Various media reports and the obvious increase of drone missile attacks since the beginning of the Obama administration make it clear that the U.S. is engaged in an illegal assassination program throughout the world. Anyone’s name, including the names of American citizens, can be added to these extrajudicial kill lists, without any legal due process. These killings violate international law and the U.S. Constitution. But in its war of terror on the world, laws and even basic morality are routinely brushed aside by the U.S. imperialists.
The full text of the letter is below and online here
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear Mr. President:
On behalf of the ACLU and its 500,000 members, I am writing to express our profound concern about recent reports indicating that you have authorized a program that contemplates the killing of suspected terrorists – including U.S. citizens – located far away from zones of actual armed conflict. If accurately described, this program violates international law and, at least insofar as it affects U.S. citizens, it is also unconstitutional.
The U.S. is engaged in non-international armed conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq and the lawfulness of its actions must be judged in that context. The program that you have reportedly authorized appears to envision the use of lethal force not just on the battlefield in Iraq, Afghanistan, or even the Pakistani border regions, but anywhere in the world, including against individuals who may not constitute lawful targets.
Even in an armed conflict zone, individuals may be targeted only if they take a direct part in hostilities, for such time as they do so, or if they have taken up a continuous combat function. Propagandists, financiers, and other non-combat "supporters" of hostile groups cannot lawfully be targeted with lethal force. Applicable international humanitarian law also prohibits targeted killing except in order to prevent an individual’s future participation in hostilities; fighters cannot be targeted solely as retribution for past actions.
Outside armed conflict zones, the use of lethal force by the United States is strictly limited by international law and, at least in some circumstances, the Constitution. These laws permit lethal force to be used only as a last resort, and only to prevent imminent attacks that are likely to cause death or serious physical injury.
In a series of cases involving prisoners currently held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay, your administration has taken the position that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force permits the detention of individuals captured anywhere in the world, even individuals who have no connection to the battlefield. For example, your administration has advanced that argument in the case of one of our clients – Mohammedou Salahi – who was detained in Mauritania. We do not think the AUMF can be read so broadly. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court interpreted the AUMF consistently with international law, permitting the detention of a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan only because the detention of battlefield combatants was "so fundamental and accepted an incident to war as to be an exercise of the ‘necessary and appropriate force’ Congress has authorized the President to use." 542 U.S. 507, 518 (2004).
The program you have reportedly endorsed is not simply illegal but also unwise, because how our country responds to the threat of terrorism will in large measure determine the rules that govern every nation’s conduct in similar contexts. If the United States claims the authority to use lethal force against suspected enemies of the U.S. anywhere in the world – using unmanned drones or other means – then other countries will regard that conduct as justified. The prospect of foreign governments hunting and killing their enemies within our borders or those of our allies is abhorrent.
The program you have endorsed also risks the deaths of innocent people. Over the last eight years, we have seen the government over and over again detain men as "terrorists," only to discover later that the evidence was weak, wrong, or non-existent. Of the many hundreds of individuals previously detained at Guantánamo, the vast majority have been released or are awaiting release.
Furthermore, the government has failed to prove the lawfulness of imprisoning individual Guantánamo detainees in 34 of the 48 cases that have been reviewed by the federal courts thus far, even though the government had years to gather and analyze evidence for those cases and had itself determined that those prisoners were detainable. This experience should lead you to reject out of hand a program that would invest the CIA or the U.S. military with the unchecked authority to impose an extrajudicial death sentence on U.S. citizens and others found far from any actual battlefield.