Obama Finally Has To Explain Why The US Can Kill Americans With Drones
The Article: Obama Will Finally Have to Explain Why the US Can Kill Americans with Drones by Derek Mead in VICE News.
The Text: In the years-long conversation about President Barack Obama’s incredible drone wars, we’ve heard opaque, albeit scintillating, references to threat matrices and kill lists. But there’s one thing we’ve never heard: What is the president’s legal rationale for extrajudicial killing of Americans with drones?
Finally, we can expect to find out soon. Today, US Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the New York Times and the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act case levied against the Department of Justice, Defense Department, and CIA. The case was initially filed after the above agencies refused to comply with a FOIA request “seeking documents relating to targeted killings of United States citizens carried out by drone aircraft.”
The order from a three-judge panel requires the government to release a raft of documents regarding drone strikes, including the classified Department of Justice memo that initially authorized the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American al-Qaeda imam, and Samir Khan, the Pakistani American publisher of the al-Qaeda affiliated Inspire magazine, who were killed by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. (Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son was killed two weeks later in another drone strike. Both strikes were just a part of the US’s long drone war in the country.)
