PART III

THE DOMESTICATION OF COUNTERINSURGENCY

Once counterinsurgency warfare has taken hold in foreign affairs, it is but a small step to extend its logic to one’s own citizens. Barely noticeable, the strategies are first applied in the same field of battle, but this time to different targets. The line between foreign combatant and suspect citizen begins to fade. Boundaries and borders become porous. Gradually we start to target our own in those foreign lands.

The year 2013 marked the first use of a targeted drone strike to assassinate a US citizen abroad. The target was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and raised in Nebraska, Minnesota, and Yemen. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Colorado State University, and did his graduate studies at San Diego State and George Washington Universities, before returning to Yemen in 2004. He became an imam there, and started posting videos of himself preaching radical sermons on the Internet. At that point, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen residing in Yemen, was marked for death.¹

His assassination was planned for several years by the Obama administration. As early as July 2010, David Barron, at the time an attorney at the Office of Legal Counsel and now a federal judge, wrote a forty-one-page legal memorandum detailing the legal justifications for killing a US citizen abroad. Barron concluded that the use of legal force was acceptable where, in his words, “the target’s activities pose a ‘continued and imminent threat of violence or death’ to US persons” and high-level intelligence officers have determined that “a capture operation would be infeasible.”² Academics and civil-liberties advocates criticized the rationale for being too vague and for failing to set standards for what is imminent or infeasible, threatening to create a dangerously broad justification for extrajudicial killing of American citizens. National security leaders, on the other hand, defended drone strikes on our citizens abroad in situations limited to those described in Barron’s memorandum, under a wartime emergency justification.³

In March 2012, President Obama’s attorney general officially declared that US citizens abroad “may be killed by US forces, but are still protected under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause” and that “it would be lawful to target a US citizen if the individual poses an imminent threat, capture is not feasible, and the operation were executed in observance of the applicable laws of war.”⁴ By 2013, Anwar al-Awlaki was dead, the victim of a targeted assassination against an American citizen abroad—without ever having been charged, tried, convicted, or sentenced to death.

In addition to al-Awlaki, nine other American citizens were killed by United States drone strikes between 2001 and 2015—although, according to official sources, they were not explicitly designated as assassination targets.⁵ In 2002, American citizen Kemal Darwish was killed in the first American drone strike in Yemen. In 2013, the US Justice Department confirmed, along with the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, the purportedly inadvertent killing of three other American citizens. The same strike that killed al-Awlaki killed another US citizen named Samir Khan, who was suspected of being an Al Qaeda militant. Al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was coincidentally killed in another drone strike the month after his father was assassinated. Jude Kenan Mohammad, another American suspected of recruiting for Al Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan in 2011. A CIA drone strike on the Pakistani border of Afghanistan in January 2015 killed an American hostage, Warren Weinstein, and a suspected American Al Qaeda militant named Ahmed Farouq. Within a week of that strike, another strike in the same region killed Adam Gadahn, an American citizen who was suspected of running Al Qaeda’s propaganda department. Although Farouq and Gadahn were allegedly high-ranking members of Al Qaeda, according to the New York Times, “there had never been a Justice Department determination that they could be marked for death.”⁶ Administration officials claim that all of these victims were simply in “the wrong place at the wrong time” despite the fact that they were terrorist suspects.

The United States has also targeted nationals of allied countries. On November 12, 2015, the US military sent an MQ-9 Reaper drone and killed Mohammed Emwazi, a British citizen. Emwazi grew up in London and was a naturalized British citizen. He was detained by British authorities in 2010 and barred from leaving the United Kingdom, but eventually got to Syria and purportedly joined the Islamic state. Prime Minister David Cameron described the strike as a “combined effort” between US and British forces, and defended it as “an act of self-defense” and “the right thing to do.”⁷ On October 16, 2015, a US airstrike targeted German hip-hop artist Denis Cuspert in Syria. Early claims that he had been killed later proved false, but US officials acknowledged that Cuspert, who left Germany to join ISIS in 2012, was the target of the attack. Cuspert converted to Islam around 2007 and began going by the name Abu Malik in 2011, using his social media platforms to disseminate Islamic devotional music (nasheeds) and rap videos purportedly to recruit young Western Muslims. Cuspert was labeled a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” by the Department of State on February 9, 2015. In confirming the targeted airstrike, Department of Defense spokeswoman Elissa Smith said that Cuspert’s death would “contribute to our efforts to stop foreign fighter recruitment.”⁸

All in all, as of April 23, 2015, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that there have been thirty-eight intentional and unintentional Western drone deaths, which “include ten Americans, eight Britons, seven Germans, three Australians, two Spaniards, two Canadians, one Belgian or Swiss national, and now one Italian. There have also been four ‘Westerners’ of unidentified nationality.”⁹ And from there, it’s a mere baby step to bring the counterinsurgency back home onto American soil.