The relevant portion of the bill says that the no-drone-killing inside the US rule “shall not apply to an individual who poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to another individual.”
But since the Obama administration refuses to release the Office of Legal Counsel kill program memos or any official interpretation of the phrase “imminent threat,” we don't know what this bill would actually do were it enacted.
[...]
[The] same murkiness [...] applies to the phrase “engaged in combat,” the words Eric Holder used in his brief letter to Senator Rand Paul yesterday on the question of domestic targeted killings.
[...]
Could it mean “riding in a car to a place where the CIA has intelligence that a suspect is going to build a bomb”? Could it mean “is a member of al Qaeda”?
[...]
Maybe, maybe not. But the crucial point is that, until the Obama administration comes clean and releases its kill memos to the public, we have no idea what “engaged in combat” means.
Privacy SOS
But since the Obama administration refuses to release the Office of Legal Counsel kill program memos or any official interpretation of the phrase “imminent threat,” we don't know what this bill would actually do were it enacted.
[...]
[The] same murkiness [...] applies to the phrase “engaged in combat,” the words Eric Holder used in his brief letter to Senator Rand Paul yesterday on the question of domestic targeted killings.
[...]
Could it mean “riding in a car to a place where the CIA has intelligence that a suspect is going to build a bomb”? Could it mean “is a member of al Qaeda”?
[...]
Maybe, maybe not. But the crucial point is that, until the Obama administration comes clean and releases its kill memos to the public, we have no idea what “engaged in combat” means.
Privacy SOS
[S]ince Holder conspicuously omitted the word “actively,” it isn’t clear that this is what he means. The public hasn’t seen the detailed legal memoranda underlying the CIA’s overseas drone program, and so we can’t really know what to make of Holder’s statement without knowing what the government thinks it means to be “engaged in combat” in this non-traditional conflict.
[...]
[T]he Bush Justice Department argued in 2004 that a “little old lady in Switzerland” who “gave money to a charity for an Afghan orphanage, and the money was passed to al Qaeda” might meet their definition of an “enemy combatant.”
[...]
Such definitional game-playing would not exactly be a novelty for this administration, which has apparently expanded the definition of “imminent threat” to cover people believed to be senior leaders of hostile groups, whether or not there is any evidence that they are actively engaged in planning some impending attack. […] So if this kind of hyperliteral close parsing of a few sentences seems like paranoid hairsplitting, it’s only because such word games appear to be par for the course when it comes to classified counterterrorism programs.
Cato Institute
[...]
[T]he Bush Justice Department argued in 2004 that a “little old lady in Switzerland” who “gave money to a charity for an Afghan orphanage, and the money was passed to al Qaeda” might meet their definition of an “enemy combatant.”
[...]
Such definitional game-playing would not exactly be a novelty for this administration, which has apparently expanded the definition of “imminent threat” to cover people believed to be senior leaders of hostile groups, whether or not there is any evidence that they are actively engaged in planning some impending attack. […] So if this kind of hyperliteral close parsing of a few sentences seems like paranoid hairsplitting, it’s only because such word games appear to be par for the course when it comes to classified counterterrorism programs.
Cato Institute
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