Academic literature on the topic 'Targeted killing – Government policy – United States'

AbstractFor the first time since the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada is in an armed conflict with an insurgency that has actively recruited Canadians and directed them to use or promote violence against Canada. In the result, the Canadian government may ask its soldiers to target and kill fellow Canadians abroad or to assist allies in doing so. This situation raises a host of novel legal issues, including the question of “targeted killing.” This matter arose for the United Kingdom in 2015 when it directed the use of military force against several Britons believed to be plotting a terrorist attack against the United Kingdom from abroad. This incident sparked a report from the British Parliament highlighting legal dilemmas. This article does the same for Canada by focusing on the main legal implications surrounding a targeted killing by the Canadian government of a Canadian citizen abroad. This exercise shows that a Canadian policy of targeted killing would oblige Canada to make choices on several weighty legal matters. First, the article discusses the Canadian public law rules that apply when the Canadian Armed Forces deploy in armed conflicts overseas. It then analyzes international law governing state uses of military force, including the regulation of the use of force (jus ad bellum) and the law of armed conflict (jus in bello). It also examines an alternative body of international law: that governing peacetime uses of lethal force by states. The article concludes by weaving together these areas of law into a single set of legal questions that would necessarily need to be addressed prior to the targeted killing of a Canadian abroad.

SummaryIf state practice is any indication, targeted killing is increasingly becoming regarded as a viable and effective response to the threat posed by terrorist organizations. Its growing role in armed conflict makes it particularly important that international humanitarian law (IHL) prove capable of providing an effective framework within which this practice may be governed. As it is currently conceived, however, IHL has shown itself ill-suited to the particular nature of armed conflicts between states and terrorist organizations on a broad level and, more specifically, to the practice of targeted killing. This article examines the decision of the Israeli supreme Court in Public Committee against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel as an example of an effort to fit targeted killing within IHL, focusing on its characterization of “terrorists” and its imposition of the “least harmful means” requirement. The author suggests that, while the former exposes the difficulty of reconciling this development in armed conflict with existing rules, the latter demonstrates the benefits of relying on fundamental principles of IHL, in this case that of military necessity. The article concludes by contending that it is these principles, rather than existing rules, that should be viewed as the appropriate mechanism by which to accommodate targeted killing within IHL.

When do U.S. presidents change policy to respond with increased intensity to mass killings of civilians in other countries? The twentieth century witnessed a series of state-sponsored mass killings in a variety of regions around the world. Conventional arguments suggest that although the United States has the capability of responding to such atrocities, it often fails to do so because of a lack of political will for action. Historical evidence suggests, however, that although the modal response of the United States is inaction, at times U.S. presidents reverse course to respond more forcefully to mass killings. Three factors explain when and why these policy shifts happen: the level at which dissent occurs within the U.S. government, the degree of congressional pressure for policy change, and the extent to which the case of mass killing poses a political liability for the president. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's creation of the War Refugee Board in 1944 during the Holocaust supports this theory.

The targeted killing of the Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in an American drone strike in January 2020 marked a novel development in the operation of the United States' drone programme; targeting a member of a state's armed forces as opposed to a member of a non-state armed group. Soleimani's killing offers an opportunity to re-examine the scope of Executive Order 12,333, which prohibits employees of the United States Government from committing assassinations. This article applies Executive Order 12,333's "assassination ban" to the Soleimani strike. The assassination ban's scope varies depending on whether it is applied in a wartime or peacetime context. This article concludes from the surrounding factual and legal context that the strike should be analysed according to the peacetime definition of assassination, which necessitates an analysis of the strike's compliance with the jus ad bellum, the legal framework applicable to uses of interstate force. It finds that the strike's non-compliance with the jus ad bellum, in addition to its likely political motive create a strong argument that the strike would constitute a prohibited assassination under the terms of the Executive Order, but the legal framework surrounding the Executive Order limits its direct enforceability with respect to presidentially authorised uses of force. It ultimately concludes that, despite the assassination ban's lack of direct enforceability, it nevertheless creates a strong normative counterbalance against an increasing tendency toward expansive uses of extraterritorial force.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, New York City-based Community Relations Service (“CRS”) Regional Director Reinaldo Rivera was at a New Jersey summit on racial profiling. At 8:46 a.m., an American Airlines 767 crashed into the North Tower of New York City’s World Trade Center. Because Rivera was with the New Jersey state attorney general, he quickly learned of the attack. Rivera immediately called his staff members, who at that moment were traveling to Long Island, New York, for an unrelated case. Getting into Manhattan had already become difficult, so Rivera instructed his conciliators to remain on standby. At 9:03 a.m., another 767, United Airlines Flight 175, flew into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. September 11 initiated a new, fraught-filled era for the United States. For CRS, an agency within the United States Department of Justice, it was the beginning of a long-term immersion into conflict issues that involved discrimination and violence against those whose appearance led them to be targets of anti-terrorist hysteria or mis- placed backlash. Appropriately, in the days following 9/11, the federal government, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), concentrated on ferreting out the culprits of the heinous acts. However, the FBI discovered that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible for the tragedies, and communities around the nation saw a surge of violence against people who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, requiring a response to protect those who were unfairly targeted. These outbreaks began as soon as September 12. Police in Illinois stopped 300 people from marching on a Chicago-area mosque. In Gary, Indiana, a masked gunman shot twenty-one times at a Yemeni- American gas station attendant. In Texas, a mosque was hit by six bullets. On September 15, a man who had been reported by an Applebee’s waiter as saying that he wanted to “shoot some rag heads” shot a Chevron gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh-American. The man, Frank Roque, shot through his car window, and five bullets hit Sodhi, killing him instantly. Roque drove to a home he previously owned and had sold to an Afghan-American couple and fired on it. He then shot a Lebanese-American man. According to a police report, Roque said in reference to the 9/11 tragedy, “I [cannot] take this anymore. They killed my brothers and sisters.” Former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said, reflecting ten years later on the hate crimes that followed the attack on the World Trade Center, “The tragedy of September 11th should be remembered in the sense of making sure that we [do not] let our emotions run away in terms of trying to show our commitment and conviction about patriotism [and] loyalty.” The events created a new chapter in American race relations, one in which racial tensions and fear were higher than ever for Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, Sikhs, and others who could be targeted in anti-Islamic hysteria because of their physical appearance or dress. In 2011, a CBS–New York Times poll found that 78% agreed that Muslims, Arab-Americans, and immigrants from the Middle East are singled out unfairly by people in this country. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, this number stood at 90%. The same poll also found that one in three Americans think Muslim-Americans are more sympathetic to terrorists than other Americans. To address these misconceptions in the years following 9/11, CRS has done a significant amount of outreach, dispute resolution, and training to mitigate unfounded backlash against Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs. Under CRS Director Freeman, the agency produced Sikh and Muslim cultural-competency trainings and two training videos: On Common Ground, which provides background on Sikhism and concerns about safety held by Sikhs in America; and The First Three to Five Seconds, which provides background on Muslims and information on their interactions with law enforcement. In 2009, President Obamas signed the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Junior Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The Act explicitly gave CRS jurisdiction to respond to and prevent hate crimes. For the first time, CRS jurisdiction expanded beyond race. Specifically, CRS was now authorized to work on issues of religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability in addition to race, color, and national origin. When I became CRS Director in 2012, following the continued incidents of unfounded violence and prejudice against those perceived as sharing heritage with Middle Eastern terrorists, I directed the agency to update the trainings and launched an initiative for regional offices to conduct these Sikh and Muslim cultural-competency trainings. In the years following 9/11, controversy has continued over racial profiling of Arab, Muslim, and Sikh individuals. Owing to the nature of the attack, one particular area of ongoing concern is access to airplane flights. Director of Transportation Mineta recalled how the racial profiling he witnessed echoed his own experience as a Japanese-American citizen: [T]here were a lot of people saying, “[We are] not [going to] let Middle Easterners or Muslims on the planes.” And I thought about my own experience [during World War II] because people [could not] make the distinction between the people who were flying the airplanes that attacked Pearl Harbor and the people who were living in Washington, Oregon, and California, who looked like the people flying the airplanes. In response to this problem, CRS trained thousands of law enforcement and Transit Security Association employees on cultural professionalism in working with Arab, Muslim, and Sikh individuals. The work of addressing the profiling and mistreatment of Arab-Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs also spiked after the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon. CRS conciliators again reached out to leaders throughout the country at mosques and gurdwaras to confront safety and security issues regarding houses of worship and concerns about backlash violence based on faith, nationality, and race. Since 9/11, CRS’s work on racial profiling continues to respond to increasing conflicts and tensions both within the United States and around the globe. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, CRS adjusted its priorities and reallocated resources in the wake of the September 11 tragedy to address the needs of targeted communities and further intercultural understanding. CRS did so by increasing the religious awareness training provided to law enforcement and other agencies, and it committed more resources to working with Muslim and Sikh faith and advocacy organizations and people. This work was not originally envisioned when the 1964 Civil Rights Act created CRS. How- ever, this new focus reflects how the model of the African-American civil rights movement has inspired other efforts to attain equality and justice for minority groups in the United States. Just as the tragedy in Selma helped lead to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Oak Creek tragedy helped lead the FBI to update its hate crime categories. Former FBI Director James Comey articulated this idea best in his speech to the Anti-Defamation League, stating “do a better job of tracking and reporting hate crime to fully understand what is happening in our communities and how to stop it.” The Community Relations Service has evolved over time since its 1964 origins, and a substantial component has been the work in response to post 9/11 unfounded racial and religious violence.

Using data from 14 government sources, we develop comprehensive estimates of US economic activity by sector, legal form of organization, and firm size to characterize how four government direct-lending programs--the Paycheck Protection Program, Main Street Lending Program, Corporate Credit Facilities, and Municipal Liquidity Facility--relate to these classes of economic activity in the United States. The classes targeted by these programs are vast--accounting for 97 percent of total US employment--though entity-specific financial criteria limit coverage within specific programs. These programs notionally cover a far larger universe than what was targeted by analogous Great Recession-era lending policies.

Abstract The use of unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones,” as part of the United States’ (US) targeted killing (TK) program dramatically increased after the War on Terror (WoT) was declared. With the ambiguous nature and parameters of the WoT, and stemming from the postulation of numerous low-level, niche-, and other securitizations producing a monolithic threat, US drone operations now constitute a vital stitch in the extensive fabric of US counterterrorism policy. This article employs the theories of securitization and macrosecuritization as discussed by Buzan (1991, 2006), and Buzan and Wæver (2009) to understand targeted killing, by means of weaponized drones, as an extraordinary measure according to the Copenhagen School’s interpretation. An overarching securitization and the use of the “security” label warrants the emergency action of targeted killing through the use of drones as an extraordinary measure. We argue that the WoT serves as a means of securitizing global terrorism as a threat significant enough to warrant the use of drone warfare as an extraordinary use of force. By accepting the WoT as a securitization process we can reasonably accept that the US’ response(s) against that threat are also securitized and therefore become extraordinary measures.

Using data from 14 government sources, we develop comprehensive estimates of U.S. economic activity by sector, legal form of organization, and firm size to characterize how four government direct lending programs—the Paycheck Protection Program, the Main Street Lending Program, the Corporate Credit Facilities, and the Municipal Lending Facilities—relate to these classes of economic activity in the United States. The classes targeted by these programs are vast—accounting for 97 percent of total U.S. employment—though entityspecific financial criteria limit coverage within specific programs. These programs notionally cover a far larger universe than what was targeted by analogous Great Recession-era lending policies. We relate our estimates to those from timely alternative data sources, which do not typically cover the majority of the economic universe.

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, killing approximately 480,000 people each year. This crushing health burden falls disproportionately, and recent CDC data shows that large disparities in adult cigarette smoking remain. One factor in these disparities is the use of flavors. Menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products are used at higher rates by vulnerable populations including youth and young adults, African Americans, women, Hispanics and Asian Americans. This is no accident; the tobacco industry has long targeted these same groups. Given FDA's failure to act to ban flavored tobacco products, states and municipalities are considering taking matters into their own hands to protect their communities from these dangerous products. The authors will explore state and local authority to restrict the sales of these products and review the evidence base indicating that removing flavored tobacco products – and menthol combustible products in particular - from the market would significantly reduce the toll of illness and death caused by these products.

When a new strain of influenza circled the globe in the fall and winter of 1918, it swept through the United States at terrifying speed, infecting at least 25 million Americans—roughly one-quarter of the population—over the next two years. Based on any metric, the pandemic was the country's largest mass-mortality episode of the twentieth century, killing approximately 675,000 Americans and surpassing the death toll of World War I. Even as the virus struck the United States with unprecedented ferocity, however, the federal government left most public health decisions to the states, producing a disjointed and hyper-localized approach to a crisis that was national and global in scope. In the absence of a strong federal role, state governments carved out their own policy paths, adopting widely divergent strategies to stem the spread of the disease. This preventive playing field was wildly uneven. Some states were well-equipped with robust public health infrastructures; others lacked the tools to manage the disease's rampant spread.

This paper assesses U.S. national security policies in surveillance, detention, interrogation and torture, and targeted killing to determine whether they comport with international human rights law and international humanitarian law. The U.S. is responsible for adhering to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Geneva Conventions. These human rights law documents can be understood through court decisions, congressional statutes, and widely accepted interpretations from organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the UN Human Rights Council. Further, this paper offers prescriptions on how international human rights law and international humanitarian law can be updated to better deal with the current war on terror.
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The debate over targeted killing in this volume begins with a joint introduction by the authors, briefly setting out the terms of discussion, and presenting a short overview of the practice—what is targeted killing, and how has it been used, in which conflicts, and by whom. Following some historical examples, mostly from Israel and the United States, the authors distinguish between contemporary signature strikes and personality strikes, and focus their forthcoming debate on the latter, i.e., named killing. While this book touches on a wide array of issues, e.g., civilian immunity, drones, violation of sovereignty, abuse of government power, etc., the authors urge the reader early on to maintain a steadfast focus on the essence of targeted killing debated throughout, namely, the targeting for death of named and identified individuals by our states and leaders.

Abstract This chapter addresses the United Kingdom’s adoption of targeted killing by drone strike as a counterterrorism policy. It compares the domestic costs of America’s application of a war paradigm in its counterterrorism efforts over the past two decades to the United Kingdom’s less disruptive retention of a crime paradigm, before demonstrating the ways in which the British government has gradually adopting aspects of America’s approach, including a reliance upon the laws of war to justify lethal action against terrorist targets abroad. The chapter then challenges this shift toward a war paradigm to defend the UK homeland by urging that Britain retain its recognition of terrorists as criminals not combatants, instead utilizing human rights law, in particular Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to provide an adequate and less domestically fractious model for the application of lethal force when absolutely necessary against terrorists plotting imminent attacks from foreign safe havens.

In recent years, mission-oriented approaches have received growing interest in science, technology and innovation (STI) policies against the background of two developments. First, while so-called “horizontal” or “generic” approaches to research, technology and innovation policies have largely been successful in improving the general innovation performance or the rate of innovation, there are perceived limitations in terms of insufficiently addressing the direction of technological change and innovation. Second, “grand societal challenges” emerged on policy agendas, such as climate change, security, food and energy supply or ageing populations, which call for thematic orientation and the targeting of research and innovation efforts. In addition, the apparent success of some mission-oriented initiatives in countries like China, South Korea, and the United States in boosting technological development for purposes of strengthening competitiveness contributed to boosting the interest in targeted and directional government interventions in STI. Against the backdrop of this renewed interest in mission-oriented STI policy, the OECD has addressed the growing importance of this topic and launched a project looking into current experiences with Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy (MOIP). The present study on MOIP in Austria was commissioned by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Energy, Mobility, Environment, Innovation and Technologiy (BMK) and comprises the Austrian contributions to this OECD project. The study aims at contributing Austrian experiences to the international debate and to stimulate a national debate on MOIP.