By Susan Heavey, David Ingram, and Mark Hosenball
Reuters
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/05/us-usa-drones-idUSBRE9140X1201...
WASHINGTON -- The government has authorized the killing of American
citizens as part of its controversial drone campaign against al Qaeda even
without intelligence that such Americans are actively plotting to attack a
U.S. target, according to a Justice Department memo.
The unclassified memo, first obtained by NBC News, argues that drone
strikes are justified under American law if a targeted U.S. citizen had
"recently" been involved in "activities" posing a
possible threat and provided that there is no evidence suggesting the
individual "renounced or abandoned" such activities.
The document was disclosed as a bipartisan group of U.S. senators
called on the Obama administration to release to Congress "any and
all" legal opinions laying out the government's understanding of what
legal powers the president has to deliberately kill American citizens.
The senators who signed the letter, including members of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, said the administration's cooperation would
"help avoid an unnecessary confrontation that could affect the Senate's
consideration of nominees for national security purposes."
Obama has nominated John Brennan, his White House counter terrorism
adviser, who defends drone strikes, to lead the CIA.
An Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing on the nomination is
scheduled for Thursday and Brennan is likely to face questioning on drone
policy.
One national security official said the leak of the Justice Department
memo may have been timed to blunt such congressional demands for the release
of additional, possibly classified, documents relating to the U.S. use of
drones.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the
Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement on
Tuesday said she had been calling on the administration to release legal
analyses related to the use of drones for more than a year.
Feinstein said the document
published by NBC had been given to congressional committees last June on a
confidential basis and that her committee is seeking additional documents,
which are believed to remain classified.
Attorney General Eric Holder
on Tuesday said he was concerned release of more documents could put sources
and operations at risk.
"We'll have to look at
this and see how, what it is we want to do with these memos. But you have to
understand that we are talking about things that are, that go into really
kind of how we conduct our offensive operations against a clear and present
danger to this nation," Holder said at a press conference.
"That is a real concern
to reveal sources, to potentially reveal sources and methods and put at risk
the very mechanisms that we use to try to keep people safe, which is our
primary responsibility, he added.
In the unclassified Justice
Department paper posted by NBC on its website, the authors laid out three
conditions that the executive branch should meet before a drone strike is
ordered.
A top U.S. official must
determine that the targeted person "poses an imminent threat of violent
attack against the United States," cannot be captured, and that the
strike "would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of
war principles," the department said.
A Justice Department
spokeswoman declined to comment to Reuters about the report.
The memo is drawing new
attention to the 2011 strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born alleged
leader of Al Qaeda's Yemen-based affiliate who U.S. investigators linked to a
botched plot to blow up a U.S. airliner with a bomb hidden in a man's
underwear on Christmas Day, 2009.
Targeted killings, carried out
by remotely piloted unmanned aircraft, are controversial because of the risks
to nearby civilians and because of their increasing use. The United Nations
recently launched an investigation into their use.
Most such attacks have been
carried out by the United States, but Britain and Israel have also used
drones.
Hina Shamsi of the American
Civil Liberties Union, which has sued for more information on the drone
program, called the memo "profoundly disturbing" and "a
stunning overreach of executive authority."
Shamsi, head of the ACLU's
National Security Project, in a statement called on the Obama administration
to release what she said was a 50-page classified legal document on which the
16-page summary is based.
"Among other things, we
need to know if the limits the executive purports to impose on its killing
authority are as loosely defined as in this summary, because if they are,
they ultimately mean little," she said late Monday.
The ACLU on Tuesday will also file court papers seeking to block
government efforts to dismiss the group's lawsuit challenging the 2011
killing of Awlaki and two other Americans in Yemen, the statement said.