Judge Troubled by Obama Administration’s Position on Drone Strikes

A federal judge said she was “really troubled” by the Obama administration’s “disconcerting” position that drone strike decisions are outside the court’s competence.

The remarks by US District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer were made on Friday during a court hearing concerning the 2011 drone-strike which killed three US citizens in Yemen. The relatives of the dead filed a lawsuit, charging that the attacks violated the US citizens constitutional rights to due process and to be free from groundless detention. The government in its turn filed a motion for the case to be dismissed.

The high-profile case attracted more spectators than the courtroom could accommodate, with some people having to stand throughout the 80-minute-long heated debate between the judge and the government representative over the role of the judicial branch in making drone attack decisions.

The position of the White House, voiced by Brian Hauck, a deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, is that courts “aren’t in a position to second guess” and “don’t have the apparatus to analyze” government’s decisions concerning drone attacks.

Collyer, disconcerted by the assertions, grilled Hauck over how far this kind of logic could eventually lead the US government.

“How broadly are you asserting the right of the United States to target an American citizen? Where is the limit to this? The limit is the courthouse door,” Collyer is cited by the New York Times as saying.

Hauk insisted the drone strike decisions were never made without detailed scrutiny by the executive branch, which could well be regarded as due process.

The assertion left Collyer unconvinced. “The executive is not an effective check on the executive, when it comes to protecting constitutional rights,” she argued.

Among other arguments put forward by Hauck was that he did not want to see “counterterrorism officials distracted by the threat of litigation.”

Collyer described it as “highly unusual” that such a lawsuit, targeting top US military and national security officials on grounds of alleged constitutional violations, would be allowed to proceed. She said it will not be an easy decision and will require a lot of reading into the matter on her part.

The US citizens killed by drone strikes in Yemen in 2011 are Anwar al-Awlaki – an al-Qaeda leader, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, who had no known involvement with terrorists, and Samir Khan, reportedly an al-Qaeda propagandist.

Read more at RT