Reply #13: Who Can't America Kill?

[Octafish]

Who Can't America Kill?

Since September 11, the threshold for who and where the U.S. military and intelligence community can kill has been increasingly lowered, with no end in sight

By Micah Zenko
The Atlantic
Sep 7 2011, 9:52 AM ET1

EXCERPT...

In the wake of the African Embassy Bombings in 1998, President Clinton issued three top secret "Memoranda of Understanding," which authorized the CIA to kill Bin Laden and his key lieutenants--fewer than ten people overall--only if they resisted arrest. The CIA interpreted the memoranda as insufficient by limiting the use of lethal force. As George Tenet noted in his memoir, "Almost every authority granted to CIA prior to 9/11 made it clear that just going out and assassinating would not have been permissible or acceptable."

After 9/11, President George W. Bush made the policy of targeted killing more explicit. Just six days after the attacks, Bush signed a Memorandum of Notification that authorized the CIA to kill, without further presidential approval, some two dozen al-Qaeda leaders who appeared on an inital "high-value target list."

Included on this list was Abu Ali al-Harithi, an operational planner in the al-Qaeda cell that attacked the U.S.S. Cole. On November 3, 2002, a Predator drone killed al-Hariti, four Yemenis, and Ahmed Hijazi, a naturalized U.S. citizen and the ringleader of an alleged terrorist sleeper cell in Lackawanna, New York. This was the first targeted killing outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the first such killing of a naturalized U.S. citizen.

In Pakistan, the U.S. counterterrorism approach after 9/11 focused primarily on law enforcement and intelligence exploitation through arrest and interrogation (including torture) followed by either release or imprisonment. As the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism: 2002 report stated: "The Government of Pakistan arrested and transferred to US custody nearly 500 suspected al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists."

By 2004, however, the United States largely stopped detaining suspected operatives from Pakistan, and instead began killing them with armed Predator drones.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/who-cant-america-kill/244663/

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