I’ll Be Watching You: Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith says that “one way to make the president’s secret actions and decisions and authorities legitimate and credible is to have an adversarial institution look at and pass on them.” Right. But it’s not an idle question. As Long War Journal’s Bill Roggio wonders, what if Reaz Qadir Khan, a naturalized U.S. citizen indicted in Oregon on March 5 for aiding in an al-Qaeda attack in Pakistan in 2009 had been abroad, rather than on American soil? Would this have been a kill rather than capture situation?
Piggly Wiggly: How connected to al Qaeda do suspects have to be to land on the CIA's kill list? As Spencer Ackerman notes in Danger Room, of the original planners of 9/11, “nearly all of those people are dead or detained.” So what does this mean for the drone program, which was originally formed for 9/11 planners? The Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in response to the 9/11 attacks, could be expanded to include terrorists or suspected terrorists not connected to Al Qaeda--a precedent that maybe gives the executive branch too much wiggle room.
Gotcha: The CIA “intercepted and grabbed” former al-Qaeda spokesman and Osama bin Laden son-in-law Abu Ghaith in Turkey and rendered him to the U.S. on March 1, according to The Washington Times and AFP, based on Turkish reports. Ghaith, suspected of supporting the 9/11 attacks, was first picked up at an Ankara hotel but local Turkish police refused to hand him over to the CIA. Agency operatives grabbed him when he was ordered deported to Jordan and whisked him “to the United States,” according to the reports.
--Sally Farrington
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1 comment:
I don't see eye to eye with Rand Paul on some big issues but he earned my respect with several statements along these lines in his fillibuster relating to drone policy:
"If you are sitting in a cafeteria in Dearborn, Mich., if you happen to be an Arab-American who has a relative in the Middle East and you communicate with them by e-mail and somebody says, oh, your relative is someone we suspect of being associated with terrorism, is that enough to kill you? For goodness sakes, wouldn’t we try to arrest and come to the truth by having a jury and a presentation of the facts on both sides of the issue? See, the real problem here, one of the things we did a long time ago is we separated the police power from the judicial power. This was an incredibly important first step. We also prevented the military from acting in our country because we didn’t want to have a police state"
Another point he made was, these precedents will be handed off to future leadership and that leadership could be worse than what we have now. Were we to have a Dick Cheney type personality step into leadership, whether by election or default in the line of people backing up the president, everyone he did not like would be labeled 'Al Qaida' and I think that is what Rand Paul was getting at.
And who is to say John Brennan is not a Cheney type personality? Obama's 'kill list' decisions are only as good as the information provided to him-
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