Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Your government can kill you if...

The Week ^ | February 4, 2013 | Marc Ambinder

A Justice Department memorandum apparently prepared for Congress lays out for the first time the criteria that the national security establishment uses to decide whether to kill an American who is a senior al Qaeda leader or the the leader of one of its operational arms. Honors go to NBC's Mike Isikoff for the score. The memo has no classification markings on it, which tells me that it is a distillation from a larger, probably classified document prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. Generally, the executive branch keeps secrets in one of two of ways. They classify something formally, or they claim that something not classified is tantamount to internal work product or private legal advice intended for the president and his advisers only.
This allows the administration to keep its internal legal memos away from other branches of government, which it claims the right to do. The Bush Administration revealed operational details of secret programs to Congress but refused to provide the legal reasoning. The Obama administration has, at least in the past two years, begun to brief members of Congress proactively on both sets of details. This is one reason why Congress, for the most part, isn't complaining about "secret laws." (There are some exceptions.)
Anyway, here is what the lawyers to the president's lawyer say about the legality of killing Americans who are constituted as al Qaeda or al Qaeda-linked threats. (The memo makes it clear that its language does not apply to other instances where American citizens might be killed by their government.)
1. "An informed, high-level official" must determine that the person represents "an imminent threat" of "violent attack against the United States."(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...

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