Drone Policy for US Citizens

[Content Note: Drones; violence.]

That is, the policy under which the Obama administration justifies using drones against US citizens:

A federal appeals court on Monday released a redacted version of the U.S. Justice Department's memorandum of justification for a 2011 drone attack that killed Anwar al Awlaki, an American-born Islamist preacher suspected of having ties to al Qaeda.

The memo says that because the U.S. government considered al Awlaki to be an "operational leader" of an "enemy force," it was legal for the Central Intelligence Agency to attack him with a drone even though he was a U.S. citizen.

The memo says the killing was further justified under Congressional authorization for the use of U.S. military force following the Sept. 11, 2001 hijacked-plane attacks.

The Obama administration released the memo in response to a court order following Freedom of Information lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times.

...Human rights advocates criticized the legal justification outlined in the memo as overly broad and a distortion of the law.

Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, described the justification as "highly aggressive and controversial interpretations of international law."

That post-9/11 authorization for the use of military force, aka the AUMF, has been used for all manner of fuckery for 13 years. It's never going to be repealed so long as we are fighting "the war on terror." It's magic for every US president.

And the only sort of person who would get rid of it is the sort who would never want the office of the US presidency.

Or could win, even if they did.