Don't you think there should be legal limitations on the President's ability to order someone's death? Note that Holder's letter recognizes no such limitations.
There should and there are. These have been presented in detail before and no doubt will be again. If Holder were to submit a lengthy memo restating the administration's legal position in regards to military action within the borders of the US, people would complain that he was trying to bury the issue in obfuscatory language.
Let me offer you instead a rule of thumb by which to judge this situation. You are aware, no doubt, that there are many combat-ready planes and ships operated by our armed forces in the airspace and waters of the continental US; and you can surely conceive of situations where those planes and ships might be ordered to intercept or even fire upon targets in response to military or terroristic threats. The primary purpose of having armed forces, after all, is for a country to defend itself from attack. If tomorrow we were to find that hostile actors had control of a jet airliner and were flying it towards a city or similarly important target, nobody would be surprised or upset if the President were to order fighter jets scrambled in order to divert even destroy it if necessary. Indeed, the previous administration came in for quite a bit of criticism over its lack of preparedness to take such actions on September 11 2001.
If you are OK with this, and I would bet money that you are, because no government in its right mind would respond to military attack by filing suit in the Supreme Court or asking congress to legislate before doing anything, then you should be OK with drones being employed for the same purpose. On the off-chance that you are opposed to any military assets of any kind being deployed within or around the US during peacetime, and that the US should not maintain any sort of defensive capability, then we are doomed to disagree.
What you describe is not targeted assassination. Your scenario depicts incident response. For example, "neutralize the several people that have hijacked this plane." Targeted assassination is, as the name suggests, aimed at a specific person, not because they are currently engaged in firing guns, hijacking planes, taking hostages, and so on, but because "intelligence suggests" that this person has been or could be involved with threats at some point. While we most all of us can envision situations in which targeted assassination is an appropriate response to a threat, the problem is that there are currently no inter-branch checks on the process that determines who is a threat. While due process doesn't mandate a trial or situation-specific court review, it's hard to argue that it doesn't demand input from any other federal branch at all. The criteria are currently determined by executive fiat and are not subject to general review by the judiciary or to modification by legislature. It's not just a matter of "drones," though the use of drones makes these issues more salient. It's about the balance of power distributed throughout the federal government.
> Targeted assassination is, as the name suggests, aimed at a specific person, not because they are currently engaged in firing guns, hijacking planes, taking hostages, and so on, but because "intelligence suggests" that this person has been or could be involved with threats at some point.
Even that [targeted assassination] has previously been used in a purely military context though (lookup what happened to Admiral Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy, not to mention counter-sniper activities throughout the past hundred years).
I have to agree with anigbrown here, if Congress or the judiciary doesn't give direction to the contrary then the Article II powers of the Commander-in-Chief can give some extremely broad powers to him with only a little bit of imagination required.
If that's something that scares Congress then they need to clip the wings early instead of whining about interpretation of law (especially interpretation at the farthest reaches of plausibility).
While due process doesn't mandate a trial or situation-specific court review, it's hard to argue that it doesn't demand input from any other federal branch at all.
I would entirely agree that the AUMF (which underpins the administration's policy on the use of drones) is overbroad and that Congress should either drastically narrow its scope or consider rescinding it completely after US troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2014, after which we would arguably no longer be in a state of war.
Likewise, I think it's past time for Congress to develop legislation on the scope of military technology - not least because we are approaching or already at the point where we have technology capable of automatically identifying and firing on targets more quickly and accurately than any human. We don't have the technology for making ethical or legal determinations about the rightness of targeting someone; I'm talking purely about the physical capabilities of machines v. humans.
Only Congress can bind the Executive on such matters. The incumbent administration can eschew any intention of using drones domestically (as they have done) but can't bind future administrations.
And Crongress has the (enumerated) power of declaring war, issuing letters of reprisal and so forth (A1,s8.11), and has lawfully granted the President broad powers to wage war under the AUMF. The fact that the President is constitutionally named as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces means that when a state of war obtains he has the privilege of commanding which military activity is to take place.
Would you please try discussing this in its proper context instead of pretending that the Executive pulled its military powers out of thin air?
As long as they're used 'to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States' by al Qaeda or its affiliates, they're being employed lawfully.
I'm not saying that that law is good or desirable. I'm just pointing out that that's how the law stands at present.
