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  1. GMK says:

    What is this business about “having faith in representations” made in affirmations to the court? The whole point of stating facts under oath to a court is you are supposed to KNOW.

  2. GKJames says:

    Not to mention that the genesis of the Drone Court (Kill Court? Offing Court? Star Chamber #2?) idea was the heat-of-the-moment panic and the concern that Congress had to be seen as doing SOMETHING to address demands for transparency. True to form, the proposal is one intended to give appearances of doing something when, in fact, it’s the classic tactic of quash the problem with meaningless process.

    That said, if they did proceed with the idea, the process could in fact be elegantly simple. Give Judge Lamberth’s in-take clerk a new twin-set of rubber stamps: “Taps” and “Drones.” No need to distract the judges from their own vital stamping work on the government’s state secrets privilege arguments.

  3. orionATL says:

    i am very interested in the first sentence of this quote from glenn greenwald:


    i have speculated that the let’s-murder-a-citizen memos were post-hoc rationalizations.

    if the prez did decide to whack al-awlaki in 2009, what might it have been for?




  4. Jeffrey Kaye says:

    A bullshit court that decides a death penalty without the appropriate due process, which relies on dubious intelligence reports, is nothing more than a rubber stamp court, a modern star chamber complete with drone executors, the judges merely an assassin’s retinue.

  5. orionATL says:


    according to miss wiki:

    “… emeni sources originally said al-Aulaqi might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd, a remote mountain valley in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived. [113] Pravda reported that the planes, using Saudi Arabian and U.S. intelligence aid, killed at least 30 al-Qaeda members from Yemen and abroad, and that an al-Aulaqi house was “raided and demolished”. [114] On December 28 The Washington Post reported that U.S. and Yemeni officials said that al-Aulaqi had attended the al-Qaeda meeting. [115] Abdul Elah al-Shaya, a Yemeni journalist, said the former imam called him on December 28, said that he was well and had not attended the al-Qaeda meeting. Al-Shaya insisted that al-Aulaqi was not tied to al-Qaeda. He did not address whether he was connected to the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had tried to bomb the plane in Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. [116]…”

    using u.s. and saudi intelligence, yemeni planes made an attempt to kill al-a on dec 24, 2009.

    the undie bomber, to whom the u.s. gov ‘t tied awlaki, failed in his suicide bombing mission over detroit on dec 25, 2009.

    could this mean the u.s. knew in advance that abdultamullah was carrying a bomb?

  6. LakeEffectSnow says:

    Colonel Morris Davis, former Guantanamo prosecutor, on usa drone policy: ‘Since 9/11, we’ve been the constrained and the cowardly’

    Former Guantanamo chief prosecutor on ‘target killings’ and drones: ‘We need to stop and think about what it is we stand for’

  7. emptywheel says:

    @orionATL: The number of posts I’ve done on this topic are actually more detailed and careful than any of these.

    There were several strikes on two different days. The al-Majala strike, purportedly to stop an attack in planning, and the attempted strike on Awlaki and an AQAP person. al-Majala ended up killing some AQAP members and most of a Bedouin tribe. They missed Awlaki.

    As I have repeatedly noted, it is the official position of the IC that htey did not know Awlaki was operational when they first tried to hit him on 12/24/09. They claim they learned he was in teh aftermath of the UndieBomb plot the next day.

    There ARE some funky things abt the UB plot. There is a credible allegation he was helped through security by a seeming Indian man in Schipol (both Yemenis and Saudis might look Indian). There are reasons to doubt DOJ claims about what UB really testified to. UB tried to argue–w/expert background–that the explosives he had could not have blown up the plane.

    But we don’t know for sure about all those things. My biggest take is that we targeted a Bedouin tribe in Yemen, supposedly w/Yemeni and Saudi intell help, in teh name of stopping an imminent attack, and MISSED an imminent attack that was far more serious. The two together ended up creating more of a need for CT forces in Yemen, which might serve the interest of both the Saudis and Yemenis.

  8. 4jkb4ia says:

    This is why even Scott Shane figured out that you couldn’t use the FISA Drone Court in the heat of the moment, but it was more plausible to use it to put people on the government’s kill list. Either would involve 5th/6th Amendment issues (“no one should be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”). IANAL but due process of law would almost have to involve defense counsel, which would be easier in the second scenario. You could have a pool of people willing to be defense attorneys before this court if it has to be secret.

    I still did not watch the hearing YET, but there may be a block of 3 hours sometime this week.

  9. orionATL says:

    tx, ew for the comment and for the extraordinary sleuthing you’ve done on this important story.

    i’ve followed your complex map-making here way too long to be foolish enough to suggest to you what was long ago evident to you.

    for the brennan/al-a story du jour, my intuition is that the white paper is a whitewash, essentially a political snd legal amnesty for the prez and his executioner.

    the two dates dec24 and 25 could be taken to demonstrate that, i.e.,that they went after al-a a day before the mad nigerian tried to set his underware on fire. since strikes take some time to organize, it’s possible they decided to go after al-a weeks before – possibly out of frustration at another yet another, earlier failure to detect a muslim attack, that involving n. hassan.

    this reasoning may not reflect what actually happened, but it does raise questions about the admin’s story-telling, specifically any implication of their’s that there was a policy with solid legal reasoning behind it before any american citizen was targeted. we had, then, a profoundly inexperienced president only a few months in office and likely not in control of his military/paramilitary. we had, then also, highly experienced military bureaucrats working the white house. this would be a perfect situation to create a foolish, later problematic, action decision.

    we may need a long time to clean up the consequences of this dangerous, impulsive, unnecessary folly.

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