WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama must approve operational plans to target overseas terror suspects with drones or other weapons outside war zones, but in some cases does not sign off on specific strikes, according to newly-declassified administration guidelines.
In addition to setting out the role of the president, the guidelines emphasize the importance of “verifying” the identity of high value targets, even as they outline the criteria and legality of striking unidentified others when “necessary to achieve U.S. policy objectives.”
The guidelines provide rules for targeting U.S. citizens abroad, and include lengthy guidance on what to do with captured terror suspects. “In no event,” the document says, “will additional detainees be brought to the detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.”
The 18-page top secret document was declassified and released late Friday, with relatively minor redactions, in response to a federal court order. At the time Obama signed the guidelines, in May 2013, the administration released a brief “fact sheet” on procedures and criteria for such operations that were drawn from the classified version.
Those rules included “near certainty” that the terrorist target was present, and that no civilians would be injured or killed; that the target posed a “continuing and imminent” threat to U.S. persons; that capture was not feasible; and all relevant domestic and international laws were obeyed.
There is no legal requirement that Obama’s successors adhere to the same rules. But administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about internal discussions, have said that compilation of the guidelines, and making them public, will restrain other presidents.
“The president has emphasized that the U.S. government should be as transparent as possible with the American people about our counterterrorism operations,” National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said of the new release.
Last month, the administration published aggregate numbers on how many civilians have been killed by CIA and military strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Libya. The numbers — 64 to 116 civilians and 2,372 and 2,581 “combatants” in 473 strikes in countries where the United States is not at war — were challenged by nongovernment groups as discounting many more civilian deaths. The figures do not include actions in the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The newly-released document was the subject of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in the fall of 2013. The administration, on the basis of “presidential communications” privilege, had denied the ACLU’s petition for its release under the Freedom of Information Act.
Early this year, after Judge Colleen McMahon, in the Southern District of New York, questioned that privilege, the government said it would publicly release a redacted version.
The document’s dry, bureaucratic language seems in stark contrast to the presumably dire consequences of the actions it outlines, and it leaves a number of questions unanswered. What appears to be a description of information to be included in the profile of an individual target is blacked out.
It provides no details of how high value targets are chosen or any geographic limitations, and includes several presidential waivers of its criteria in the event of “fleeting opportunity” to take action.
Numerous international law experts have said that the administration’s overall terminology and justification for lethal strikes are novel and without precedent. “The government has essentially invented its own set of standards … somewhere in between” international law covering war zones and outside areas,” Jaffer said. “This doesn’t provide any more clarity about the substantive standards the government is using.”
