Thread: Federal Court: Drone Killing of U.S. Citizens Is Constitutional

Thursday, 10 April 2014 09:45 Federal Court: Drone Killing of U.S. Citizens Is Constitutional

Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.







On April 4, a federal court dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s killing of three American citizens in two drone strikes in 2011.

The complaint was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of the families of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son.
The complaint focuses on the violations to the Constitution arising from the assassinations of the three men, who were American citizens. Anwar al-Awlaki was born in the state of New Mexico, while his son Abdulrahman was born in Colorado. Khan was a naturalized U.S. citizen whose family lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. Anwar Al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were killed in Yemen on September 30, 2011, while Anwar's son Abdulrahman was killed in a separate drone strike on October 14, 2011.

According to the lawsuit:
The U.S. practice of "targeted killing" has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, including many hundreds of civilian bystanders. While some targeted killings have been carried out in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many have taken place outside the context of armed conflict, in countries including Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, and the Philippines.
These killings rely on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts.... The killings violated fundamental rights afforded to all U.S. citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law.
All those reasonable arguments are moot now, in light of the court’s tossing of the case.
Upon hearing the court’s decision, Nasser Al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman, said, as reported by the CCR:
I am deeply disappointed by the judge’s decision and in the American justice system. What I am asking is simply for the government to account to a court its killings of my American son and grandson, and for the court to decide if those killings were lawful. Like any parent or grandparent would, I want answers from the government when it decides to take life, but all I have got so far is secrecy and a refusal even to explain.
Although Obama administration officials finally admitted that the three men were killed by the United States, they argued to the federal court that national security concerns should preclude the matter from being adjudicated.
While Judge Rosemary M. Collyer refused to accept the concept of the executive branch judging the constitutionality of its own actions, she dismissed the suit.
On the CCR website, the group’s lead attorney, Maria LaHood, commented on the effect of Collyer’s refusal to judge the legality of the murders:
Judge Collyer effectively convicted Anwar Al-Aulaqi posthumously based on the government’s own say-so, and found that the constitutional rights of 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi and Samir Khan weren’t violated because the government didn’t target them. It seems there’s no remedy if the government intended to kill you, and no remedy if it didn’t. This decision is a true travesty of justice for our constitutional democracy, and for all victims of the U.S. government’s unlawful killings.
LaHood’s understanding of the constitutional standards for government-sanctioned assassination is accurate. Any killing by the government must conform to the standards established by the Fifth Amendment. That key provision of the Bill of Rights guarantees that “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
While every person killed in the name of the United States who has not received the due process the Constitution guarantees is a tragedy and a significant weakening of our moral and constitutional foundation, the case of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki is particularly disturbing and his killing unconscionable.
As he sat enjoying a roadside picnic in Yemen with a few second cousins and their friends — most of whom the young Colorado native had never met before that day — the teenager and all his companions were killed by two Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator drone.
A question that has never been answered by President Barack Obama — the man who authorizes such assassinations — is what law authorized the murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

Some in the Obama administration, including the president, have argued that such sudden strikes are justified in the face of a credible threat posed by the victim. No such claim has been made in the case of the younger al-Awlaki. He posed no threat to the national security of the United States, but he was killed without opportunity to defend himself before an impartial judge in a court of law.
Although he was killed three years ago, to date the Obama administration has never informed the country of any wrongdoing by this teenager, other than being related to a man (his father) who posted on the Internet anti-American videos that allegedly influenced others to commit crimes. A government-sanctioned assassination of such an individual is repugnant to all those who cherish life, liberty, and the due process that protects them.
An additional denial of due process came from the fact that no known attempt was ever made to capture this young man and take him into U.S. custody. Of course, that could be because he might actually have ended up in a court of law if he had been apprehended; and President Obama, a former lawyer, knows that trials can be long, messy, and unpredictable. It is much quicker and cleaner just to launch a missile and kill someone without going through the hassle of due process.

Finally, with regard to civilian casualties, not even the White House claims that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a member of al-Qaeda or any associated group believed to pose a threat to the United States. He was quite literally killed for being associated with one who was allegedly associated with those allegedly associated with al-Qaeda.
Not only was the target of the nighttime drone attack a civilian, but so were the boys sitting with him when two U.S. missiles lit up the area and killed them all. Being merely near a person related to someone accused of being associated with a group allegedly affiliated with an alleged al-Qaeda network is apparently sufficient provocation for becoming “collateral damage” in the U.S. “war on terror.”
Judge Collyer’s decision to dismiss this historic lawsuit witnesses the era into which our Republic has entered. The president of the United States sits in a chair in the White House rifling through dossiers of suspected terrorists. After listening to the advice of his claque of counselors, it is the president himself who designates who of the lineup is to be killed. As the New York Times explained in 2012:
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret "nominations" process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
The legal conundrum has apparently now been solved in favor of the president’s power to add names to and subtract them from kill lists worthy of the bloodthirstiest Roman dictators.



Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels nationwide speaking on nullification, the Second Amendment, the surveillance state, and other constitutional issues. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton and he can be reached at jwolverton@thenewamerican.com.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews...1573-287785873

Obama Administration to Release ‘Justification’ for Drone Strikes on US Citizens


May 20, 2014

The Associated Press is reporting the Obama administration being poised to release a formal “justification,” detailing the circumstances in which the lethal force of drone strikes may be used against a United States Citizen.


The United States’ Drone program was founded by the most recent Bush administration, but has been greatly expanded under the watch of president Obama. The practice of eliminating enemy combatants through the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has been allowed to flourish under the premise of aiding to the War on Terror, allthough it is often innocent bystanders which make up the majority of death tolls.


Countries where the US drone programs operate are certainly not alone in voicing their objection to the often unconscionable collateral damages of drone strikes. Last year, Germany made their voice very clear when they stated their rejection of using drones as a method of “policing” the world. Their opinion was so firmly-founded they forfeited future orders of drones, scheduled over the course of the next four years.


Tied into the issue of drone killings, is the use of NSA-collected to fuel the targeting of terrorists abroad. The NSA has been using metadata and location data to provided instructions for US drone’s deadly force. Without boots on the ground, providing visual confirmation of target identity, the metadata collected by the NSA has been the sole intelligence used to guide the killing of predator drones in many cases. That means that a Hell Fire missile has been sent to the location of a target’s phone, without confirming their presence there visually.
“Tied into the issue of drone killings, is the use of NSA-collected to fuel the targeting of terrorists abroad”

A worrisome compliment to the pending reveal of the Obama Administration’s justification for the use of drone strikes on American citizens, is Wikileaks’ announcement of their intention to release the name of the final country in which the NSA records every word of every phone conversation. This announcement would directly go against the course of action for releasing this information by Glenn Greenwald, the reporter chosen by Edward Snowden to release his information. Greenwald has stated that his reason for not releasing this information already is, basically, the fear of it causing bloodshed. That fear, along with pressures from US governmental agencies. Wikileaks, apparently, does not share this fear with Greenwald.


The Intercept, where Glenn Greenwald is currently reporting from, had recently revealed that the NSA was recording every single phone conversation originating from the Bahamas. Contained in the pages of previous releases, we now know that the Philippines, Mexico, and Kenya have all been targeted as well. The last three have been largely understood as being monitored through meta data collecting practices, not actual voice recording as with the Bahamas.
“Soon enough American citizens will find out which country has it’s every phone call recorded by the NSA and whether or not they will be killed by a drone for [hopefully] protesting that practice”

In addition to the Bahamas, the documents published by the Intercept indicated that a second country had every single phone conversation recorded by the NSA. The name of this country has been redacted by The Intercept after pressures from governmental agencies. The decision to redact the final country’s name came with much controversy, as evident in Twitter conversations between involved reporting groups. Wikileaks accused The Intercept of being racist, Glenn Greenwald reminded them that most of the revelations regard non-white countries, Wikileaks accused The Intercept of conforming to a “Pentagon talking points” model of information release, …etc.


While Wikileaks threatens to reveal the name of a country under complete surveillance by the NSA, the Associate Press is reporting the Obama administration’s intent to publicly justify the killing of United States’ citizens with predator drones. While the two may seem dissonant, the involvement of the NSA within the United States’s drone assassination program makes it quite a tricky incision to separate the two.


The suspense won’t last too long however, and soon enough American citizens will find out which country has it’s every phone call recorded by the NSA and whether or not they will be killed by a drone for [hopefully] protesting that practice.


http://www.thewestwire.com/obama-jus...-citizens-nsa/