Killing At Home

In a recent closed door session of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein (D-CA) asked Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, whether or not President Bush had the authority to order the killing of an al-Queda suspect in the US. Bardbury answered yes. From Newsweek:

Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances.

Current and former government officials said they could think of several scenarios in which a president might consider ordering the killing of a terror suspect inside the United States. One former official noted that before Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, top administration officials weighed shooting down the aircraft if it got too close to Washington, D.C. What if the president had strong evidence that a Qaeda suspect was holed up with a dirty bomb and was about to attack? University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein says the post-9/11 congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Al Qaeda empowered the president to kill 9/11 perpetrators, or people who assisted their plot, whether they were overseas or inside the United States. On the other hand, Sunstein says, the president would be on less solid legal ground were he to order the killing of a terror suspect in the United States who was not actively preparing an attack.

This is troubling for several reasons. What is the definition of actively planning a terrorist attack. I don't think that flight 93 fits this definition. Flight 93 was in the process of committing a terrorist act. Certainly, as horrible as it would be, I think the President would have the authority to shoot down an airliner in such a situation. That's certainly an abnormal situation though.

When most terrorist attacks occur in the world, law enforcement would be the first to interdict in the attack, and they certainly wouldn't have to wait on authorization from the President to use lethal force, so we have to assume we are talking about a situation where the attack is still in the planning stages.

The problem is that in a situation where planning is occurring, killing the suspect would be counter productive to rooting out the rest of the plot. Capturing the suspect would be far more preferential. Dead men don't talk.

However; lest we forget, this has happened before in the United States, although presidential authorization was not involved.

In 1985, the radical group Move was holed up in a Philadelphia row house. Then Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambore ordered a bomb dropped on the row house after only a twelve hour stand-off. The result, the Move members were killed, and oh yea, 53 other houses burned down as well.

This method would only really work in context with the war on terror if all the terrorists were holed up in one house with a chemical or biological weapon where a bomb could vaporize the chemicals or germs. I think this technique would do the terrorists work for them if it was a dirty bomb, but I'm not entirely sure about that.

There may be other scenarios, but I can't think of any where the president would have to order a killing.