Senator Wyden asks when will drones kill American citizens?
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter on Monday to John Brennan, the White House’s counterterrorism adviser and nominee to be head of the CIA, asking for an outline of the legal and practical rules that underpin the U.S. government’s targeted killing of American citizens suspected of working with al-Qaida. The Obama administration has repeatedly resisted disclosing any such information about its so-called “disposition matrix” targeting terrorists, especially where it concerns possible American targets. Brennan reportedly oversees that matrix from his White House perch, and would be responsible for its execution at CIA director.
“How much evidence does the President need to determine that a particular American can be lawfully killed?” Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, asks in the letter, acquired by Danger Room. “Does the President have to provide individual Americans with the opportunity to surrender before killing them?”
Wyden’s questions about the targeted-killing effort get specific. He wants to know how the administration determines when it is “not feasible” to capture American citizens suspected of terrorism; if the administration considers its authority to order such killings inherent in its Constitutional war powers or embedded in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force; and if the intelligence agencies can “carry out lethal operations inside the United States.” Wyden also expresses “surprise and dismay” that the intelligence agencies haven’t provided him with a complete list of countries in which they’ve killed people in the war on terrorism, which he says “reflects poorly on the Obama administration’s commitment to cooperation with congressional oversight.”
The body he sits on, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is charged with providing "vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States," to ensure "that they conform with the Constitution and U.S. law." There is no one in America more justified in demanding to know the official legal rationale behind actions like targeted killings. Obama isn't just keeping this information from the American people. He isn't just hiding his legal reasoning from the U.S. Congress. He is stonewalling one of 15 senators that federal law establishes as the most important check on secret abuses by the CIA.
Understand that the CIA's capacity to commit abuses is anything but theoretical. As Obama well knows, its history is rife with examples of its personnel using the cover of secrecy to do things that the American people and their elected representatives would have never willingly permitted. CIA abuses inspired the creation of the very same Select Committee on Intelligence in 1976. It began after the Church Committee discovered and revealed abuses as varied as secretly opening the mail of American citizens, attempting to assassinate foreign leaders, trying to monitor private citizens who opposed the Vietnam War, and illegal wiretapping.
Even after Congress committed to more vigilant oversight of the CIA, it continued to operate with far less transparency than other federal agencies. Little wonder that it continued to commit abuses. During the Reagan Administration, for example, the executive branch approved a CIA plan to secretly mine the most important harbor in Nicaragua. Members of the Senate committee claimed that they weren't sufficiently notified and won a promise of greater cooperation.
Though the Iran-Contra affair was run out of the White House, the CIA was complicit in parts of it, and several agency staffers were disciplined in its aftermath for withholding information. Twelve CIA employees were disciplined in the mid-1990s for failing to adequately inform Congress of its activities in Guatemala. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 9/11 Commission cited insufficient oversight of the CIA as a significant problem. And during the Bush Administration, CIA officers tortured prisoners by blindfolding them, strapping them to a board, and repeatedly forcing water into their lungs so that they'd be so terrified of drowning that they'd talk. Obama has acknowledged that waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" institutionalized under his predecessor were torture, a judgment that hasn't stopped him from nominating Brennan, then at the CIA, who has defended all but waterboarding.
Thus far, senators on the intelligence panel have been more concerned about Brennan’s possible role in national-security information leaks and the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program than in using Brennan’s nomination to peer into the decision-making surrounding Obama’s counterterrorism strikes. Wyden writes that it is “critically important” for Congress to understand “how the executive branch understands the limits and boundaries of this authority.”
Wyden doesn’t specifically ask for information about the killing of Awlaki and his son. He’s after the more general rules embraced by the administration about when killing a U.S. citizen is permissible in the U.S. shadow wars. Those rules, apparently written in 2010 by Justice Department lawyers David Barron and Marty Lederman, were described in a New York Times piece but remain secret. Wyden doesn’t ask for their disclosure, just for the administration to permit members of the intelligence panel to read them.
“For the executive branch to claim that intelligence agencies have the authority to knowingly kill American citizens but refuse to provide Congress with any and all legal opinions that explain the executive branch’s understanding of this authority represents an alarming and indefensible assertion of executive prerogative,” Wyden writes.
Senator Wyden's letter:
"As you may be aware, I have asked repeatedly over the past two years to see the secret legal opinions that contain the executive branch's understanding of the President's authority to kill American citizens in the course of counterterrorism operations. Senior intelligence officials have said publicly that they have the authority to knowingly use lethal force against Americans in the course of counterterrorism operations, and have indicated that there are secret legal opinions issued by the Justice Department's office of Legal Counsel that explain the basis for this authority. I have asked repeatedly to see these opinions, and I have been provided with some relevant information on the topic, but I have yet to see the opinions themselves.
.... For the executive branch to claim that intelligence agencies have the authority to knowingly kill American citizens but refuse to provide Congress with any and all legal opinions that explain the executive branch's understanding of this authority represents an alarming and indefensible assertion of executive prerogative. There are clearly some circumstances in which the President has the authority to use lethal force against Americans who have taken up arms against the United States, just as President Lincoln had the authority to order Union troops to take military action against Confederate forces during the Civil War. But it is critically important for Congress and the American public to have full knowledge of how the executive branch understands the limits and boundaries of this authority, so that Congress and the public can decide whether this authority has been properly defined, and whether the President's power to deliberately kill American citizens is subject to appropriate limitations. I have an obligation from my oath of office to review any classified legal opinions that lay out the federal government's official views on this issue, and I will not be satisfied until I have received them. So please unsure that these opinions are provided to me, along with the other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and our cleared staff, and that we receive written assurances that future legal opinions on this topic will also be provided.
I have been asking for over a year for the complete list of countries in which the intelligence community has used its lethal counterterrorism authorities. To my surprise and dismay, the intelligence community has declined to provide me with the complete list. In my judgment, every member of the Senate Intelligence Committee should know (or be able to find out) all of the countries where United States intelligence agencies have killed or attempted to kill people. the fact that this request was denied reflects poorly on the Obama Administration's commitment to cooperation with Congressional oversight. So, please ensure that the full list of countries is provided to me, along with other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee."
As the Senate intelligence panel’s leading civil libertarian, Wyden frequently calls on the administration to explain the classified reasoning behind its most controversial national security practices. He’s accused the administration of adopting a private interpretation of the Patriot Act so expansive, for instance, that it amounts to “secret law” authorizing surveillance. Most often the administration stiffs Wyden. The National Security Agency has yet to disclose how many Americans are caught up in its dragnet for terrorist communications, one of Wyden’s major preoccupations, telling the Senator that even disclosing that number would violate Americans’ privacy.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/01/wyden-brennan/
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/a-senators-lonely-crusade-to-learn-the-cias-secrets/267180/