Obama aide defends killing of Americans

U.S. policy called legal, ethical, wise

— President Barack Obama’s spokesman Tuesday defended administration policy on targeted killings on foreign soil of U.S. citizens in al-Qaida leadership roles as “legal,” “ethical” and “wise.”

The administration is confronting renewed questions about national-security and terrorism policies regarding drone aircraft, killings of U.S. citizens, renditions and pre-emptive cyber-attacks as a Thursday confirmation hearing approaches for John Brennan, Obama’s counter terrorism adviser and his nominee to lead the CIA.

“These are important questions and the president takes them very seriously,” said Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary.

Brennan has publicly acknowledged and detailed some aspects of the policies and “will answer senators’ questions ably,” Carney said. “We believe that he will be confirmed.”

NBC News on Monday said it had obtained a 16-page Justice Department “white paper” detailing circumstances under which the U.S. is justified in ordering the killing of a U.S. citizen in al-Qaida leadership.

It says the government can order the killing of a citizen who is an al-Qaida leader actively engaged in “planning operations to kill Americans.”

The document said such killings are legal if an “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government” determines the citizen poses an imminent threat of violent attack, if capture is “infeasible” and if the operation can be carried out “in a manner consistent with applicable law-of-war principles.”

“In defined circumstances, a targeted killing of a U.S. citizen who has joined al-Qaida or its associated forces would be lawful under U.S. and international law,” the memo says.

The 16-page document allows for an elastic interpretation of those concepts and does not require that the target be involved in a specific plot, because al-Qaida is “continually involved in planning terrorist attacks against the United States.”

The paper does not spell out who might qualify as an “informed, high-level official”able to determine whether an American overseas is a legitimate target. It avoids specifics on a range of issues, including the level of evidence required for an American to be considered a “senior, operational” figure in al-Qaida.

The document’s emphasis on those two words, which appear together 16 times, helps to explain the careful phrasing the administration employed in the single case in which it intentionally killed an American citizen in a counterterrorism strike.

Within hours after Anwar al-Awlaki’s death in September 2011, White House officials described the U.S.-born cleric as “chief of external operations” for al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen, a designationthey had not used publicly before the strike.

Officials said that al-Awlaki, previously portrayed mainly as a propagandist, was directly involved in a series of plots, including the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in 2009.

The white paper, which was distributed confidentially to certain lawmakers last summer, doesn’t indicate when the underlying Justice Department memos on targeted killings of Americans were completed.

As a result, it is unclear whether the memos were in place before first apparent attempt to kill al-Awlaki, a joint U.S.-Yemeni strike shortly before the foiled Detroit plot in 2009.

Three other Americans have been killed in U.S. airstrikes in Yemen since 2002,including al-Awlaki’s 16-yearold son. But U.S. officials have said those Americans were casualties of attacks aimed at other senior al-Qaida operatives.

Brennan, who had a 25-year career in the CIA that included covert action and analyst work and held a senior post in George W. Bush’s administration, has had a central role in the U.S. program of using drones to attack suspected terrorists.

“We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, to prevent future attacks and, again, save American lives,” Carney said.

Civil liberties groups described the white paper as an example of the kind of unchecked executive power that Obama campaigned against during his first presidential run.

“The parallels to the Bush administration torture memos are chilling,” said Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Warren accused Obama of hypocrisy for ordering Bush administration memos released publicly while maintaining secrecy around his own. To deliver on his promises of transparency, Warren said Obama “must release his own legal memos and not just a Cliffs Notes version.”

Carney emphasized that the white paper is unclassified and indicated the administration does not intend to release the classified legal memo on which it is based.Asked whether Obama would respond to demands from lawmakers that he release the original document, Carney said, “I just have nothing for you on alleged memos regarding potentially classified matters.”

The number of attacks on Americans is minuscule compared with the broader toll of the drone campaign, which has killed more than 3,000 militants and civilians in hundreds of strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The struggle between the administration and Congress is relatively narrow, limited mainly to the White House’s refusal to turn over a collection of classified memos rather than any broad-scale opposition to the use of drone strikes or even the killing ofAmericans.

Most members of Congress agree with administration assertions that the drone campaign has been essential to crippling al-Qaida and its ability to mount large-scaleattacks against the United States.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., the chairman of the intelligence committee that will consider Brennan’s nomination, released a statement Tuesday indicating that she believes the release of the white paper - which was apparently done without the consent of the administration - should quell calls for more transparency.

The administration’s legal position “is now public and the American people can review and judge the legality of these operations,” Feinstein said. She has indicated she will support Brennan’s nomination.

Brennan withdrew from consideration as Obama’s first CIA chief in 2009 after human-rights groups and some Democrats raised concerns that he had supported harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects. Obama instead named Brennan as a White House adviser, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation.

Ahead of the Brennan hearing, the Open Society Justice Initiative, a group founded by billionaire investor George Soros that describes its mission as combating humanrights violations linked to counterterrorism operations, released a report on the CIA secret detention and rendition programs since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Amrit Singh, the group’s senior legal officer and author of the report, said Brennan should detail his views on past and current techniques as part of the confirmation process.

On renditions, Brennan in a 2005 interview with PBS’ Newshour defended as an “absolutely vital tool” the CIA program of sending suspected terrorists to other countries for questioning, including to some that practiced torture. In a 2007 interview with CBS, he said the agency’s “enhanced interrogation tactics” saved lives while saying waterboarding, or simulated drowning, should be prohibited.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the intelligence committee, said Brennan’s level of influence and the timing of his nomination have given lawmakers leverage that they lacked in previous efforts to seek details from the White House.

Brennan “is the architect of [the administration’s] counterterrorism policy,” Wyden said. “If the Congress doesn’t get answers to these questions now, it’s going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get them in the future.” Information for this article was contributed by Margaret Talev, Roger Runningen and Laura Litvan of Bloomberg News and by Greg Miller, Karen DeYoung and Julie Tate of The Washington Post.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/06/2013

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