More than a decade ago, I asked a question that seemed fit for a Black Mirror episode: Who cannot be put on a president’s extrajudicial kill list?
Only that query wasn’t something out of a dystopian sci-fi series. It was in response to some real-world news: in the name of fighting terrorism, President Barack Obama had asserted the power to order executions without a judge, jury, or trial.
At the time, some of us were concerned that the power would be abused both by Obama’s administration (which extrajudicially executed three US citizens) and by future presidents. Those concerns intensified after a federal court rubber-stamped Obama’s kill list, and after Obama’s spokesman brushed off the drone killing of an American teenager by saying he “should have [had] a far more responsible father.”
Fast forward to today, and the fears expressed more than a decade ago seem justified as President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth order extrajudicial murders on the high seas in the name of fighting the drug war (all while Trump pardons a drug trafficker convicted in a court of law).
Just like Obama, Trump is reportedly relying on secret memos from the same secret Justice Department office to legally justify the killings. We only know that because a protracted court battle forced the disclosure of a redacted version of one of the Obama-era memos. As Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University put it: “Our government is once again committing grave human rights abuses on the ostensible authority of a legal opinion that is being kept secret.”
It is difficult to know what rules, guidelines, or decision trees — if any — are being used by Trump, but we do know that Obama aides “develop(ed) explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures” for ordering extrajudicial murders, according to the New…
Auteur: David Sirota
