The Sydney Morning Herald
US rules kill own to protect
By Peter Finn and Sari Horwitz
THE US government has the right to order the killing of American citizens overseas if they are senior al-Qaeda leaders who pose an imminent terrorist threat and cannot reasonably be captured, Attorney-General Eric Holder said.
''Any decision to use lethal force against a United States citizen - even one intent on murdering Americans and who has become an operational leader of al-Qaeda in a foreign land - is among the gravest that government leaders can face,'' Mr Holder said in a speech at Northwestern University's law school in Chicago.
''The American people can be - and deserve to be - assured that actions taken in their defence are consistent with their values and their laws.''
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Mr Holder's discussion of lethal force against US citizens did not mention any individual by name, but his address was clearly animated by the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki, a senior figure in al-Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in September.
Since that operation, the Obama administration has faced calls to explain the legal framework behind its decision to target Awlaki and to release at least portions of a still-classified memorandum by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that contains its evidence, reasoning and conclusions.
Mr Holder's speech represented the administration's most elaborate public explanation to date on targeted killings.
And it followed a prolonged internal debate about how to balance the need to inform the public about one of the most extraordinary decisions a government can take, without explicitly acknowledging the ongoing classified drone program.
Among the most revealing parts of the speech was Mr Holder's discussion of some of the factors the administration reviews before deciding that an individual represents an ''imminent threat''.
He said the critical factors included the ''relevant window of opportunity to act, the possible harm that missing the window would cause to civilians and the likelihood of heading off future disastrous attacks against the United States''.
The Attorney-General's ''flexible definition of imminent threat is absolutely appropriate as applied to terrorist planners, but it may be unsettling to many in the international community who criticised President Bush for his principle of pre-emption'', said John Bellinger, who served as a legal adviser to the State Department in the George Bush administration.
Mr Bellinger said he agreed with the Attorney-General's statement of US law for targeting an American, although he noted that the speech was less clear about how targeted killings complied with international legal rules.
There are no known US citizens on target lists maintained by the CIA or the military's Joint Special Operations Command.
Critics of the administration said the government had assumed dangerous new powers.
''While the speech is a gesture towards additional transparency, it is ultimately a defence of the government's chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public scrutiny,'' said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project.
Mr Holder said he rejected any attempt to label such operations ''assassinations''.
''They are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced,'' he said.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-rules-kill-own-to-protect-20120306-1ui9i.html
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