The Obama administration’s use of unmanned drones to kill terrorism suspects overseas has withstood its strongest legal challenge — a constitutional lawsuit by the father of a U.S. citizen slain by a missile strike in Yemen nearly three years ago. The case was dismissed on Friday in a forty-one-page decision by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., Rosemary M. Collyer. Her ruling can be appealed.
Although government officials did not win on their plea that such claims should be barred completely from the courts, they did win on their argument that the courts cannot create a remedy for targeted killings without intruding on the powers of the president and Congress to wage war.
The case grew out of the targeted killing of Anwar Al-Aulaqi in September 2011 as he rode in a vehicle in the Yemeni province of al-Jawf, some ninety miles outside of the nation’s capital, Sana’a. Al-Aulaqi, who was born in the U.S. and had dual U.S. and Yemeni citizenship, had been put on a U.S. “kill list” for allegedly leading Al-Qaeda terrorism efforts in the Arabian peninsula. Officials said they had decided he could never be captured.
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