Officials: It's OK to kill U.S. al-Qaida members

December 4, 2002

BY JOHN J. LUMPKIN

WASHINGTON--American citizens working for al-Qaida overseas can legally be targeted and killed by the CIA under President Bush's rules for the war on terrorism, U.S. officials say.

The authority to kill U.S. citizens is granted under a secret finding signed by the president after the Sept. 11 attacks that directs the CIA to attack al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The authority makes no exception for Americans, so permission to strike them is understood, officials said.

These officials said the authority will be used only when other options are unavailable. Military strikes will take place only when law enforcement and internal security efforts by allied foreign countries fail, the officials said.

Capturing and questioning al-Qaida operatives is preferable, even more so if an operative is a U.S. citizen, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Any decision to strike an American will be made at the highest levels, perhaps by the president.

On Nov. 3, a CIA-operated Predator drone fired a missile that destroyed a carload of suspected al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. The target of the attack, a Yemeni named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, was the top al-Qaida operative in Yemen. Efforts by Yemeni authorities to detain him had failed.

But the CIA didn't know a U.S. citizen, Yemeni-American Kamal Derwish, was in the car. He died, along with al-Harethi and four other Yemenis.

The Bush administration said killing an American in this fashion was legal. ''No constitutional questions are raised here. There are authorities that the president can give to officials,'' said Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser. ''He's well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority.''

U.S. authorities have alleged that Derwish was the leader of an al-Qaida cell in suburban Buffalo, N.Y. Most of the alleged members of the cell were arrested and charged with supporting terrorists, but Derwish was not accused of any crime in American courts.

Experts on the Constitution and the international laws of war said the Bush administration's definitions create problems. Al-Qaida members don't serve in a foreign nation's army. Nor do they take to traditional battlefields, except in Afghanistan. But Bush and al-Qaida have defined the entire world as a battlefield.

''That is the most vulnerable aspect of the theory,'' said Scott L. Silliman, director of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. ''Could you put a Hellfire missile into a car in Washington, D.C., under the same theory? The answer is yes, you could.'' AP