Security: Unprecedented lawsuit challenges “Targeted Killing”

The American Civil Liberties Union today released a new video condemning the U.S. government practice of issuing death sentences without due process as part of its targeted killing policy. “Targeted Killing” is being released to coincide with the filing today of an unprecedented lawsuit by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) challenging the government's asserted authority to use lethal force against U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield without judicial process, and without disclosing the standards it uses to target individuals for death.

The four-minute video features ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, former CIA officer Jack Rice, CCR Executive Director Vince Warren and United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings Philip Alston.

In the video, Jaffer warns against turning the entire globe into a war zone, saying, “Everybody recognizes that the government has the authority to use lethal force in actual zones of armed conflict, in Iraq for example, or Afghanistan. But what we’re talking about here is a use of lethal force on people who are located far away from those zones. It’s one thing to assert war time authorities in zones of actual conflict, and it’s another thing to assert — as the administration is now doing — that the entire world is a battlefield.”

Rice describes targeted killings as “death sentences without due process.” He points out about potential targets that “we don't know that they're guilty and we don’t have any transparency in the government to confirm that they are. If they are killed it’s only after the fact that we find out, and we just have to hope that the Americans are correct.”

Warren speaks of the importance of upholding American values while fighting terrorism. He says that “when the whole world is looking for a solution of how to deal with a terrorist threat, the one thing that we can’t do in this country is abandon our principles, because it’s the principles of international human rights that will get the world through this.”

While there are extremely narrow circumstances under which the government can authorize the targeting and killing of suspected terrorists without due process, international law and the Constitution require such killings to be limited to instances of imminent threat in which there are no non-lethal means available to stop the threat. The U.S. government refuses to disclose the standards it uses for putting people on kill lists, and it appears that the government’s asserted authority is far broader than the law permits.



Source: ACLU