Eli Lake has an important interview with White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan:
In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Brennan said he would not talk about lists of targeted American terrorists. However, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been tracking down U.S. nationals and U.S. passport holders who pose security threats, like the Yemen-based al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, he said.
The most important element of the interview to my mind, however, is this:
"If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response," Mr. Brennan said. "If an American person or citizen is in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place, and they are trying to carry out attacks against U.S. interests, they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response. And it can take many forms."
The al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Shabaab in Somalia is currently fighting an insurgency against the internationally recognized (and American-backed) Transitional Federal Government in Somalia. Al-Shabaab has recruited more Americans than any other group -- at least 20 -- so Brennan's warning that there are "dozens" of Americans who have joined terror groups isn't exactly news.
What is news, though, is that Brennan seems to have revealed a lower threshold for targeting American citizens with lethal action. It's one thing to argue that since person X is a member of an organization at war with the United States, they can be targeted as a matter of self-defense, as State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh did. It's quite another to say that an American citizen threatening a "U.S. interest" anywhere in the world is also subject to targeted assassination. That's a much broader category, and a much broader field of conflict.
Indeed, while Al-Shabaab has yet to launch an attack against the U.S., you could conceivably target Americans who joined them for assassination under Brennan's standard based on the fact that they threaten "U.S. interests" in Somalia, where the U.S. military is not at war. Not just in Somalia, either. In "any other place." So Brennan didn't just confirm that the administration targets U.S. citizens for killing. He appears to have revealed that the administration does so under a much broader rubric than previously known.
I'm sort of hard-pressed to understand how this isn't simply an unrestricted license for the administration to kill whomever they want anywhere in the world, even an American citizen, subject only to an internal deliberations process among their lawyers.
-- A. Serwer