Charlottesville, VA becomes first city in U.S. to pass resolution against drone use + Justice Department white paper: government can kill Americans just for the fun of it.

By Madison Ruppert: According to reports, just after 11 p.m. Monday, February 4, the City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia passed what is likely the first resolution against drone use in the United States.
This comes as a drone moratorium is moving forward in the Virginia state legislature and a Department of Justice white paper was leaked revealing some of the troubling reality behind the Obama administration’s drone assassination program.
While this victory is a relatively small one, there is anti-drone legislation in the works nationwide as the domestic drone boom continues unabated. Now colleges and universities are offering more drone piloting programs to keep up with the increasingly common use of drones domestically by entities ranging from the military and law enforcement to the Department of Homeland Security to the National Guard and more.
The wording of the resolution passed in Charlottesville comes largely from a Rutherford Institute model resolution, according to David Swanson, the author of the draft that first appeared on the City Council’s official agenda.
The version of the resolution that passed included an endorsement on the two-year moratorium on drones (detailed in the article linked above) and an amendment committing Charlottesville to not use drones either for surveillance or assault.
Given that the Virginia governor has openly called for drones to be used in the state, citing the alleged success of drones in the battlefield, this widespread anti-drone activity in Virginia is especially encouraging.

The resolution also “calls on the United States Congress and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court,” which is especially interesting given that the military hands over surveillance from drones to law enforcement.
The resolution continues by pledging “to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or borrowed drones.”
The resolution passed by a 3-2 vote with all of the council members who put the item on the agenda voting in favor of the resolution.
Dave Norris, Dede Smith and Satyendra Sing Huja voted in favor of the resolution, but according to Swanson, “ Norris and Smith favored banning the City from purchasing drones, but Council Member [and Vice Mayor, according to US News] Kristin Szakos argued that there might be a positive use for a drone someday, such as for the fire department.  Kathy Galvin joined Szakos in voting No.”
Dede Smith spoke out against drones in general, according to US News, saying that drones are “pretty clearly a threat to our constitutional right to privacy.”
“If we don’t get out ahead of it to establish some guidelines for how drones are used, they will be used in a very invasive way and we’ll be left to try and pick up the pieces,” Smith said.
One unfortunate aspect is that “Charlottesville’s City Council ended up not including the section in my draft that instructed the federal government to end its practice of extrajudicial killing,” according to David Swanson.
“But there was no discussion on that point, and several other sections, including one creating a local ordinance, were left out as well,” Swanson wrote.
According to Smith, the problem with that was that “we don’t own the air.” Swanson counters in his article, “we should.”
Swanson points to draft state legislation in Oregon that is attempting to do just that.
He is clearly encouraged by the passage of this resolution, pointing out, “In the past, Charlottesville has passed resolutions that have inspired other localities and impacted federal and state policies.  Let us hope this one is no exception.”
It seems that Smith agrees with Swanson in saying, “With a lot of these resolutions, although they don’t have a lot of teeth to them, they can inspire other governments to pass similar measures.”
“You can get a critical mass and then it does have influence,” Smith continued. “One doesn’t do much, but a thousand of them might. We want this on [federal and state lawmakers'] radars.”
Norris said Charlottesville has a “long tradition of promoting civil liberties,” according to US News.
“It’s just part of our culture here,” Norris said.
The move has already received praise from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
“[The] Charlottesville resolution demonstrates that people care about protecting their civil liberties and Fourth Amendment rights and are willing to devote the time necessary to closely examine this issue,” said Amie Stepanovich, a lawyer with EPIC, according to US News.
“Lawmakers should be looking at [drone privacy] issues now in order to ensure that there are safeguards in place to protect individual privacy from these invasive technologies,” Stepanovich said.
EPIC recently held a meeting in Washington, D.C. on drones which produced some encouraging results including Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, saying that he thinks the House Judiciary Committee could move to regulate the use of drones for surveillance in the U.S.
Yet the pro-drone sentiment is still strong despite the horrors we see abroad. For instance Charlottesville Vice Mayor Kristin Szakos, who voted against the resolution, said that she “can imagine ways in which drones might be used for positive things,” adding that the move was a premature one, according to US News.
“I think drones have been used for bad things, but it’s like banning airplanes because they can drop bombs,” Szakos claimed.
“At this point, the city isn’t even talking about using drones. It seems premature to me to ban them altogether,” she said, according to US News.

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Additional:
Justice Department white paper: government can kill Americans just for the fun of it.

By Madison Ruppert: According to an unclassified Department of Justice white paper released by NBC News, the U.S. government can kill Americans without charge or trial or even “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future” as part of the highly controversial drone assassination program.
The 16-page paper (mirrored here) released late February 4, 2013 is not, however, the Office of Legal Counsel memo which was at issue in the case in which a judge ruled the federal government can claim the right to legally kill Americans without ever revealing that legal justification.
The undated paper is not an official legal memo, although according to NBC, “the white paper was represented by administration officials as a policy document that closely mirrors the arguments of classified memos on targeted killings by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides authoritative legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies.”
This document is apparently separate from the Obama administration’s yet-to-be-completed drone killing rulebook, which the CIA would reportedly not have to follow.
The white paper outlines some quite disturbing facts behind the government’s justification of their so-called targeted killing program.
Indeed, the document refers to a “broader concept of imminence” than any actual intelligence about an ongoing plot against the United States or any U.S. interest.
“The condition that an operational  leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” states the unsigned and undated white paper.
While the document claims that it is focused on a hypothetical U.S. citizen “who is a senior, operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force of al-Qa’ida,” it reveals that the individual might not actually have to be “a senior, operational leader” as such.
The white paper says an “informed, high-level” U.S. government official can determine that the American being targeted has been “recently” involved in “activities” that pose a threat of violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.”
Another disturbing aspect of the white paper is the complete lack of specificity and clarity throughout the document, even when it comes to the most critical terms.
The words “recently” and “activities,” used in the incredibly important context above, are never defined by the paper, which is entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.”
The paper, which NBC calls “confidential” yet not classified, was reportedly given to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June of last year by officials in the Obama administration “on the condition that it be kept confidential and  not discussed publicly.”
It outlines an incredibly ambiguous three-part test that supposedly makes the execution of Americans without charge or trial:

1. The targeted American must be an “imminent” threat (imminent is redefined in the memo in order to completely strip it of its usual meaning)
2. The capture of the target must be infeasible and “U.S. officials may consider whether an attempted capture of a suspect  would pose an ‘undue risk’ to U.S. personnel involved in such an operation,” as NBC puts it (emphasis mine)
3. The strike must be conducted according to what the document calls “law of war principles” (keep in mind that a 16-year-old American was killed under this program)

“This is a chilling document,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU involved with the case which attempted to uncover the classified memo in court.
“Basically, it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen,” Jaffer said. “It recognizes some limits on the authority it sets out, but the limits are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.”
Jaffer notes that the memo “redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning.”
On Monday, 11 senators led by Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden united across party lines to write a letter to Obama calling for the release of all Justice Department memos on the drone assassination program.
While the senators said that “there will clearly be circumstances in which the president has the authority to use lethal force” against Americans who take up arms against the U.S. as part of an opposing fighting force, they highlighted the need for clarity.
“It is vitally important, however, for Congress and the American public to have a full understanding of how the executive branch interprets the limits and boundaries of this authority, so that Congress and the public can decide whether this authority has been properly defined, and whether the President’s power to deliberately kill American citizens is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards,” said the letter, according to Hindustan Times.
This comes as U.S. colleges and universities have begun offering more drone piloting programs to keep up with the domestic drone boom, the U.S. military is operating drones domestically and sharing data with law enforcement and Leon Panetta said the drone war must continue abroad indefinitely.
UPDATE: David Kravets puts it well in his article for Wired’s Threat Level when he writes, “What do you call a country where an unelected bureaucrat has the ability to order the execution of its citizens? Answer: President Barack Obama’s America.”
The Danger Room article by Spencer Ackerman focuses on the issue of the redefinition of the world “imminence” in the white paper. It is worth a read to see just how much the definition has been changed by the Obama administration.

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