Federal Judge Tosses Lawsuit Against Obama Administration Over Drone Strikes

The case is Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta (sometimes called Al-Awlaki v. Panetta), filed by the father of Anwar al-Awlaki.

This one's touchy for me. Anwar al-Awlaki had certainly joined al-Qaeda and was indeed an "enemy combatant." But he was a U.S. citizen and his targeted killing denied him of due process in a court of law. He should have been captured and brought to justice, just like the president always says he's going to do when Americans are killed in terrorists attacks. To be clear, I shed no tears for the man. I just don't love the idea of the U.S. government targeting its own citizens for extrajudicial killings. Other than that, I love the drone warfare program. It's killer!

See the New York Times, "Judge Dismisses Suit Against Administration Officials Over Drone Strikes":

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit against top Obama administration officials that was filed by the parents of three United States citizens whom the government killed without trial in drone strikes, including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric.

In a 41-page opinion, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that courts should hesitate before deciding to hold a government official personally responsible for violating a citizen’s constitutional rights in the context of a wartime action.

“The persons holding the jobs of the named defendants must be trusted and expected to act in accordance with the U.S. Constitution when they intentionally target a U.S. citizen abroad at the direction of the president and with the concurrence of Congress,” Judge Collyer wrote. “They cannot be held personally responsible in monetary damages for conducting war.”


The lawsuit sought unspecified damages against several top national security officials for the deaths caused by two American drone strikes in Yemen.

In September 2011, a strike targeting Mr. Awlaki killed him and Samir Khan, also an American citizen. Two weeks later, another drone strike killed Mr. Awlaki’s teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. The Obama administration has said that the deaths of Mr. Khan and the younger Mr. Awlaki were unintentional.

If it stands, the ruling suggests that courts have no role to play, before or after, in reviewing the legality of government decisions to kill citizens whom officials deem to be terrorists in overseas wartime operations, even away from “hot” battlefields where conventional American forces are on the ground.

“We believe the court reached the right result,” said Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman. Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which helped bring the suit, said they had not decided whether to appeal.

Baher Azmy, the center’s legal director, criticized the judge for accepting “at face value the government’s claims” that Mr. Awlaki was a terrorist without first conducting an adversarial hearing to gather evidence.

“The Constitution cannot permit the killing of U.S. citizens based on the government’s untested claim of dangerousness,” Mr. Azmy said.

Judge Collyer cited officials’ statements that Mr. Awlaki was a terrorist leader with the Yemeni group known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. She also cited an account of his role in a plot to blow up a Detroit-bound jet in 2009, based on court documents from the trial of a Nigerian man who pleaded guilty to trying to bomb the plane, and statements by Mr. Awlaki praising and encouraging acts of terrorism.

Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman, and Sarah Khan, Mr. Khan’s mother, filed the lawsuit in July 2012 against several officials it accused of authorizing and directing the strikes, including the secretary of defense and the director of the C.I.A. It did not name the president, who is immune from such lawsuits.

I've bolded the key bit. There's something about unchecked, unreviewable executive power that rankles here. Maybe I've been reading too much Glenn Greenwald, but remember Jonathan Turley has spoken out against the Obama administration's tyrannical moves as well.

I'm not going to spend too much more time with this one. I think Judge Collyer is too deferential to executive/military power and uncritical of distinctions between U.S. citizens and non-citizen enemy combatants. Unfortunately, I think the plaintiffs erred in seeking damages from individual governmental officials. Officials are acting in the name of the state, and that's where the liability should lie. But we'll see. I doubt this will be the last on this. The concentration of power in this administration must give Dick Cheney a hard on.