Yesterday, in a letter to Congressional leaders signed by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the Obama administration said that in addition to Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was targeted and killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen, three other Americans have been killed, albeit not “specifically targeted”: Samir Khan, killed in the same strike; Awlaki’s son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was also killed in Yemen; and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a strike in Pakistan.
In his letter, Holder said, “The decision to target Anwar al-Awlaki was lawful, it was considered, and it was just,” and provided both legal and national security rationale: “Based on generations-old legal principles and Supreme Court decisions handed down during World War II, as well as during the current conflict, it is clear and logical that United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted…”
As to national security/operational considerations, Holder expands “Mr. Awlaki not only had ‘planned’ the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009, a claim that has been widely discussed in court documents and elsewhere, but had also ‘played a key role’ in an October 2010 plot to blow up cargo planes bound for the United States, including taking ‘part in the development and testing. of the bombs. He added that Mr. Awlaki had also been involved in ‘the planning of numerous other plots,’” according to an extensive article in the New York Times this morning.
The same article states that President Obama “plans to open a new phase in the nation’s long struggle with terrorism on Thursday by restricting the use of unmanned drone strikes that have been at the heart of his national security strategy and shifting control of them away from the C.I.A. to the military,” and that
A new classified policy guidance signed by Mr. Obama will sharply curtail the instances when unmanned aircraft can be used to attack in places that are not overt war zones, countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The rules will impose the same standard for strikes on foreign enemies now used only for American citizens deemed to be terrorists.
Lethal force will be used only against targets who pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and cannot feasibly be captured, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a letter to Congress, suggesting that threats to a partner like Afghanistan or Yemen alone would not be enough to justify being targeted.
President Obama will announce this shift in policy in a speech he will give today at the National Defense University. In the same speech the president will also “renew his long-stalled effort to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” and to “reappoint a high-level State Department official to oversee the effort to reduce the prison population,” according to the Times.
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Lead image: President Barack Obama receives the Presidential Daily Briefing in the Oval Office, May 22, 2013. Pictured, from left, are: Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Lisa Monaco, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Robert Cardillo, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration; and Tony Blinken, Deputy National Security Advisor. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
