The US government has defended its plan to assassinate overseas American citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist efforts against the United States.“The unfortunate reality is that our nation will likely continue to face terrorist threats that at times originate with our own citizens,” US Attorney General Eric Holder said on Monday at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago.
- “When such individuals take up arms against this country and join al-Qaeda in plotting attacks designed to kill their fellow Americans, there may be only one realistic and appropriate response. We must take steps to stop them in full accordance with the [US] Constitution. In this hour of danger, we simply cannot afford to wait until plans are carried out, and we will not,” Holder said.
- The initiative to defend the targeted assassination plan came after the US administration was pressured by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to provide justifications that killing Americans suspected of terrorist efforts is a legitimate measure.
- “Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to court, either before or after the fact,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
- The US-based rights group filed a lawsuit in a New York court on February 1, demanding the disclosure of documents authorizing targeting Americans overseas using lethal force.
- Citing a 2011 killing of US born Anwar al-Awlaqi in a US assassination drone attack in Yemen, the ACLU called for "basic -- and accurate -- information about the government's targeted killing program.”
The plan has also received criticism from a number of other civil liberties organizations and activists within and outside the United States. “From what we know so far, the memo is highly reminiscent of the torture memos written during the Bush administration, in which irrelevant US cases and statutes are cited in order to give the CIA a green light,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law expert at the University of Notre Dame, adding that “relevant international law does not permit targeted killing far from battle zones.”
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