{"id":1794,"date":"2011-12-01T11:20:17","date_gmt":"2011-12-01T19:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/?p=1794"},"modified":"2011-12-01T11:20:17","modified_gmt":"2011-12-01T19:20:17","slug":"obama-lawyers-citizens-targeted-if-at-war-with-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/obama-lawyers-citizens-targeted-if-at-war-with-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Lawyers: Citizens Targeted If at War With US"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Matt Apuzzo
\nWASHINGTON (AP)<\/a> — U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.<\/p>\n

The lawyers were asked at a national security conference about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. He died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen.<\/p>\n

The government lawyers, CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson, did not directly address the al-Awlaki case. But they said U.S. citizens don’t have immunity when they’re at war with the United States.<\/p>\n

Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.<\/p>\n

The courts in habeas cases, such as those involving whether a detainee should be released from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, make the determination of who can be considered an enemy combatant.<\/p>\n

Late last year, a judge threw out a lawsuit filed by al-Awlaki’s father, saying that the courts do not have the authority to review military decisions by the president aimed at protecting the country from terrorists. The cleric’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki of Yemen, was suing to prevent the U.S. from targeting his son.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Matt Apuzzo WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday. The lawyers were asked at a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[31,232,580,248],"tags":[3047,3051,3048,3050,3046,3049],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/savingtherepublic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}