What do Reyaad Khan, Ruhul Amin, Samir Khan, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Junaid Hussain and Micah Xavier Johnson have in common? All of these young, brown-skinned males were killed extrajudicially through the use of remote-control technology under authorization by their very own government.
British nationals Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin had traveled to Syria to join up with ISIS (the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) in response to Western military intervention in the Middle East. Both were killed by the Royal Air Force (RAF) in August 2015 using lethal drones, even though the British parliament had voted down Cameron’s call for war in Syria. Ironically, in the year of the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, the prime minister chose to deploy missiles to destroy these compatriots without indicting or trying them for crimes. Following the precedent set by US President Barack Obama four years earlier, Cameron claimed to be acting in national self-defense. Obama had authorized the drone killing in Yemen of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, an outspoken opponent of US militarism and an advocate of jihad.
Al-Awlaki was said to be an operational leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but no evidence of his alleged crimes has ever been released by the US government. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the Muslim cleric gave speeches in which he denounced the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks carried out on that day and warned that the US government needed to be careful to avoid being perceived as waging a war on Islam. In the period following 9/11, he himself was harassed by the FBI, and imprisoned for more than a year in Yemen at the US government’s request. Ultimately, Al-Awlaki came to sympathize with the very radical Islamists whom he had earlier decried.
After being released from the prison where he was detained without charges, Al-Awlaki was eliminated by US drone on September 30, 2011, along with Samir Khan, also a US citizen, who had been putting out pro-jihad…