Sen. Wyden plans tough questions for Brennan on targeted killings. ACLU files suit in the matter

Sen. Ron Wyden is not satisfied with Obama administration's legal justification for its targeted killings. The Obama administration's use of targeted killings against suspected al Qaeda-linked individuals is coming under fresh fire from liberals, civil libertarians and other critics, and is likely to generate some heat in Thursday's Senate confirmation hearings for CIA director nominee John Brennan, the current deputy national security adviser at the White House. As head of the CIA, Brennan would be in charge of the drone planes used to fire missiles at suspects, including Americans, who are alleged to be senior operational leaders of Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Complaints about the government's policy of killing suspected terrorists has been rumbling along mostly out of public view for years, but Monday's leak of a constitutionally rickety administrative memo detailing justification for killing Americans abroad has added kindling to the objections. So much so that the American Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit in the matter Tuesday night.

The drone war, the use of pilot-less aircraft controlled by joystick via satellite from thousands of miles away to search out and kill suspected terrorists, did not begin with the Obama administration. But it has been expanded in the past four years. This has meant that "collateral damage"'the rancid euphemism for civilian deaths caused by military action'has also grown. Actual figures of such deaths are hard to come by because the government has chosen not to keep count. Some critics have put the ratio of civilian bystanders to targeted individuals at 10-1. But there is just no way to know.

So far, drone attacks have been confined to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But there are hints that these might be expanded to take in al Qaeda-affiliates in Saharan North Africa from bases in Niger.

The leaked "white paper" memo, which members of two congressional committees received in secret last June, raises three big concerns. It redefines an "imminent" attack in such a way as to make the term meaningless. It states that judicial review is out of the question'impractical and unnecessary. And it implies that the president's inherent powers under Article II of the U.S. Constitution give him pretty much carte blanche in ordering targeted killings against Americans outside the country suspected of being high-level Al Qaeda operatives. The government killed three U.S. citizens in two attacks in Yemen in 2011.

While the leaked memo is mostly devoted to arguing that the president has targeted killing powers under the September 2001 congressional authorization to use military force (AUMF) against terrorists, it's not clear whether the administration is also claiming the president'any president'has assassination powers under Article II. If that is the claim, then Congress could not stop the executive branch from killing U.S. citizens unless it rewrote the Constitution. Repealing the AUMF would not be enough.

Democratic Sen Ron Wyden of Oregon is one of a double-handful of senators who have repeatedly challenged the administration's failure to make its legal position on targeted killings clear. He is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that will be hearing Brennan's confirmation testimony. Continue reading about criticism of the administration's targeted killing policy and its legal justification below the fold.