That’s the claim the Obama administration made in court. As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

[W]hat’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

Italics in the original. My colleagues Gene Healy and Nat Hentoff have expressed concerns about targeted killings. Charlie Savage wrote a good piece on this that highlights how even the most ardent defenders of executive power may blush at this broad claim of power.

The government’s increasing use of the state secrets doctrine to shield its actions from judicial review has been contentious. Some officials have argued that invoking it in the Awlaki matter, about which so much is already public, would risk a backlash. David Rivkin, a lawyer in the White House of President George H. W. Bush, echoed that concern.


“I’m a huge fan of executive power, but if someone came up to you and said the government wants to target you and you can’t even talk about it in court to try to stop it, that’s too harsh even for me,” he said.

In fairness, Rivkin would defend the administration’s claim of power on other grounds — that targeting is a “political question” for the elected branches of government — but this approach seems to have lost out because it invites the judiciary to determine whether the U.S. is at war in Yemen.


Amending the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after 9/11 is long overdue. What groups are we truly at war with, where does the line between war and peace sit, who can we detain and kill, and what process is owed before a citizen may be targeted with lethal force? Questions of war are political in nature, and if we don’t know the answers, it is Congress’ role to step in and provide them.