How do you define murder?
by digby
Emptywheel on the newly released Awlaki memo:
Importantly, the memo doesn't include the government's discussion about what makes a terrorism suspect an "imminent threat," and the lengths to which the government must go to try to capture the suspect before it is deemed infeasible — both central standards in the government's claim to be able to kill Americans. (Those may appear in a February 2010 memo Barron also wrote to authorize Awlaki's killing.) For all we know, Obama's team watched a YouTube video of an Awlaki sermon and looked at a map of Yemen before deciding it was drone time.
But the government did leave unredacted a hint of the standard for review — and it is pretty shocking. Rather than speaking of probable cause — the standard a court would use before approving a mere wiretap on Awlaki— the memo instead weighs whether "a decision-maker could reasonably decide that the threat posed by [Awlaki]'s activities to United States persons is 'continued' and 'imminent.'" Not only does the memo approve bypassing due process, but it sets the standard unbelievably low for a decision taken with a lot of advance notice.
Wow. It sure is a good thing our leaders are so good and so not evil or you might think someone could easily make a big boo boo.
Emptywheel has much more detail. But this Vox explainer lays out the basic points we know and don't know about the memo. We understand they've based their finding on the 2001 Authorization to use military force in Afghanistan. We don't know anything about the case against Awlaki himself because it's been redacted. And we don't know how they thread the important needle that gets them off the hook for plain old murder charges --- the CIA, you see, has never before been considered a military force allowed to kill as a military institution under international and domestic law. That part's redacted too.
The takeaway seems to be that the administration became very agitated at the notion set forth by legal scholars that they had literally committed murder under domestic statutes. So they wrote a very long and detailed memo setting forth justifications to answer that charge. But they've redacted so much of it that nobody can really make heads or tails out of the rationales behind it.
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