Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com & Barbara Starr / CNN – 2014-02-11 00:50:45
Obama Mulls Assassinating Another US Citizen
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(February 10, 2014) — After a lot of feigned hand-wringing about the legality of assassinating American citizens without any judicial oversight, the next of us to go is now just a matter of time, and remains totally up to President Obama.
Officials confirm that Obama and “various commanders in the US military” are having discussions about an as-yet-unnamed American citizen who may or may not be summarily executed at some point in the near future.
We don’t know who he is, or where he is, but we do know the excuse that he’s “involved with al-Qaeda,” an allegation that will never actually need to be defended in court.
Pentagon officials say the question is pretty much an academic one at this point, and comes down to whether the president deems killing him as worth the “potential domestic fallout” of yet another extrajudicial killing of an American citizen.
The administration made a big deal of building up a putative secret case against Anwar al-Awlaqi, or at least repeating the same allegations often enough that his assassination wasn’t met with a huge backlash, though in the wake of his death the administration killed two other Americans, including Awlaqi’s son, in such a haphazard way it seemed killing Americans at will was just the “new normal.”
The Justice Department will no doubt argue that it is the new normal from a legal perspective, but having dispensed with the legal questions surrounding killing people without any court involvement, officials still apparently fear there will be some backlash if they start making a habit of it.
Source: US Debating Targeted Killing
Of American Terror Suspect Overseas
Barbara Starr / CNN Pentagon Correspondent
(February 10, 2014) — The Obama administration is in high-level discussions about staging an operation to kill an American citizen involved with al Qaeda and suspected of plotting attacks against the United States, a senior US official tells CNN.
The official, who declined to disclose any specific information about the target or the country the suspect presides in, was confirming information first reported by The Associated Press.
The debate about whether to undertake a mission is being held with various commanders in the US military, as well as the US national security agencies. The discussion centers on the risk involved and the importance of the target.
Before military force against an American is approved, there must be an imminent danger and no reasonable prospect of capturing the target. Ultimately, the President would need to sign off on the decision.
The US has targeted an American before, most notably Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a key member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was killed by a US drone in 2011.
Another American, Samir Khan, was killed in the same strike, though he was not the target of the operation. Khan was behind al Qaeda’s English-language Inspire magazine, which aimed to influence jihadis and wannabe jihadis around the world.
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