A federal judge said she was “really troubled” by the Obama administration’s “disconcerting” position that drone strike decisions are outside the court’s competence.
The remarks by US District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer were
made on Friday during a court hearing concerning the 2011
drone-strike which killed three US citizens in Yemen. The
relatives of the dead filed a lawsuit, charging that the attacks
violated the US citizens constitutional rights to due process and
to be free from groundless detention. The government in its turn
filed a motion for the case to be dismissed.
The high-profile case attracted more spectators than the
courtroom could accommodate, with some people having to stand
throughout the 80-minute-long heated debate between the judge and
the government representative over the role of the judicial
branch in making drone attack decisions.
The position of the White House, voiced by Brian Hauck, a deputy
assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil
Division, is that courts “aren’t in a position to second
guess” and “don’t have the apparatus to analyze”
government’s decisions concerning drone attacks.
Collyer,
disconcerted by the assertions, grilled Hauck over how far this
kind of logic could eventually lead the US government.
“How broadly are you asserting the right of the United States
to target an American citizen? Where is the limit to this? The
limit is the courthouse door,” Collyer is cited by the New
York Times as saying.
Hauk insisted the drone strike decisions were never made without
detailed scrutiny by the executive branch, which could well be
regarded as due process.
The assertion left Collyer unconvinced. “The executive is not
an effective check on the executive, when it comes to protecting
constitutional rights,” she argued.
Among other arguments put forward by Hauck was that he did not
want to see “counterterrorism officials distracted by the
threat of litigation.”
Collyer described it as “highly unusual” that such a lawsuit,
targeting top US military and national security officials on
grounds of alleged constitutional violations, would be allowed to
proceed. She said it will not be an easy decision and will
require a lot of reading into the matter on her part.
The US citizens killed by drone strikes in Yemen in 2011 are
Anwar al-Awlaki — an al-Qaeda leader, his 16-year-old son
Abdulrahman, who had no known involvement with
terrorists, and Samir Khan, reportedly an al-Qaeda
propagandist.
The fact that the three men were killed by drones was
confirmed in May by US Attorney General Eric Holder, who also
specified that only the senior al-Awlaki was specifically
targeted in the attacks.
“Al-Awlaki repeatedly made clear his intent to attack US
persons and his hope that these attacks would take American
lives,” Holder said. “Based on this information,
high-level US government officials appropriately concluded that
al-Awlaki posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent
attack against the United States.”
The lawsuit, charging the US government officials with violation
of the US citizens’ constitutional rights was filed by Nasser
al-Awlaki — Anwar’s father and Abdulrahman’s grandfather and by
Sarah Khan, Samir Khan’s mother. Their case was filed by lawyers
for the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil
Liberties Union.
The civil rights groups particularly stress the case of the 16
year-old US-born boy, who became victim of the drone war despite
not being engaged in criminal activity.
UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben
Emmerson, who has been investigating the US drone program since
January, has repeatedly called on the United States to curtail
this type of activity, warning that any justification for it
cited in international law by US officials is not accepted
outside the United States.
In May, President Obama spoke of the need to revamp the country’s drone policy at the National
Defense University, while at the same time insisting the country
needed to have the program in place.
The debate over drone attacks has recently become so acute in the
US that residents in a Colorado town have suggested possibly
issuing an
ordinance that would allow them shoot drones
down. The plan prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to
warn that such a move would be illegal.
Republished with permission from: RT