelligence gathering and future targeted killings.

Then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made that position clear in a federal court filing a year ago, when he asserted a state secrets privilege in urging a federal judge to dismiss a suit brought by Awlaki's father, Nasser, seeking a court injunction against any attack on his son. U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the elder Awlaki's case, saying it wasn't the court's role to intervene in military operations.

Awlaki's U.S. citizenship didn't entitle him to any special right of due process beyond what a foreign terrorism suspect would have, the legal analysts said.

A 1942 Supreme Court decision upholding the war-crimes convictions and death sentences of Nazi infiltrators caught attempting to sabotage East Coast defense operations rejected special consideration of one saboteur who claimed U.S. citizenship. The justices found all eight men to be "enemy belligerents" subject to the prosecution and punishment allowed under the law of war.

In Ex parte Quirin, the justices found all eight men to be "enemy belligerents" subject to the prosecution and punishment allowed under the law of war.

"The constitution guarantees due process for every 'person,' not just for citizens, and the laws of war do not preclude the possibility of one state's citizen taking up arms against his own country," said David Glazier, a national security law professor at Loyola Law School.

"From the U.S. government's perspective, that's the real beauty of treating [the fight with Al Qaeda] as an armed conflict," Glazier said. "Both U.S. national and international law are in agreement that the nationality of the target doesn't matter."

carol.williams@latimes.com

Is it legal for Obama to murder American citizens?

YEMEN: Does U.S. have the right to target and kill its citizens?

September 30, 2011 | 3:49 pm

News that U.S.-born radical cleric Anwar Awlaki was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen on Friday has revived debate about the inclusion of Americans on a U.S. government "targeted killing" list.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented Awlaki’s father in a lawsuit last year against the Obama administration, argue that the United States does not have the authority to hunt down and kill one of its citizens without any judicial review, in a country where it is not at war.

“The targeted-killing program violates both U.S. and international law,” ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement posted Friday on the group's blog.

Vince Warren, the Center for Constitutional Rights executive director, said the program “essentially grants the executive the power to kill any U.S. citizen deemed a threat, without any judicial oversight or any of the rights afforded by our constitution."

The United States has used the program to target Al Qaeda, Taliban and associated leaders since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Such killings have escalated since President Obama took office in 2009, including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May and unmanned drone strikes like the one that killed Awlaki, according to a Council on Foreign Relations background report. The administration argues that the U.S. is in armed conflict with Al Qaeda and that its right to self-defense can include killing individuals who are planning attacks, whether or not they are in a declared war zone.

In an address Friday, Obama asserted that Awlaki was the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which U.S. officials describe as the terrorist network's most active affiliate.

“In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans,” Obama said. “He directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009. He directed the failed attempt to blow up U.S. cargo planes in 2010. And he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.”

Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said it did not matter that Awlaki was born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents.

“Other than Bin Laden, he was probably the most dangerous person in Al Qaeda as regards attacks on the United States,” Ruppersberger said. “He was smart, he knew our culture, he understood the U.S. He knew Al Qaeda couldn’t mount another 9-11 because intelligence would detect it, so he tried to inspire lone-wolf plots.”

Regional experts agreed that Awlaki was a charismatic recruiter for global jihad who spread militant messages through the Internet and inspired attacks against the U.S. But they questioned the extent of his operational role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

“He was not a military leader. Killing him is not a big loss inside Yemen,” said Saeed Ali Obaid Jamhi, an expert on Islamic militants in the region. “He was not so much involved in the Yemen struggle. He was more of an international figure. He was a spiritual inspiration for jihadis, and his death will increase the hatred against the Yemen government for allowing U.S. planes and drones to target people inside Yemen.”

Strike on Aulaqi demonstrates collaboration between CIA and military

Strike on Aulaqi demonstrates collaboration between CIA and military

By Greg Miller, Published: September 30

Traveling from secret bases on opposite sides of Yemen, armed drones from the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command converged above Anwar al-Aulaqi’s position in northern Yemen early Friday and unleashed a flurry of missiles.

US officials said the CIA was in control of all the aircraft, as well as the decisions to fire, and that the operation was so seamless that even hours later, it remained unclear whether a drone supplied by the CIA or the military fired the missile that ended the al-Qaeda leader’s life.

Aulaqi’s death represents the latest, and perhaps most literal, illustration to date of the convergence between the CIA and the nation’s elite military units in the counterterrorism fight.

President Obama described Aulaqi’s death as “a tribute to our intelligence community” and gave credit to Yemeni security forces who, he said, had “worked closely with the United States over the course of several years.”

But after a decade of often inconclusive efforts against al-Qaeda, the Obama administration has relied on new levels of collaboration between the CIA and JSOC to push the terrorist network closer to collapse.

In May, U.S. Navy SEALS who serve under JSOC killed Osama bin Laden during a raid deep into Pakistan that relied on intelligence and covert action authority from the CIA.

At the same time, the administration has sought to put new pressure on al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia by surrounding those countries with a constellation of drone bases. These include a new CIA facility in the Arabian peninsula that played a key role in Friday’s operation. U.S. drones also fly from military installations in Djibouti, Ethi­o­pia and the Seychelles.

Even leadership ranks have begun to blur: Former CIA director Leon E. Panetta is now secretary of defense; David H. Petraeus, previously the military commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, is just weeks into his new assignment as head of the CIA.

The attack on Aulaqi blended capabilities from both sides and was carried out under CIA authority that allowed for greater latitude in conducting lethal operations outside conventional war zones. The military aircraft came across the Gulf of Aden from Djibouti, which has been the primary base for JSOC drones patrolling Yemen for much of the past year.

U.S. officials said that CIA drones involved in the strike took off from an agency base in the Arabian peninsula so new that it had become operational only in recent weeks.

The opening of that base was part of a two-pronged strategy by the administration to exploit JSOC’s ability to work closely with Yemen’s counterterrorism units on the ground while pushing the CIA to replicate aspects of its lethally efficient drone campaign in Pakistan.

The Post has agreed not to disclose the exact location of the new CIA drone base at the request of the Obama administration. Even before that facility was completed, the agency was escalating pressure on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the group’s Yemen-based offshoot is known.

Obama pushes boundaries in targeting al-Aulaqi

Obama pushes boundaries in targeting al-Aulaqi

By Scott Wilson, Published: September 30

In authorizing the killing of an American citizen affiliated with al-Qaeda, President Obama has starkly affirmed his willingness to use high-risk, violent tactics against declared enemies.

The drone strike against Anwar al-Aulaqi, which the White House on Friday refused to acknowledge publicly, burnishes Obama’s national security credentials as he heads into an election year when the strength of his leadership will undoubtedly be questioned.

Carried out in northern Yemen, the U.S. attack also underscores Obama’s willingness to operate outside the defined U.S. combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan in waging what was once known as the global war on terror. Obama stopped using that term when he took office, arguing that it overstated the strength and scope of the U.S. enemy.

“This is further proof that al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world,” Obama told a mostly military audience Friday at a farewell ceremony for Adm. Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. “We will be determined, we will be deliberate, we will be relentless, we will be resolute in our commitment to destroy terrorist networks that aim to kill Americans.”

But in relying on drones far more than his predecessor did in hunting down alleged terrorists, Obama is intensifying the war with al-Qaeda across a broader geographic area — and stretching the boundaries of its legal rationale.

Although citizenship is not a factor in determining whether a person can be lawfully killed under the laws of war, Obama has taken a clear step beyond the Bush war on terror in killing Aulaqi, who was never indicted for his alleged acts. A second U.S. citizen, Samir Khan, also died in the attack.

The Justice Department had written a secret memo authorizing the targeting of Aulaqi, following a broad review of the legal issues raised by a strike on a U.S. citizen, according to administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. They said none of the lawyers involved in the process, from across the government, dissented.

A former constitutional law lecturer, Obama declined Friday to explain the legal justification for the strike. For a president who promised a more rigorous adherence to the law in his national security policy — as well as a more transparent administration — his silence drew concern and charges of hypocrisy.

“The president clearly has the background and intelligence to explain the legal theory justifying the attacks,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “His refusal to do so is a deliberate decision, and it is unwise because it undermines the justification for the attack and makes it open to misinterpretation by other governments seeking to expand their own operations against perceived terrorists.”

Obama emerged from a crowded Democratic field in 2008 on the basis, in part, of his opposition to the Iraq war.

Although he pledged to escalate operations against al-Qaeda if elected, Obama was perceived by many voters as the anti-war candidate, an image he buttressed with a sharp critique of President George W. Bush’s national security regimen.

Obama called Bush’s detention and interrogation policies inconsistent with U.S. law and values, at some political risk given his foreign policy inexperience. A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken six months after his inauguration found that 57 percent of the public approved of his handling of the issue.

Since then, Obama has more than doubled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, joined other nations in a military operation to protect civilians in Libya and ultimately oust longtime leader Moammar Gaddafi, and authorized a commando raid deep inside Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.

He has also significantly expanded the use of drones against al-Qaeda leaders and foot soldiers. In Pakistan alone, the United States has carried out 227 drone strikes since Obama took office, nearly five times more than Bush conducted during his eight-year tenure.

According to the New America Foundation, the Obama administration has killed at least 1,100 combatants in those strikes, also a nearly fivefold increase from the Bush years. Those figures do not include civilian deaths that resulted from the remotely controlled attacks.

As his overall approval rating has sunk, Obama has seen a rise in support for his handling of national security. A Post-ABC News poll published last month showed that 62 percent approve of how he has managed the terrorist threat.

“In international affairs, he will take risks,” said John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, a think tank close to the administration. “The risks Bush took were bad bets because they were so influenced by ideology. Obama takes risks based on analysis and calculations.”

At a time of deep economic uncertainty, public support for Obama’s national security policies, including a steady troop drawdown from Iraq, has not improved his overall political standing on the eve of a difficult election year.

Although his approval rating jumped 9 percentage points immediately after bin Laden’s killing in May, the boost evaporated within weeks. In a New York Times-CBS News poll published last month, only 2 percent of respondents listed terrorism and national security as “the most important problem facing the country.”

But Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Obama has likely benefited from the intangible effect that diplomatic and military success can bring to a presidency, especially a Democratic one.

“Polls often miss the fact that if you seem strong on national security, it makes you look presidential more broadly, so it helps your image as a leader,” O’Hanlon said. “Unlike his predecessors in the Democratic Party, Obama’s not really accused of being weak and I think that’s a huge advantage for him heading into the campaign.”

In his remarks Friday, Obama called Aulaqi’s killing “another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates.” He did not mention Aulaqi’s U.S. citizenship; administration officials stressed throughout the day that he is also a citizen of Yemen.

Many on the left expressed concern that Obama has taken the war against al Qaeda into territory where Bush did not venture. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) said in a statement that “the administration has a crossed a dangerous divide and set a dangerous precedent for how the United States handles terrorism cases.”

“Mr. al-Aulaqi’s allegedly violent rejection of America was not acceptable in any way,” Kucinich said. “Neither is it acceptable to trample the Constitution through extrajudicial killings.”

The operation also drew different reactions from Obama’s Republican rivals with Gov. Rick Perry of Texas praising the operation and Rep. Ron Paul, also of Texas, criticizing the president for killing a U.S. citizen without due process.

“Nobody knows if he ever killed anybody,” Paul said, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. “If the American people accept this blindly and casually . . . I think that’s sad.”

White House press refuses to answer questions about al-Awlaki murder

White House press secretary Jay Carney refuses to answer questions about al-Awlaki killing

By Dylan Stableford | The Cutline

Unlike the press briefings that followed the killing of Osama bin Laden, White House press secretary Jay Carney largely refused to answer questions about the U.S.-led drone attack that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Islamic preacher turned propaganda chief for al-Qaida, in Yemen on Friday.

"This is a significant fact, that al-Awlaki is dead," Carney told reporters. "Questions about the circumstances about his death . . . I'm not going to get into."

Samir Khan, the Saudi-born American publisher of an al-Qaida propaganda magazine called Inspire, was also killed in the operation.

Carney declined to engage reporters who wanted the White House to offer evidence of al-Awlaki's role in global terrorism, or why al-Awlaki--an American citizen--wasn't given due process.

"What do you think constitutional law professor Barack Obama would make of all this?" one reporter asked.

"I think he spoke about it today," a smirking Carney replied.

Perhaps the White House learned its lesson after the killing of bin Laden, whom officials first said was armed and had used his wife as a human shield. Two days later, Carney was forced revise the initial account in a press briefing with reporters.

"In the room with bin Laden, a woman--bin Laden's--a woman, rather, bin Laden's wife, rushed the U.S. assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed," Carney said. "Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed."

U.S. warns of retaliation after cleric killing

Of course this is the reason we have the current problem. The American Empire has been f*cking with the Arabs for the last 70 or so years. If the American Empire would butt out and stop interfering with the affairs of sovereign Arab countries they wouldn't hate us.

Source

U.S. warns of retaliation after cleric killing

Oct. 1, 2011 12:40 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration says the killing of a U.S.-born cleric in Yemen has raised the risk of anti-American violence worldwide.

The State Department says the death of Anwar al-Awlaki would provide motivation for individuals or groups to retaliate against U.S. citizens or American interests.

A department warning issued Saturday notes that al-Awlaki and other members of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula previously called for attacks against the U.S., and the warning says his supporters could seek to avenge his death.

Al-Awlaki was killed during an attack on his convoy early Friday.

The State Department issued a similar alert after Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. This latest alert is set to expire at the end of November.

Anwar Awlaki: Targeted for death

Anwar Awlaki: Targeted for death

October 2, 2011

Amid all the self-congratulation over the killing of Anwar Awlaki and the confident assertion that the world is a better place as a result, it is worth remembering that the secret, unilateral, targeted assassination of a U.S. citizen far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan is hardly something to celebrate.

If Awlaki was in fact the architect of terrorism attacks inside the United States, as officials maintain he was, then perhaps his demise is to be welcomed. But we don't really know, do we? There was no transparent, legal, reviewable process by which he was placed on the list of those targeted for killing by the U.S. government. There was no judicial procedure, nor any public airing of the charges against him. He had no opportunity to respond to specific allegations.

Even in wartime, the killing of a U.S. citizen — or anyone else — who poses no immediate danger is morally obnoxious. It also is impossible to harmonize with the U.S. Constitution. The 5th Amendment says that no citizen should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. If Awlaki had been arrested in America, rather than assassinated in Yemen, he would have had an incontestable right to a trial.

The Obama administration's interest in Awlaki is understandable. The charismatic preacher, an American-born Muslim, is said to have incited the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and may have directed a plot to blow up a cargo plane bound for Chicago. He also was in touch with Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at the Ft. Hood Army base.

We understand the government's conundrum. In this dangerous new world, our enemies don't wear uniforms, threats cross national borders, and an order given abroad can quickly lead to devastation at home. The U.S. has struggled for a decade with how to safeguard people without crossing moral lines or violating individual rights.

But if the United States is going to continue down the troubling road of state-sponsored assassination, the government should, at the very least, provide a clear understanding of the criteria used to decide who should be placed on the target list. And there must be some form of judicial review of those decisions; why should a judge's approval be required to place a wiretap on a suspected terrorist but not to kill him? Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has detained many alleged terrorists, only for courts to discover that the evidence against them was unreliable or wrong.

Last year, Awlaki's father asked a federal judge to rule that the United States may not assassinate an American citizen outside a war zone "unless he is found to present a concrete, specific and imminent threat to life or physical safety, and there are no means other than lethal force" to neutralize the threat. The judge declined, saying the issue was a political question best left to the president. But President Obama should be pressed to abide by those guidelines.

The war on terror is not a free-for-all in which the United States may behave as it wishes without accountability or adherence to principle. We would have been pleased if Awlaki could have been captured and brought to this country for trial, because the promise of due process is a fundamental, bedrock American value.

Awlaki-conversation

Anwar Awlaki's killing: Why it doesn't feel like a victory [The conversation]

September 30, 2011 | 6:44 pm

Awlaki-conversation

Anwar Awlaki's killing in Yemen on Friday has reignited two debates that are sure to dominate this weekend's conversation. While many Americans cheer the blow to Al Qaeda, civil libertarians, including Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, are taking President Obama to task for his role in the assassination.

Regardless of Awlaki's tie to Al Qaeda, or that he was a radical Islamist cleric, libertarians argue that he was a U.S. citizen and therefore privy to protection under the 1st and 5th amendments; in other words, he had the right to freely express his opinions, and he should have had his day in court.

The other debate taking place is whether, as Obama put it, Awlaki's death really "marks a significant milestone" in the effort to disable Al Qaeda. What did his death really accomplish? Here’s the conversation.

Did Obama have the right to assassinate Awlaki?

Los Angeles Times editorial:

If Awlaki was in fact the architect of terrorism attacks inside the United States, as officials maintain he was, then perhaps his demise is to be welcomed. But we don't really know, do we? There was no transparent, legal, reviewable process by which he was placed on the list of those targeted for killing by the U.S. government. There was no judicial procedure, nor any public airing of the charges against him. He had no opportunity to respond to specific allegations. [...]

The war on terror is not a free-for-all in which the United States may behave as it wishes without accountability or adherence to principle. We would have been pleased if Awlaki could have been captured and brought to this country for trial, because the promise of due process is a fundamental, bedrock American value.

That debate may not bear so directly on the Awlaki killing, which presents a (hopefully) rare set of questions about presumed terrorists who also happen to be Americans. But it's an occasion for Washington to debate some basic questions about our targeted killing campaign. Maybe it's time, as John Bellinger argues, to revisit Congress' September 2001 authorization of military force in response to the 9/11 attacks and provide clearer legal guidelines for our ongoing counter-terror campaign. And what about the argument that drone strikes, on balance, make us less safe? As the country cheers the demise of a hateful anti-American, it's worth pausing to consider the implications of America's high-tech hunt for enemies around the globe.

What's most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law"), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

Awlaki, however, is no ordinary criminal defendant. He is accused of being a senior leader in a terrorist organization that has attacked the United States and its citizens on numerous occasions. He has been "linked" to both Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber. And he was residing in Yemen in the midst of an al-Qaeda stronghold.

Had his Yemeni parents not been working in New Mexico at the moment he was born, few would question the authority of the U.S. government to conduct this operation. Since they were, however, Awlaki is a United States citizen and entitled to the same protections as any of the rest of us. What, precisely, those protections are is not quite clear in this case.

Awlaki's killing can't be viewed as a one-off situation; what we're talking about is the establishment of a precedent by which a US president can secretly order the death of an American citizen unchecked by any outside process. Rules that get established on the basis that they only apply to the "bad guys" tend to be ripe for abuse, particularly when they're secret.

Max Boot, Los Angeles Times:

The pressing question is not whether killing Awlaki was the right thing to do -- it was -- but what impact his killing will have. That's a tougher call. Other terrorist organizations have been able to survive, even thrive, after the deaths of important leaders. [...]

The challenge for American policymakers is to figure out how to fill the security vacuum in Yemen. That's much tougher than using a Predator to fire a Hellfire missile, but unless we come up with some way to bring a modicum of stability to this turbulent land, the death of Awlaki is likely to be a fleeting victory.

Over the past decade of its fight against al-Qaeda, the U.S. has too frequently mistaken successful tactics for strategic gains. If we are to turn the killing of important jihadi leaders like Awlaki into sustainable strategic success, we need to understand how the enemy's network functions and how our operations change it. Until then, we might be firing in the dark.

The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki changes everything -- and changes nothing. Yes, the ability of the U.S. to reach across continents to eliminate senior terrorist leaders has proven the ultimate game-changer in the war on terrorism. Today, every breath al-Qaeda terrorist leaders take is a sigh of relief; another day that a missile has not rained down upon them. The time they can devote to plotting attacks is now consumed by staying alive and staving off an inevitable Hellfire missile strike.

Yemen Notes Its Own Role in U.S. Attack on Militant

Yemen Notes Its Own Role in U.S. Attack on Militant

By LAURA KASINOF

Published: October 1, 2011

SANA, Yemen — Yemeni officials provided more details on Saturday about their role in the tracking and killing of an American-born cleric, while a government spokesman said that the United States should show more appreciation to Yemen’s embattled president for his assistance in the case.

A high-ranking Yemeni official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Yemen had provided the United States with intelligence on the location of the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by an American drone strike on Friday. The information came from “a recently captured Al Qaeda operative,” the official said.

He said that Yemeni security officials located Mr. Awlaki on Friday morning in a house in the village of Al Khasaf in Al Jawf Province. The remote village lies in a desert where the Yemeni state has no control and tribes with varying loyalties rule.

The United States said that Mr. Awlaki, a propagandist for the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, had taken on an operational role in the organization, and last year the Obama administration placed him on a list of targets to kill or capture. The Yemeni group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is considered Al Qaeda’s “most active operational affiliate,” President Obama said Friday, and the United States was a major target.

The State Department issued a travel alert on Saturday, warning that the attack “could provide motivation” for retaliatory attacks worldwide against American citizens and interests.

The killing came a week after the return to Yemen of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been recovering in Saudi Arabia from wounds sustained in an assassination attempt and whose resignation after 33 years of autocratic rule has been demanded by a large protest movement in Yemen, the political opposition, regional powers and the United States.

The timing of the airstrikes fueled speculation that Mr. Saleh, who has frequently portrayed himself as an essential bulwark against Al Qaeda, had handed over Mr. Awlaki to the Americans in order to reduce American pressure on him to leave.

American officials said Friday that there was no connection between Mr. Saleh’s return and the airstrikes. They said that American and Yemeni security forces had been hunting Mr. Awlaki for nearly two years, and that new information about his location surfaced about three weeks ago.

That information allowed the C.I.A. to track his movements, the officials said, and wait for an opportunity to strike when there was little risk to civilians.

A senior American official made it clear on Saturday that Mr. Saleh’s immediate resignation remained a goal of American policy and said that Yemen’s government was under no “significant illusion” that the United States had changed its position.

“Sustaining military-to-military cooperation is in our best interest,” the official added, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We don’t want to undermine that cooperation.”

A Yemeni government spokesman, however, said that Mr. Saleh deserved credit for helping the Americans.

“After this big victory in catching Awlaki, the White House calls on the president to leave power immediately?” a deputy information minister, Abdu al-Janadi, told Reuters. “The Americans don’t even respect those who cooperate with them.”

The spokesman for Yemen’s opposition coalition, Mohammed Qahtan, rejected the idea that Mr. Awlaki’s killing was a feather in the government’s cap. Instead, it showed “the regime’s failure and weakness to perform its duty to arrest and try Awlaki in accordance with the Constitution,” Mr. Qahtan said. “And it’s that that forced America to go after him using their own means.”

Although Yemen did not carry out the strike, which was launched from a secret American base, Yemeni officials were quick to trumpet the results. A high-ranking Yemeni security official called The New York Times at 10:15 a.m. local time on Friday, about 20 minutes after the attack.

The Defense Ministry broadcast the announcement an hour later, hours before American officials made any public statement.

xxx

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/world/awlaki-strike-shows-us-shift-to-drones-in-terror-fight.html?hp

Strike Reflects U.S. Shift to Drones in Terror Fight

Christopher Griffin, via Reuters

WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for Al Qaeda’s rising franchise in Yemen, was one more demonstration of what American officials describe as a cheap, safe and precise tool to eliminate enemies. It was also a sign that the decade-old American campaign against terrorism has reached a turning point.

Disillusioned by huge costs and uncertain outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration has decisively embraced the drone, along with small-scale lightning raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden in May, as the future of the fight against terrorist networks.

“The lessons of the big wars are obvious,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has studied the trade-offs. “The cost in blood and treasure is immense, and the outcome is unforeseeable. Public support at home is declining toward rock bottom. And the people you’ve come to liberate come to resent your presence.”

The shift is also a result of shrinking budgets, which will no longer accommodate the deployment of large forces overseas at a rough annual cost of $1 million per soldier. And there have been improvements in the technical capabilities of remotely piloted aircraft. One of them tracked Mr. Awlaki with live video on Yemeni tribal turf, where it is too dangerous for American troops to go.

Even military officials who advocate for the drone campaign acknowledge that these technologies are not applicable to every security threat.

Still, the move to drones and precise strikes is a remarkable change in favored strategy, underscored by the leadership changes at the Pentagon and C.I.A. Just a few years ago, counterinsurgency was the rage, as Gen. David H. Petraeus used the strategy to turn around what appeared to be a hopeless situation in Iraq. He then applied those lessons in Afghanistan.

The outcome — as measured in political stability, rule of law and economic development — remains uncertain in both.

Now, Mr. Petraeus (he has chosen to go by his civilian title of director, rather than general) is in charge of the C.I.A., which pioneered the drone campaign in Pakistan. He no longer commands the troops whose numbers were the core of counterinsurgency.

And the defense secretary is Leon E. Panetta, who oversaw the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan’s lawless tribal area as the C.I.A. director. Mr. Panetta, the budget director under President Bill Clinton, must find a way to safeguard security as the Pentagon purse strings draw tight.

Today, there is little political appetite for the risk, cost and especially the long timelines required by counterinsurgency doctrine, which involves building societies and governments to gradually take over the battle against insurgents and terrorists within their borders.

The apparent simplicity of a drone aloft, with its pilot operating from the United States, can be misleading. Behind each aircraft is a team of 150 or more personnel, repairing and maintaining the plane and the heap of ground technology that keeps it in the air, poring over the hours of videos and radio signals it collects, and gathering the voluminous intelligence necessary to prompt a single strike.

Air Force officials calculate that it costs $5 billion to operate the service’s global airborne surveillance network, and that sum is growing. The Pentagon has asked for another $5 billion next year alone for remotely piloted drone systems.

Yet even those costs are tiny compared with the price of the big wars. A Brown University study, published in June, estimates that the United States will have spent $3.7 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq by the time the wars are over.

The drones may alienate fewer people. They have angered many Pakistanis, who resent the violation of their country’s sovereignty and the inevitable civilian casualties when missiles go awry or are directed by imperfect intelligence. But while experts argue over the extent of the deaths of innocents when missiles fall on suspected terrorist compounds, there is broad agreement that the drones cause far fewer unintended deaths and produce far fewer refugees than either ground combat or traditional airstrikes.

Still, there are questions of legality. The Obama administration legal team wrestled with whether it would be lawful to make Mr. Awlaki a target for death — a proposition that raised complex issues involving Mr. Awlaki’s constitutional rights as an American citizen, domestic statutes and international law.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel eventually issued a lengthy, classified memorandum that apparently concluded it would be legal to strike at someone like Mr. Awlaki in circumstances in which he was believed to be plotting attacks against the United States, and if there was no way to arrest him. The existence of that memorandum was first reported Saturday by The Washington Post.

The role of drones in the changing American way of war also illustrates the increasing militarization of the intelligence community, as Air Force drone technologies for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — and now armed with Hellfire missiles for strikes on ground targets — play a central role in C.I.A. operations. The blurring of military-intelligence boundaries includes former uniformed officers assuming top jobs in the intelligence apparatus and military commando units carrying out raids under C.I.A. command.

As useful as the drones have proved for counterterrorism, their value in other kinds of conflicts may be more limited. Against some of the most significant potential threats — a China in ascendancy, for example, or a North Korea or Iran with nuclear weapons — drones are likely to be of marginal value. Should military force be required as a deterrent or for an attack, traditional forces, including warships and combat aircraft, would carry the heaviest load.

Of course, new kinds of air power have often appeared seductive, offering a cleaner, higher-tech brand of war. Military officials say they are aware that drones are no panacea.

“It’s one of many capabilities that we have at our disposal to go after terrorists and others,” one senior Pentagon official said. “But this is a tool that is not a weapon for weapon’s sake. It’s tied to policy. In many cases, these weapons are deployed in areas where it’s very tough to go after the enemy by conventional means, because these terror leaders are located in some of the most remote places.”

In some ways, the debate over drones versus troops recalls the early months of George W. Bush’s administration, when the new president and his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, envisioned how a revolution in military technology would allow the Defense Department to reduce its ground forces and focus money instead on intelligence platforms and long-range, precision-strike weapons.

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, in which ground forces carried out the lion’s share of the missions.

Mr. Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, worries about the growing perception that drones are the answer to terrorism, just a few years after many officials believed that invading and remaking countries would prove the cure. The recent string of successful strikes has prompted senior Obama administration officials to suggest that the demise of Al Qaeda may be within sight. But the history of terrorist movements shows that they are almost never ended by military force, he said.

“What gets lost are all the other instruments of national power,” including diplomacy, trade policy and development aid, Mr. Zenko said. “But these days those tools never get adequate consideration, because drones get all the attention.”

Some lame excuses for American murders with drones

Source

Will drone strikes become Obama’s Guantanamo?

By John B. Bellinger III, Published: October 2

The killing of the U.S.-born al- Qaeda cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki on Friday along with another U.S. citizen and two other al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen is likely to fuel the international controversy over the legality and wisdom of the Obama administration’s dramatically increased use of drone attacks. For several years, U.S. allies have made no public comment even as U.S. drone strikes have killed twice as many suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members than were ever imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. But that acquiescence may change, as human rights groups and the media focus more attention on the legality and collateral damage of drone attacks. The U.S. drone program has been highly effective in killing senior al-Qaeda leaders, but the administration needs to work harder to explain and defend its use of drones as lawful and appropriate — to allies and critics — if it wants to avoid losing international support and potentially exposing administration officials to legal liability.

The U.S. position, under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, has been that drone strikes against al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are lawful under U.S. and international law. They are permitted by the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act, which empowered the president to “all necessary and appropriate force” against nations, organizations or persons who planned, committed or aided the Sept. 11 attacks.

The United States also believes that drone strikes are permitted under international law and the United Nations Charter as actions in self-defense, either with the consent of the country where the strike takes place or because that country is unwilling or unable to act against an imminent threat to the United States. U.S. officials have been understandably reluctant to confirm whether consent has been given by particular countries.

Obama administration officials have explained in the past that strikes against particular militant leaders are permissible, either because the individuals are part of the overall U.S. conflict with al-Qaeda or because they pose imminent threats to the United States. President Obama emphasized Awlaki’s operational role on Friday, stating that he was the “leader of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

The killing of Awlaki raises additional legal concerns because U.S. citizens have certain constitutional rights wherever they are in the world. Some human rights groups have asserted that due process requires prior judicial review before killing an American, but it is unlikely that the Constitution requires judicial involvement in the case of a U.S. citizen engaged in terrorist activity outside this country. Administration lawyers undoubtedly reviewed the targeting of Awlaki even more carefully than of a non-American, and the Justice Department reportedly prepared an opinion concluding that his killing would comply with domestic and international law. This is likely to be considered sufficient due process under U.S. constitutional standards.

But the U.S. legal position may not satisfy the rest of the world. No other government has said publicly that it agrees with the U.S. policy or legal rationale for drones. European allies, who vigorously criticized the Bush administration for asserting the unilateral right to use force against terrorists in countries outside Afghanistan, have neither supported nor criticized reported U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Instead, they have largely looked the other way, as they did with the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Human rights advocates, on the other hand, while quiet for several years (perhaps to avoid criticizing the new administration), have grown increasingly uncomfortable with drone attacks. Last year, the U.N. rapporteur for summary executions and extrajudicial killings said that drone strikes may violate international humanitarian and human rights law and could constitute war crimes. U.S. human rights groups, which stirred up international opposition to Bush administration counterterrorism policies, have been quick to condemn the Awlaki killing.

Even if Obama administration officials are satisfied that drone strikes comply with domestic and international law, they would still be wise to try to build a broader international consensus. The administration should provide more information about the strict limits it applies to targeting and about who has been targeted. One of the mistakes the Bush administration made in its first term was adopting novel counterterrorism policies without attempting to explain and secure international support for them.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan rightly acknowledged in a recent speech that “the effectiveness of our counterterrorism activities depends on the assistance and cooperation of our allies.” If the Obama administration wants to avoid losing the tacit support (and potentially the operational and intelligence assistance) of its allies for drone strikes and its other counterterrorism policies, it should try to ensure that they understand and agree with the U.S. policy and legal justification. Otherwise, the administration risks having its largely successful drone program become as internationally maligned as Guantanamo.

The writer is a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP and an adjunct senior fellow in international and national security law at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as legal adviser for the State Department from 2005 to 2009 and as legal adviser to the National Security Council from 2001 to 2005.

Obama is a carbon copy clone of Emperor Bush

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Cheney: After Yemen strike, Obama owes apology to Bush

By Joby Warrick, Published: October 2

Former vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday called last week’s CIA drone strike against al-Qaeda operative Anwar Awlaki a validation of the George W. Bush administration’s terrorist-fighting strategy, and said that President Obama should apologize for his past criticism of those policies.

Cheney endorsed the killing of Awlaki as “justified,” despite Awlaki’s U.S. citizenship, and suggested that the Obama White House was being hypocritical when it approved a deadly strike against the New Mexico-born Awlaki while condemning Bush’s use of so-called enhanced interrogation methods of al-Qaeda prisoners.

“They’ve agreed they need to be tough and aggressive in defending the nation and using some of the same techniques that the Bush administration did,” Cheney said on CNN’s Sunday talk show “State of the Nation with Candy Crowley.” “And they need, as I say, to go back and reconsider some of the criticisms they offered about our policies.”

The Obama administration defended its decision to kill Awlaki, the first U.S. citizen to be added to the CIA’s target list, saying the al-Qaeda propagandist was part of a terrorist organization actively planning attacks on the United States. A Justice Department memo providing legal justification for the strike concluded that Awlaki was not entitled to normal legal protections because he was a combatant in a war against Americans.

But that reasoning rankled Cheney, who noted that Obama had criticized Bush-era decisions that justified the harsh treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners.

“They, in effect, said that we had walked away from our ideals, or taken policy contrary to our ideals, when we had enhanced interrogation techniques,” said Cheney, who has acknowledged supporting the Bush-era use of secret prisons and waterboarding for al-Qaeda suspects. “Now they clearly have moved in the direction of taking robust action when they think it is justified.”

Asked by host Crowley if he would like an apology, he replied: “Well, I would.”

But Cheney said that the Awlaki hit “was a good strike.”

On the same broadcast, the former head of the House Intelligence Committee called on the White House to release the legal memos justifying the use of lethal force against Awlaki. Former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said Obama should allow a public debate about the legal basis for its fight against terrorism, avoiding what she said was excessive secrecy under Bush and Cheney.

Of Cheney’s request for an apology, she said: “I think Vice President Cheney has a rather thin skin for a guy who has been in the partisan wars as long as he has.”

Ron Paul: US could target journalists for killing

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Ron Paul: US could target journalists for killing

By PHILIP ELLIOTT - Associated Press | AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential contender Ron Paul on Wednesday suggested that the United States could assassinate journalists the same way it targeted Americans with ties to al-Qaida.

The Texas congressman again criticized President Barack Obama for approving last week's drone strikes in Yemen against a U.S. citizen who was tracked and executed based on secret intelligence that linked him to two failed terrorist attacks against the U.S. An American-born propagandist also died in the bombing. Escalating his criticism, Paul told a National Press Club luncheon that if citizens do not protest the deaths, the country will start adding reporters to its list of threats that must be taken out.

"Can you imagine being put on a list because you're a threat? What's going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? ... This is the way this works. It's incrementalism," Paul said.

"It's slipping and sliding, let me tell you."

Anwar al-Awlaki, the target of the U.S. drone attack, was one of the best-known al-Qaida figures after Osama bin Laden. American intelligence officials had linked him to two thwarted attacks on U.S.-bound planes, an airliner on Christmas 2009 and cargo planes last year. The second American killed in the drone attack, Samir Kahn, was the editor of Inspire, a slick online magazine aimed at al-Qaida sympathizers in the West.

Paul likened the pair to German officials who carried out the Holocaust but were still given trials.

"All the Nazi criminals were tried. They were taken to court and then executed," Paul said. "The reason we do this is because we want to protect the rule of law."

Paul, making his second run for the Republican presidential nomination, has built a die-hard following among the GOP's libertarian wing and has worked to court anti-war conservatives.

Secret panel decides which Americans Obama will murder

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Secret panel can put Americans on "kill list'

ReutersBy Mark Hosenball | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.

Current and former officials said that to the best of their knowledge, Awlaki, who the White House said was a key figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda's Yemen-based affiliate, had been the only American put on a government list targeting people for capture or death due to their alleged involvement with militants.

The White House is portraying the killing of Awlaki as a demonstration of President Barack Obama's toughness toward militants who threaten the United States. But the process that led to Awlaki's killing has drawn fierce criticism from both the political left and right.

In an ironic turn, Obama, who ran for president denouncing predecessor George W. Bush's expansive use of executive power in his "war on terrorism," is being attacked in some quarters for using similar tactics. They include secret legal justifications and undisclosed intelligence assessments.

Liberals criticized the drone attack on an American citizen as extra-judicial murder.

Conservatives criticized Obama for refusing to release a Justice Department legal opinion that reportedly justified killing Awlaki. They accuse Obama of hypocrisy, noting his administration insisted on publishing Bush-era administration legal memos justifying the use of interrogation techniques many equate with torture, but refused to make public its rationale for killing a citizen without due process.

Some details about how the administration went about targeting Awlaki emerged on Tuesday when the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing.

The process involves "going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president, but the National Security Council does the investigation, they have lawyers, they review, they look at the situation, you have input from the military, and also, we make sure that we follow international law," Ruppersberger said.

LAWYERS CONSULTED

Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described.

They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC "principals," meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.

The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

They confirmed that lawyers, including those in the Justice Department, were consulted before Awlaki's name was added to the target list.

Two principal legal theories were advanced, an official said: first, that the actions were permitted by Congress when it authorized the use of military forces against militants in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; and they are permitted under international law if a country is defending itself.

Several officials said that when Awlaki became the first American put on the target list, Obama was not required personally to approve the targeting of a person. But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals' decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

A former official said one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to "protect" the president. [I guess Obama wants to claim that he isn't accountable for the murders of people he decides to kill]

Officials confirmed that a second American, Samir Khan, was killed in the drone attack that killed Awlaki. Khan had served as editor of Inspire, a glossy English-language magazine used by AQAP as a propaganda and recruitment vehicle.

But rather than being specifically targeted by drone operators, Khan was in the wrong place at the wrong time, officials said. Ruppersberger appeared to confirm that, saying Khan's death was "collateral," meaning he was not an intentional target of the drone strike.

When the name of a foreign, rather than American, militant is added to targeting lists, the decision is made within the intelligence community and normally does not require approval by high-level NSC officials.

'FROM INSPIRATIONAL TO OPERATIONAL'

Officials said Awlaki, whose fierce sermons were widely circulated on English-language militant websites, was targeted because Washington accumulated information his role in AQAP had gone "from inspirational to operational." That meant that instead of just propagandizing in favor of al Qaeda objectives, Awlaki allegedly began to participate directly in plots against American targets.

"Let me underscore, Awlaki is no mere messenger but someone integrally involved in lethal terrorist activities," Daniel Benjamin, top counterterrorism official at the State Department, warned last spring.

The Obama administration has not made public an accounting of the classified evidence that Awlaki was operationally involved in planning terrorist attacks.

But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki's hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.

For instance, one plot in which authorities have said Awlaki was involved Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb hidden in his underpants.

There is no doubt Abdulmutallab was an admirer or follower of Awlaki, since he admitted that to U.S. investigators. When he appeared in a Detroit courtroom earlier this week for the start of his trial on bomb-plot charges, he proclaimed, "Anwar is alive."

But at the time the White House was considering putting Awlaki on the U.S. target list, intelligence connecting Awlaki specifically to Abdulmutallab and his alleged bomb plot was partial. Officials said at the time the United States had voice intercepts involving a phone known to have been used by Awlaki and someone who they believed, but were not positive, was Abdulmutallab.

Awlaki was also implicated in a case in which a British Airways employee was imprisoned for plotting to blow up a U.S.-bound plane. E-mails retrieved by authorities from the employee's computer showed what an investigator described as " operational contact" between Britain and Yemen.

Authorities believe the contacts were mainly between the U.K.-based suspect and his brother. But there was a strong suspicion Awlaki was at the brother's side when the messages were dispatched. British media reported that in one message, the person on the Yemeni end supposedly said, "Our highest priority is the US ... With the people you have, is it possible to get a package or a person with a package on board a flight heading to the US?"

U.S. officials contrast intelligence suggesting Awlaki's involvement in specific plots with the activities of Adam Gadahn, an American citizen who became a principal English-language propagandist for the core al Qaeda network formerly led by Osama bin Laden.

While Gadahn appeared in angry videos calling for attacks on the United States, officials said he had not been specifically targeted for capture or killing by U.S. forces because he was regarded as a loudmouth not directly involved in plotting attacks.

Release of Justice Department memo on Awlaki killing urged

by Peter Finn - Oct. 8, 2011 12:00 AM

Washington Post

WASHINGTON - A bipartisan chorus of political and legal voices is calling on the Obama administration to release a declassified version of the Justice Department memo that provided the legal analysis sanctioning the killing in Yemen last week of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen.

They said that the reasoning behind the extraordinary step of killing an American cannot be kept secret from scrutiny if the public is to continue to support counterterrorism operations. Awlaki was killed in a CIA drone strike.

"While U.S. counterterrorism operations are, by necessity, classified, I do believe the administration should make public its legal analysis on its counterterrorism authorities, whether in the form of a legal opinion or a white paper," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "For both transparency and to maintain public support of secret operations, it is important to explain the general framework for counterterrorism actions."

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also said this week, "I would urge them to release the memo. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Both Feinstein and Levin said they supported the lethal action.

Awlaki was born in New Mexico, and administration officials said he was the chief of "external operations" for al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen, which has attempted a number of terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Several former Bush administration officials also said that some version of the legal opinion, written in 2010 by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel after consultations across the executive branch, should be released to make a public case that the killing of Awlaki was legal under U.S. and international law.

"I do think it would be important for domestic audiences and international audiences for the administration to explain how the targeting and killing of an American complies with applicable constitutional standards," said John Bellinger, former legal adviser to the State Department in the George W. Bush administration.

Senior Obama administration officials - including John Brennan, the president's counterterrorism adviser, and Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser - have given speeches that offered a broad rationale for U.S. drone attacks on individuals in al-Qaida and associated forces.

They argued that deadly force is legal under the 2001 congressional authorization of the use of military force and that the U.S., acting in self-defense, is not limited to traditional battlefields in pursuit of terrorists who present an imminent threat.

Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen

Secret U.S. Memo Made Legal Case to Kill a Citizen

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: October 8, 2011

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.

The memo, written last year, followed months of extensive interagency deliberations and offers a glimpse into the legal debate that led to one of the most significant decisions made by President Obama — to move ahead with the killing of an American citizen without a trial.

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans believed to pose a terrorist threat.

The Obama administration has refused to acknowledge or discuss its role in the drone strike that killed Mr. Awlaki last month and that technically remains a covert operation. The government has also resisted growing calls that it provide a detailed public explanation of why officials deemed it lawful to kill an American citizen, setting a precedent that scholars, rights activists and others say has raised concerns about the rule of law and civil liberties.

But the document that laid out the administration’s justification — a roughly 50-page memorandum by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, completed around June 2010 — was described on the condition of anonymity by people who have read it.

The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him.

The memorandum, which was written more than a year before Mr. Awlaki was killed, does not independently analyze the quality of the evidence against him.

The administration did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

The deliberations to craft the memo included meetings in the White House Situation Room involving top lawyers for the Pentagon, State Department, National Security Council and intelligence agencies.

It was principally drafted by David Barron and Martin Lederman, who were both lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the time, and was signed by Mr. Barron. The office may have given oral approval for an attack on Mr. Awlaki before completing its detailed memorandum. Several news reports before June 2010 quoted anonymous counterterrorism officials as saying that Mr. Awlaki had been placed on a kill-or-capture list around the time of the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. Mr. Awlaki was accused of helping to recruit the attacker for that operation.

Mr. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, was also accused of playing a role in a failed plot to bomb two cargo planes last year, part of a pattern of activities that counterterrorism officials have said showed that he had evolved from merely being a propagandist — in sermons justifying violence by Muslims against the United States — to playing an operational role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s continuing efforts to carry out terrorist attacks.

Other assertions about Mr. Awlaki included that he was a leader of the group, which had become a “cobelligerent” with Al Qaeda, and he was pushing it to focus on trying to attack the United States again. The lawyers were also told that capturing him alive among hostile armed allies might not be feasible if and when he were located.

Based on those premises, the Justice Department concluded that Mr. Awlaki was covered by the authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda that Congress enacted shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — meaning that he was a lawful target in the armed conflict unless some other legal prohibition trumped that authority.

It then considered possible obstacles and rejected each in turn.

Among them was an executive order that bans assassinations. That order, the lawyers found, blocked unlawful killings of political leaders outside of war, but not the killing of a lawful target in an armed conflict.

A federal statute that prohibits Americans from murdering other Americans abroad, the lawyers wrote, did not apply either, because it is not “murder” to kill a wartime enemy in compliance with the laws of war.

But that raised another pressing question: would it comply with the laws of war if the drone operator who fired the missile was a Central Intelligence Agency official, who, unlike a soldier, wore no uniform? The memorandum concluded that such a case would not be a war crime, although the operator might be in theoretical jeopardy of being prosecuted in a Yemeni court for violating Yemen’s domestic laws against murder, a highly unlikely possibility.

Then there was the Bill of Rights: the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee that a “person” cannot be seized by the government unreasonably, and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that the government may not deprive a person of life “without due process of law.”

The memo concluded that what was reasonable, and the process that was due, was different for Mr. Awlaki than for an ordinary criminal. It cited court cases allowing American citizens who had joined an enemy’s forces to be detained or prosecuted in a military court just like noncitizen enemies.

It also cited several other Supreme Court precedents, like a 2007 case involving a high-speed chase and a 1985 case involving the shooting of a fleeing suspect, finding that it was constitutional for the police to take actions that put a suspect in serious risk of death in order to curtail an imminent risk to innocent people.

The document’s authors argued that “imminent” risks could include those by an enemy leader who is in the business of attacking the United States whenever possible, even if he is not in the midst of launching an attack at the precise moment he is located.

There remained, however, the question of whether — when the target is known to be a citizen — it was permissible to kill him if capturing him instead were a feasible way of suppressing the threat.

Killed in the strike alongside Mr. Awlaki was another American citizen, Samir Khan, who had produced a magazine for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula promoting terrorism. He was apparently not on the targeting list, making his death collateral damage. His family has issued a statement citing the Fifth Amendment and asking whether it was necessary for the government to have “assassinated two of its citizens.”

“Was this style of execution the only solution?” the Khan family asked in its statement. “Why couldn’t there have been a capture and trial?”

Last month, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, delivered a speech in which he strongly denied the accusation that the administration had sometimes chosen to kill militants when capturing them was possible, saying the policy preference is to interrogate them for intelligence.

The memorandum is said to declare that in the case of a citizen, it is legally required to capture the militant if feasible — raising a question: was capturing Mr. Awlaki in fact feasible?

It is possible that officials decided last month that it was not feasible to attempt to capture him because of factors like the risk it could pose to American commandos and the diplomatic problems that could arise from putting ground forces on Yemeni soil. Still, the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan demonstrates that officials have deemed such operations feasible at times.

Last year, Yemeni commandos surrounded a village in which Mr. Awlaki was believed to be hiding, but he managed to slip away.

The administration had already expressed in public some of the arguments about issues of international law addressed by the memo, in a speech delivered in March 2010 by Harold Hongju Koh, the top State Department lawyer.

The memorandum examined whether it was relevant that Mr. Awlaki was in Yemen, far from Afghanistan. It concluded that Mr. Awlaki’s geographical distance from the so-called hot battlefield did not preclude him from the armed conflict; given his presumed circumstances, the United States still had a right to use force to defend itself against him.

As to whether it would violate Yemen’s sovereignty to fire a missile at someone on Yemeni soil, Yemen’s president secretly granted the United States that permission, as secret diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks have revealed.

The memorandum did assert that other limitations on the use of force under the laws of war — like avoiding the use of disproportionate force that would increase the possibility of civilian deaths — would constrain any operation against Mr. Awlaki.

That apparently constrained the attack when it finally came. Details about Mr. Awlaki’s location surfaced about a month ago, American officials have said, but his hunters delayed the strike until he left a village and was on a road away from populated areas.

When will America start murdering suspected drug dealers with drones???

The United States can [and does] send [drones] over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

[The American Empire is] creating an international norm — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks

And of course I think the questions is not will the American Empire start using drones to kill suspected drug dealers, but when will the American Empire murdering suspected drug dealers with drones.

Source

Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: October 8, 2011

WASHINGTON

AT the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.

The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000 militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed along with a second American, Samir Khan.

If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.

“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”

The qualities that have made lethal drones so attractive to the Obama administration for counterterrorism appeal to many countries and, conceivably, to terrorist groups: a capacity for leisurely surveillance and precise strikes, modest cost, and most important, no danger to the operator, who may sit in safety thousands of miles from the target.

To date, only the United States, Israel (against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza) and Britain (in Afghanistan) are known to have used drones for strikes. But American defense analysts count more than 50 countries that have built or bought unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.’s, and the number is rising every month. Most are designed for surveillance, but as the United States has found, adding missiles or bombs is hardly a technical challenge.

“The virtue of most U.A.V.’s is that they have long wings and you can strap anything to them,” Mr. Gormley says. That includes video cameras, eavesdropping equipment and munitions, he says. “It’s spreading like wildfire.”

So far, the United States has a huge lead in the number and sophistication of unmanned aerial vehicles (about 7,000, by one official’s estimate, mostly unarmed). The Air Force prefers to call them not U.A.V.’s but R.P.A.’s, or remotely piloted aircraft, in acknowledgment of the human role; Air Force officials should know, since their service is now training more pilots to operate drones than fighters and bombers.

Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, a company that tracks defense and aerospace markets, says global spending on research and procurement of drones over the next decade is expected to total more than $94 billion, including $9 billion on remotely piloted combat aircraft.

Israel and China are aggressively developing and marketing drones, and Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and several other countries are not far behind. The Defense Security Service, which protects the Pentagon and its contractors from espionage, warned in a report last year that American drone technology had become a prime target for foreign spies.

Last December, a surveillance drone crashed in an El Paso neighborhood; it had been launched, it turned out, by the Mexican police across the border. Even Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, has deployed drones, an Iranian design capable of carrying munitions and diving into a target, says P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, whose 2009 book “Wired for War” is a primer on robotic combat.

Late last month, a 26-year-old man from a Boston suburb was arrested and charged with plotting to load a remotely controlled aircraft with plastic explosives and crash it into the Pentagon or United States Capitol. His supposed co-conspirators were actually undercover F.B.I. agents, and it was unclear that his scheme could have done much damage. But it was an unnerving harbinger, says John Villasenor, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. He notes that the Army had just announced a $5 million contract for a backpack-size drone called a Switchblade that can carry an explosive payload into a target; such a weapon will not long be beyond the capabilities of a terrorist network.

“If they are skimming over rooftops and trees, they will be almost impossible to shoot down,” he maintains.

It is easy to scare ourselves by imagining terrorist drones rigged not just to carry bombs but to spew anthrax or scatter radioactive waste. Speculation that Al Qaeda might use exotic weapons has so far turned out to be just that. But the technological curve for drones means the threat can no longer be discounted.

“I think of where the airplane was at the start of World War I: at first it was unarmed and limited to a handful of countries,” Mr. Singer says. “Then it was armed and everywhere. That is the path we’re on.”

Who signed Anwar al-Awlaki’s death warrant?

By Richard Cohen, Published: October 10

Who the hell is David Barron?

Wikipedia says that name may refer to a British film producer, a soccer player, an actor or a sportswriter. Google says he could be a hairstylist in Atlanta. None of these, though, is the David Barron I have in mind. The one I want is the one who signed off on the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a very bad guy but, still, an American citizen. Barron was a U.S. government lawyer.

Never heard of him? Me neither. But according to published reports, he was one of two lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — the other was Martin Lederman — who in 2010 composed an approximately 50-page memo saying it was legally permissible to kill Awlaki even though he was a U.S. citizen and had not been convicted of so much as a traffic violation. Using plain common sense, they apparently argued that Awlaki — born in the United States or not — was an enemy combatant and could be treated as such. On Sept. 30, he was killed in a drone attack in Yemen.

A little “yippee” emitted from me when I heard the news. Awlaki was a traitor to his country and its values. He was allegedly a senior recruiter for al-Qaeda and was linked to the Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Malik Hasan as well as other attempted terror acts. Awlaki was not shy about his activities, and so they, not to mention his allegiance, were not in question.

There was a question, though, about what to do with him. The Constitution is persnickety about due process, the right to a trial and so on. Awlaki’s citizenship seemed to complicate matters, although in the view of some it should not have. He was an enemy combatant, pure and simple. We were at war, pure and simple, and his life could be taken.

But according to those who have seen it, there is a hint in the Justice Department memo that this was never a pure and simple case. We are told that one reason Justice concluded Awlaki could be killed was because he was in the wilds of Yemen and could not be captured. It seemed some thought was given to his citizenship; otherwise, why even bother to consider his capture? About 2,000 militants have been killed by drones — and not because they couldn’t be captured. They were killed not only because they deserved to be but because they could be. Former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey even suggests in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that these militants were killed because the Obama administration, having ruled out harsh interrogation, had no use for them.

The Justice Department memo and its acknowledgment of Awlaki’s citizenship are ample proof that the Obama administration realized it was crossing a line. But it did so on the sneak — a memo, still secret, written by two lawyers you and I never heard of.

We live in a soft police state. It’s not a film-noir one, based on ideology and punctuated by the crunch of hobnailed boots, but one created in response to terrorism and crime. Cameras follow us. Our travels, our purchases, are recorded. Our computers and cellphones snitch on us. There’s no Orwellian Big Brother, just countless little ones, all of them righteously on the lookout for the bad guys. It’s necessary, I suppose. It will be abused, I don’t suppose.

The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized Awlaki’s killing. But so far, the only politician of note to do so is Rep. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate with a touching reverence for the Constitution as written. “Al-Awlaki was born here; he’s an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes,” he exclaimed. Paul, though, gets dismissed as a constitutional kvetch.

I do not share Paul’s indignation, but I do his dismay. Something big and possibly dangerous has happened . . . in secret. Government’s most awesome power — to take a life — has been exercised on one of its own citizens without benefit of trial. A guy named Barron and another named Lederman apparently said it was okay. Maybe it was. But I’d sure like to hear the attorney general or the president explain why.

cohenr@washpost.com

US assassination squad - Iran assassination squad

Anwar al-Awlaki’s family speaks out against his son’s death in airstrike

Anwar al-Awlaki’s family speaks out against his son’s death in airstrike

By Peter Finn and Greg Miller, Published: October 17

In the days before a CIA drone strike killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki last month, his 16-year-old son ran away from the family home in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa to try to find him, relatives say. When he, too, was killed in a U.S. airstrike Friday, the Awlaki family decided to speak out for the first time since the attacks.

“To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and the boy’s grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”

The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.

The young Awlaki was the third American killed in Yemen in as many weeks. Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina, died alongside Anwar al-Awlaki.

Yemeni officials said the dead from the strike included Ibrahim al-Banna, the Egyptian media chief for al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, and also a brother of Fahd al-Quso, a senior al-Qaeda operative who was indicted in New York in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden.

The strike occurred near the town of Azzan, an Islamist stronghold. The Defense Ministry in Yemen described Banna as one of the “most dangerous operatives” in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, often referred to by the acronym AQAP.

U.S. assessment

U.S. officials said they were still assessing the results of the strike Monday evening to determine who was killed. The officials would not discuss the attack in any detail, including who the target was, but typically the CIA and the Pentagon focus on senior figures in al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

“We have seen press reports that AQAP senior official Ibrahim al-Banna was killed last Friday in Yemen and that several others, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, were with al-Banna at the time,” said Thomas F. Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “For over the past year, the Department of State has publicly urged U.S. citizens not to travel to Yemen and has encouraged those already in Yemen to leave because of the continuing threat of violence and the presence of terrorist organizations, including AQAP, throughout the country.”

A senior congressional official who is familiar with U.S. operations in Yemen and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy issues said, “If they knew a 16-year-old was there, I think that would be cause for them to say: ‘Gee, we ought not to hit this guy. That would be considered collateral damage.’ ”

The official said that the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command are expected to ensure that women and children are not killed in airstrikes in Pakistan and Yemen but that sometimes it might not be possible to distinguish a teenager from militants.

Nasser al-Awlaki said he was told by people in the area where the airstrike occurred that the two teenagers were about to have a meal with a small group of men when they were hit. He said he did not know who else was in the group but was told that they were mostly young people.

The others I just don’t know. Maybe they were being targeted,” Awlaki said.

‘A typical kid’

In a separate statement Monday, the Awlaki family said that Abdulrahman “along with some of his tribe’s youth have gone barbecuing under the moonlight. A drone missile hit their congregation killing Abdulrahman and several other teenagers.”

Nasser al-Awlaki said the family decided to issue a statement after reading some U.S. news reports that described Abdulrahman as a militant in his twenties.

The family urged journalists and others to visit a Facebook memorial page for Abdulrahman.

“Look at his pictures, his friends, and his hobbies,” the statement said. “His Facebook page shows a typical kid. A teenager who paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.”

The pictures on the Facebook page show a smiling kid out and about in the countryside and occasionally hamming it up for the camera. Abdulrahman left the United States with his father in 2002.

Nasser al-Awlaki said Abdulrahman was in the first year of secondary school when he left Sanaa to find his father. He wrote a note to his mother, saying he missed his father and wanted to see him. The teenager traveled to the family’s tribal home in southern Yemen, but Anwar al-Awlaki was killed Sep. 30 in Yemen’s northern Jawf province, about 90 miles east of the capital.

“He went from here without my knowledge,” Nasser al-Awlaki said. “We would not allow him to go if we know because he is a small boy.” He said his grandson, after hearing about his father’s death, had decided to return to Sanaa. The family also condemned the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, 40, as an “unlawful assassination,” saying that he was an American citizen who had never been formally charged with any crime.

Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, was one of al-Qaeda’s most prominent and effective propagandists, but U.S. officials said he had also become directly involved in terrorist plots against the United States. After his killing, President Obama described him as chief of “external operations” for AQAP.

U.S. officials had tied him to the attempted bombing of a commercial aircraft on approach to Detroit and the attempted downing of two cargo planes over the United States. They said he inspired an Army officer who is charged with killing 13 people in a November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., and a Pakistani-American man who tried to set off a car bomb in New York City in May 2010.

The family, in its statement, said, “Anwar was never a ‘militant’ ” nor was he “the head of Al Qaeda external operations.”

The United States has stepped up drone operations in Yemen to counter AQAP, which it fears is exploiting the country’s chaos to plot further attacks. Violent clashes continued Monday in Sanaa between government forces and troops loyal to an army general who broke with President Ali Abdullah Saleh to protect protesters calling for his ouster.

Staff writers James Buck, Greg Jaffe and Jason Ukman and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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While it doesn't bother American Emperor one bit to murder Americans in foreign countries using drone missile strikes the American Empire gets real angry when foreign government try to murder their enemies on American soil.

In this article Obama and the American Empire are angry about an attempt by the Iranian government to murder a Saudi diplomat on American soil.