Paul’s comments were sharply criticized by Republicans senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain as alarmist and hypocritical considering his silence during Bush’s drone campaign. Referencing the mounting criticism of Obama’s drone campaign by Fox News and many Republicans, Graham said, “To my Republican colleagues, I don’t remember any of you coming down here suggesting that President Bush was going to kill anybody with a drone, do you? They had a drone program back then, all of a sudden this drone program has gotten every Republican so spun up. What are we up to here?” He added, “People are astonished that President Obama is doing many of the things that President Bush did. I’m not astonished. I congratulate him for having the good judgment to understand we’re at war. And to my party, I’m a bit disappointed that you no longer apparently think we’re at war.”88 For his part McCain said, “We’ve done, I think, a disservice to a lot of Americans by making them think that somehow they’re in danger from their government. They’re not. But we are in danger from a dedicated, longstanding, easily replaceable-leadership enemy that is hellbent on our destruction.”89
As the Paul filibuster demonstrated, no issue related to the drone campaign caused more consternation among Americans than the notion that drones could be used to kill Americans. Writing for the Huffington Post, columnist Anthony Gregory expressed the concerns of Paul and many other Americans in both parties over the precedent of an American president ordering the killing of an American without a triaclass="underline"
It was actually something special when President Obama ordered the drone killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki….
Obama’s summary execution of these Americans, conducted as a military operation through the CIA, would indeed seem to break with precedent and qualify as one of those watershed moments in America’s long retreat from the rule of law. While liberals criticized the Bush administration for warrant-less wiretapping and detentions without trial, one would think that the outright killing of an American citizen without due process would qualify as a greater offense.90
Journalist David Cole, writing for the New York Review of Books, expressed his concerns as welclass="underline" “As American citizens we have a right to know when our own government believes it may execute us (and others) without a trial.”91
For his part, President Obama said that Awlaki had been “planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans.” His death demonstrated that terrorists “will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.”92 Most Americans seemed to agree with Obama. According to a subsequent poll, a full 69 percent of Americans who were asked if the strike on Awlaki was justified agreed that it was.93
To further gain legitimacy for the strikes, on March 5, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a talk on the issue at Northeastern University, saying that “the unfortunate reality is that our nation will likely continue to face terrorist threats that—at times—originate with our own citizens. We must take steps to stop them—in full accordance with the Constitution. In this hour of danger, we simply cannot afford to wait until deadly plans are carried out—and we will not.” He further said, “Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack. In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.”94
Holder continued, “Any decision to use lethal force against a United States citizen—even one intent on murdering Americans who has become an operational leader of Al Qaeda in a foreign land—is among the gravest that government leaders can face.” He then laid out a three-part formula for determining whether the targeted killing against a U.S. citizen is legally justified. He said the government must determine that the citizen in question poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, capture is not possible, and the killing would be consistent with laws of war.95 The drone strikes against those posing an imminent threat would be limited to American terrorists abroad. In March 2013 Holder stated, “The government has no intention to carry out any drone strikes in the United States. It’s hard for me to imagine a situation in which that would occur.”96
As if to hammer home the point that the Obama administration would kill those Americans deemed to be terrorists operating with the enemy abroad, in the month following Awlaki’s death a CIA drone also killed Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, Abdul Rahman, and a seventeen-year-old Yemeni cousin in a blitz of drone strikes on al Qaeda vehicles and safe houses in Yemen.97 Abdul Rahman Awlaki’s grandfather furiously denied the charges that his grandson was a terrorist and said, “To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense. They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”98 For their part, U.S. officials claimed they had “no idea” the son was traveling with a supposed Egyptian al Qaeda agent, and a senior Obama administration official added, “This was a military-aged male travelling with a high-value target.”99
Ironically enough, postings on several Yemeni al Qaeda websites after the son’s death claimed that Abdul Rahman Awlaki, who had been dubbed “Usayyid” (the Lion’s Cub) by al Qaeda after his father’s death, had sworn that he wanted to be martyred just as his father had been before him. One al Qaeda site said, “His sadness reached its peak after the American planes assassinated his father…. But when he said to the Emir [al Qaeda leader] of the city of Azzam, ‘I hope to attain martyrdom as my father attained it,’ it did not come to his mind that this will happen, and just one day after he said it.”100
OBAMA’S PERSONAL ROLE IN APPROVING A SECRET DRONE KILL LIST
On May 29, 2012, the New York Times published an extraordinary article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane titled “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” which reported that the president was intimately involved in the moral and targeting decisions made in the drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia.101 The article depicted a president who realized after several close terrorist calls (including the failed bombing of a flight to Detroit in 2009 by the underwear bomber) that if even one terrorist attack succeeded, his presidency would be marked by it. According to Becker and Shane,
Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record….
While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda—even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen [Awlaki], a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”…
This secret “nominations” process [of names to add to the “kill list”] is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia. The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda…. A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.