Reasonable Force: Police Logics and the Targeted Killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi

Alana Pagano

 

The US Army and Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual—updated in 2006 for the first time in 25 years—asserts that ‘warfighting and policing are dynamically linked’ and that the ‘roles of the police and military forces… blur.’1 The view that the distinctions between war and police are blurring is so pervasive it is held by the gamut of commenters on war, from political scientists and critical theorists to politicians and policymakers.2 This essay responds to Caroline Holmqvist’s Policing Wars which provides a comprehensive overview of how wars in the 21st century, most notably the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, are avowedly understood by the state as policing wars. By policing wars, she means a rationalisation of “war as policing, directed against purportedly ‘criminal’ forces and in the interest of upholding a particular type of ‘order.’”3 To address the question of why the state would seek to embed its war-making in the logic(s) of policing I turn to the killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi,4 a U.S citizen who was killed in a “targeted killing”5 in 2011 after he had been assessed by the CIA as “a senior leader of Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula”6 but had not been formally charged or convicted by the U.S. government. Specifically, I trace the arguments made in two heavily redacted memorandums written by then Acting Assistant Attorney General David Barron in February and July of 2010 that provided the state’s legal grounding to kill al-Aulaqi. I draw out the police logics undergirding the following sites in the memos: the citation of Tennessee v. Garner (the case that inaugurated reasonable force jurisprudence), the framing of al-Aulaqi as a ‘continued and imminent threat,’ the turn to the public authority justification, and the secrecy surrounding the memos specifically and the drone program broadly.

In these sites I locate a framework of legal immunity that simultaneously legitimizes and obscures violence through reframing it as ‘reasonable force’ and a framework of insularity in which the perspective of the state is both privileged and framed as inaccessible. Additionally, I identify a temporality in which an expansion of what constitutes an imminent threat enables an expansion of what and who is considered a threat and the production of emergency situations that solicit immediate violent action. I argue that the police logics at work in these sites enable the state to simultaneously expand and obscure its violence through the police’s ‘moral capacity’7 to determine what and who is reasonable and unreasonable, and the discretion to respond to what they perceive as unreasonable with immediate violence. Before turning to the above described moments in the memos, I outline the relationship between discretion, reason, and violence in policing. My argument is made in conversation with Tyler Wall who similarly poses the question of why the state would embed it’s drone warfare within police logics.8 I build on Wall’s work through a deeper engagement with the state’s employment of the logic of “reasonable force.” Although I focus on the specific killing of al-Aulaqi made unique by his citizenship status, I also identify how these logics play out in the government’s larger framing of the drone program by turning towards ‘signature strikes’ and the surveillance function of drones.

In the introduction to a collection of essays on police power, Markus Dubber and Mariana Valverde write that one of the “fundamental theoretical points” that emerges from considering the power to police from a wide range of historical moments and institutional fields is the “inevitability of discretion.”9 This discretion manifests in the knowledge production that is at the core of “Blackstone’s famous definition of police as the fatherly concern to ensure the present order, future prosperity, and general well-being of the national household.”10 Police ensure these ends through a “wisdom” that is “precisely the ability to decide, in the particular instance, which specific measures will best promote prosperity, order, and well-being, without being bound by strict lawlike definitions.”11 Police power cannot be bound by a pre-established knowledge because it is precisely the ability to decide what to do to maintain order in the singularity of each incident that has the potential to disrupt order. Elsewhere Valverde refers to this knowledge production of police as “highly discretionary, to the point that, as American legal dictionaries remark, it is impossible to define it or even to enumerate all of its components.”12 Indeed, as Dubber observes in The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government—his comprehensive exposition on the constitutional and legal history of policepowers—a defining characteristic of police power is its inability to be defined. Present in virtually every commentary on the police powers from Blackstone and Bentham to Hegel and Taney is “the remark that it cannot be, and has not been defined.”13 The persistence of this indefinability is evident by the claim in American Jurisprudence (Second) that “police power is by its nature incapable of any satisfactory or exact definition or limitation.”14

As we see in Dubber’s rendition of Blackstone’s definition of police power, the primary concern of police power is not limited to maintaining order but includes ensuring the “future prosperity” of the “national household.” This “prosperity” is ensured through the productivity of the workers within the “national household.” The worker’s productivity is maintained through policing. Contemporary scholars Mark Neocleous, Barry Ryan, and Dubber each observe that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century policing coheres around a concern with the improvement and expansion of the state.15 The police of this time period was concerned “with actively shaping the social body according to certain ends—the ends of the state and the production of wealth.”16 In this vision of policing, “the ‘value and utility’ of human productivity” is emphasized through policing—and thus bringing order to—those whose behavior and actions are deemed irrational and immoral: among others, the poor or ‘idle’, vagabonds, vagrants, prostitutes, drunks.17 This policing is a project of reforming society for the ends of “moral and cultural progress.”18 Police’s reasoning—its determination of what is needed to maintain and expand order—is also its determination of what and who is acting within the reason of the state. Police power, through its boundless discretion, simultaneously transcends and imposes limits.

The authority of police to intervene in society rests on the threat of violence.19 Police, through the discretion afforded them, “have the special sanction to determine in any moment whether to use violence” without needing this violence to be approved beforehand.20 Ryan writes that what distinguishes the power of police is its “moral and political capacity to combine such strategic reasoning with immediate violence, and to possess jurisdiction over both word and action.”21 This “strategic reasoning”—the ability to determine what to do to maintain (and expand) order in a given situation that demarcates what is within and outside of the reason of the state—exists in a continuum with the police’s use of force. This cohabitation of reason and violence is reasonable force.22

To recap, the indefinability of police lends it boundless discretion. This discretion manifests in the police power’s ability to demarcate what is reasonable and unreasonable for the productivity of the state through an enforcement grounded in the threat of violence. As I will explore, this relationship between discretion, reason, and violence is central to the arguments of reasonable force jurisdiction. It is important to note that police power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not exist in the institutional form it does today in which uniformed police officers ensure order through policing their constituencies. However, as I show in this essay, one can trace continuities between earlier forms of policing and contemporary legal frameworks of policing. As Ryan claims, it is “plausible” to suggest that contemporary policing emerges from earlier understandings of policing.23 I trace these continuities not to locate an origin of police power that will demystify the policing we encounter today but to discern the persistence of certain functions of police despite historical changes in its form. This continuity speaks to the weight of police in shaping and enforcing social orders.

In an Office of Legal Counsel memo dated February 19, 2010, then Assistant Attorney General David Barron argues that the use of lethal force against Anwar al-Aulaqi would not violate the Fourth Amendment by citing Tennessee v. Garner. Barron writes, “this conclusion draws from the fact that, even in domestic law enforcement operations, the Supreme Court has noted that “if the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious harm, deadly force may be used if necessary to prevent escape and if, where feasible, some warning has been given.”24 Earlier in the memo Barron frames al-Aulaqi as a threat by referring to his killing as “self-defense”: “consistent with the assassination ban in Executive Order 12333… killings in self-defense are not…. assassinations.”25 The use of the police shooting parallel to justify the killing of al-Aulaqi was not restricted to Barron’s citation of Garner. Journalist Scott Shane writes that the police shooting parallel—and with it the implication that police respond to immediate threats with lethal force—was “raised repeatedly by government officials who supported targeting Awlaki.”26 Shane quotes Gerald Feierstein, the then Ambassador to Yemen, as saying: “My view was Anwar al-Awlaki was actively plotting to kill American citizens. To me, he was like a guy walking down an American street carrying an M-16. The police would take him out.”27

Tennessee v. Garner initiated the jurisprudence of reasonable force. In the case, the court ruled that killing a fleeing suspect is only “reasonable” if the suspect poses a threat to the police officers or the community. Before Garner, “24 states (including Tennessee) had, adapted from the English common law, rules allowing the police to use any means necessary to arrest or prevent the escape of a felony suspect.”28 In requiring that a police officer’s lethal use of force be “reasonable” the appearance of a limit is placed on the violence of police.

This limit was significantly reconfigured by the ruling of Graham v. Connor in 1989, four years after Garner. Graham v. Connor introduced the standard of “objective reasonableness” which asserted that in assessing force the actions of an “objective” officer must be imagined. “Objective” here establishes that the “subjective motivation” of the officer is not relevant to the question of if excessive force was used. Further, Graham establishes that the court evaluates the reasonableness of the officer’s actions “from the perspective of the officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight” to take into account the split-second nature of judgements officers take.29 Essentially, this establishes a standard wherein use of force is permitted when it can be asserted that “an objectively reasonable officer would have conducted oneself similarly if one were in such a position.”30 The court is instructed not to determine if the officers actions were reasonable, but if they appeared reasonable to the officer under the conditions available to them at the time of the use of force. The discretionary judgement and perspective of the police officer is privileged.31 Leonard Feldman argues that the standard for use of lethal force established in Graham v. Connor, along with qualified immunity which I will not discuss here but also involves a privileging of the perspective of police, forms a nexus of legal mechanisms that establishes legal immunity for police violence.32 This claim is corroborated in police officers rarely facing legal repercussions for use of lethal force.33

Garner marked a moment in which the appearance of a limit—that the violence of police be ‘reasonable’—was placed on the violence of police. Ultimately, its transmutation in the court actually served to legally sanction police violence while legitimating it as ‘reasonable force,’ or, in other words, force that is fundamentally measured or restricted. Similarly, Barron invokes the limit of Garner to expand the violence making capabilities of the state through justifying, and thus framing as legitimate, the killing of U.S. citizens in foreign territories the U.S. is not in a recognized conflict with. As Tyler Wall argues, the citation of Garner in the state’s legal arguments surrounding al-Aulaqi places “drones and police violence on a legal continuum through the concept of “reasonableness.”34

The elusiveness that Dubber understands as intrinsic to police powers is further embedded in American governance by the vesting of police powers to the states. Dubber argues that this positioning insulates police powers from the scrutiny of the federal government.35 If a state’s action is “classified as an exercise of its police power,” Dubber writes, it receives no constitutional scrutiny.36 This “immunizing” role of federalism was and continues to be instrumental in the ability of local and municipal forces to engage in racial terrorism with impunity from the federal government.37 In reasonable force jurisprudence, though, we do, on the face of it, see police power being constitutionally scrutinized. That Dubber does not address this scrutiny in his argument points to a gap in his writing. However, as indicated above, the appearance of scrutiny—of an imposition of a limit—in reasonable force ultimately reinforces Dubber’s argument that police power cannot be scrutinized by the federal government. In reasonable force, we encounter how “the police mandate cannot be, and is not supposed to be in the liberal eyes of state power, thoroughly checked or held accountable by legal rules.”38 This immunity, writes Tyler Wall, “gets at the appeals to police law made by legal architects of the drone war.”39

As Nikhil Singh notes, “policing is anticipatory: it comprises, in Foucault’s influential account, ‘those supervisions, checks, inspections and varied controls, that, even before the thief has stolen, makes it possible to identify whether he is going to steal.’”40 Policing is directed towards preventing threats through constructing a specialized knowledge of who and what may be a potential threat. Both of David Barron’s memos claim that al-Aulaqi could legally be targeted on the basis of the CIA’s conclusion that he posed a ‘continued and imminent threat’ to the United States.41 The intent behind the targeted killing of Al-Aulaqi is framed as preventing him from planning future terrorist attacks. As journalist Scott Shane writes: Barron… evidently concluded that terrorists assumed to be plotting in secret qualified as an imminent threat, since requiring the government to wait until they acted would be self-defeating. Because the evidence showed Awlaki as a leader of AQAP who was determined to attack the United States and was working relentlessly toward that goal, there was no requirement that the intelligence agencies know the details and timing of a specific plot. They could assume that an attack was always imminent.42 How can a threat be both ‘continued’—suggesting a threat spanning an indeterminate period of time—and ‘imminent’—suggesting an immediate threat? This contradiction is resolved in the timeframe defined in the regulation of police use of force, as Jennifer M. Page identifies in In Defense of Self and Others, a police training manual on use of force: Let us consider two examples. First, recall the idea that, for self-defense to be morally permissible, it must be a necessary means of averting a lethal threat. However, as a widely read police manual on self-defense emphasizes, the courts have determined that police officers are not required to “consider alternative levels of force once the ‘imminent danger’ element is satisfied” (Patrick and Hall, 2017, 100). What does “imminent danger” mean? According to the manual, it means “simply that the danger could happen at any moment—it does not have to have happened, or be happening yet.43 For the danger to be imminent, it only needs to be able to happen ‘at any moment.’ It is not restricted to what is about to happen but what could happen. Imminence is expanded to allow an imminent threat to span an indeterminate amount of time. However, as we see in turning to reasonable force jurisdiction, in the framing of a police officer’s encounter with an imminent threat there is also no time; an ‘imminent danger’ requires the officer to act immediately. If a police officer encounters “a guy walking down an American street carrying an M-16,” as Gerald Feierstein hypothesizes in framing the killing of al-Aulaqi as a police shooting, they “would take him out.”

Graham v. Connor introduces imminence to the standard of ‘reasonable force’ by establishing that “the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Further, the court establishes that “the calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that officers are often forced to make split-second judgments – in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving – about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.” As Feldman writes, the court is instructed to judge the officer’s reasonableness from the space of “the police officer in an apparent emergency who lacks the time to make reasoned judgements.”44 This emergency framework is further clarified in Smith v. Freland, three years after the Graham decision: Thus, under Graham, we must avoid substituting our personal notions of proper police procedures for the instantaneous decision of the police officer on the scene. We must never allow the theoretical, sanitized world of our imagination to replace the dangerous and complex world that policemen face every day. What constitutes “reasonable” action may seem quite different to someone facing a possible assailant than to someone analyzing the question at leisure.45 In the timeframe of an emergency what is considered reasonable expands. To put it another way, what is reasonable appears differently when immediate action is required. In establishing the distinction between “the dangerous and complex world that policemen face every day”—a world of emergencies—and the “theoretical, sanitized world of our imagination,” a limit is established on what can be discerned from the police officer’s actions and perspective. In the same moment one is asked to embody the perspective of the police officer, it is implied that this knowledge is inaccessible to them. As Feldman writes, the decision-making of the police is “rendered opaque.”46 Recalling Dubber and Valverde, the police’s decision-making is discretionary to the point that it is indefinable or inaccessible. In a statement that follows from a discussion of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld,47 Barron writes, in reference to the inability to give due process to al-Aulaqi despite him being a US citizen: “on the battlefield, the Government’s interests and burdens preclude offering a process to judge whether a detainee is truly an enemy combatant.”48 Immediately following is the framing of al-Aulaqi as a “continued and imminent threat,” suggesting that the inability to legally scrutinize al-Aulaqi’s status as an enemy combatant is due to the urgency—emergency—of the situation. Further, the decision making surrounding al-Aulaqi’s killing and the entire drone program is framed, like police violence, as inaccessible to the public. As Wall writes, “locating targeted drone killings on a continuum with police killings helps to highlight the ways the killing state works to make illegible its own violence.”49

The drone program has been steeped in secrecy since it began.50 In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of Nasser al-Aulaki, Anwar al-Aulaki’s father. The lawsuit argued that the government’s refusal to disclose the standards it uses for authorizing the deliberate killing of U.S. citizens far from any armed conflict zone violates the constitution. Judge John D. Bates, a federal judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, dismissed the case on the grounds that the case raises “political questions” not subject to court review. In his decision he writes: “There are circumstances in which the Executive’s unilateral decision to kill a US citizen overseas is ‘constitutionally committed to the political branches’ and judicially unreviewable.”51 Nine months later, a drone strike in Yemen’s northern al-Jawf governorate killed al-Aulaqi and three others, including the twenty-five year old American Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another strike killed Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, Anwar al-Aulaqi’s American born sixteen year old son who had left his grandfather’s house in Sana’a to find his father. In 2013 Nasser al-Aulaqi, Abdulrahman’s grandfather, wrote in a New York Times editorial: The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen. I visited the site later, once I was able to bear the pain of seeing where he sat in his final moments. Local residents told me his body was blown to pieces. They showed me the grave where they buried his remains. I stood over it, asking why my grandchild was dead. Nearly two years later, I still have no answers. The United States government has refused to explain why Abdulraham was killed.52 That same year the ACLU and CCR filed another suit now on behalf of the estates of Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi and Samir Khan. The suit was dismissed “with the government contending again that the lawfulness of drone strikes was for the political branches to decide.”53 In the hearings, the Justice Department “intimated” that Abdulrahman’s death had been “inadvertent” but declined to supply “an on-the-record account of the strike.”54 In both cases the CIA submitted “state secrets” declarations that asserted that the case could not be “litigated” “without risking or requiring the disclosure of classified and privileged intelligence information that must not be disclosed.”55 The CIA further added that “even if the agency were to provide the relevant information, the court would ‘hardly [be] competent to evaluate it.’”56 Positioning the case of the targeted killing of al-Aulaqi as “judicially unreviewable” firmly embeds the case within the police logic of being constitutionally inscrutable. Further, in the CIA’s statement that, even if the decision-making were made available, the court would not be “competent to evaluate it” evokes the police logic that the police’s discretion is fundamentally inaccessible. These police logics of insularity and complexity enable the state to engage in covert acts of violence. In these legal battles, and these memos, we see “the extent to which the drone campaign is saturated within the language of law” while also evading the law.57 In the July memo, Barron argues that 18 U.S.C. 1119, which concerns the foreign murder of U.S nationals, doesn’t apply to the killing of al-Aulaqi by arguing that Section 119 “must be construed to incorporate the public authority justification which renders ‘lethal action carried out by a governmental official lawful in some circumstances.’”58 To explain the public authority justification Barron makes the analogy of a police officer speeding while pursuing a criminal.59 This mode of both being in the law and able to exceed it is both what we witness in the above described legal battles and the legal immunity ‘reasonable force’ works toward in which law legitimates the use of force while not limiting its discretion.60 Bernard Harcourt similarly positions the actions of the U.S. in the war on terror within this framework of using law to legitimate violence while evading its consequences by arguing against the pervasive take that the U.S.’s actions in the war on terror mark a “state of exception” in which legality is suspended. Harcourt rather claims that the actions considered to fall within the “state of exception”— among others, CIA black sites, targeted killings by drone, invasive surveillance of American citizens—“were rendered fully legalized and regulated practices—firmly embedded in a web of legal memos, preauthorized formalities, and judicial or quasi-judicial oversight.”61 Wall adds to Harcourt’s argument by claiming that the “structural, legal corollary” the states “exceptional” actions were embedded in is “the normal, routine procedures animating domestic police violence.”62 Wall cites Joseph Pugliese who writes, “the danger in fetishizing the concept of exceptionalism in the context of law is that it functions to erase the serial practices of violence actually constitutive of the internal operations of the state and their normalization precisely through law.”63 Wall argues that the “serial practices of violence” found in policing that “animate” drone violence include the ability for a myriad of activities ranging from the quotidien to the extreme to share the quality of being an “emergency situation” for police: The point to make here is that the police correspond to a near endless, albeit routine, line up of “emergency situations”—from pulling someone over for a headlight being out or running a red light to jaywalking to driving too fast or slow, or for playing music too loud or using drugs, or to catch fleeing suspects. In theory, everything and everyone, in practice, primarily the marginalized and poor, is always a potential suspect so long as police think “something doesn’t seem right” or someone is “out of place.”64 Wall’s emphasis in this passage draws our attention to how framing drone warfare “as ‘spectacular,’ ‘exceptional,’ and ‘new’” obscures the reality that this violence takes place through a framework of normalized, ordinary emergency policing of racialized populations.65 I will comment on this point later but, for now, I am interested in expanding on Wall’s claim that the category of police “suspects and threats” animates “the dronification of state violence.”66
As delineated earlier, the legality of reasonable force hinges on the police officer’s perception of an imminent threat. The perceived imminence of this threat creates an emergency situation in which the officer—to protect themselves and the community—acts immediately with violence. The legal concern is not the actual threat posed by the situation—‘a headlight being out,’ ‘jaywalking,’ etc—but what threat the officer perceived they were responding to. As Smith v. Freland asserts, the world police officers face every day is “dangerous and complex.” In this world, an imminent danger “could happen at any moment,” as the police training manual In Defense of Self and Others informs us.67 As Wall writes, “police operate in a political geography characterized by cops never knowing, and always trying to “find out,” who is a threat and who is not, who is suspicious and who is not, who is an enemy and who is not.”68 Police are trained to identify “danger signals that are indicative of an imminent attack, such as non-compliance with orders, presence of a weapon or unseen hands, to name a few.”69 Police operate in an expansionary framework in which “everything and everyone” is a potential threat and any threat is a potential emergency. Further embedding the focus on the potentiality of the threat as against the known threat is the centering of what the police perceive as threatening as against what actually took place in the legal adjudication of police use of force. We encounter a police officer using lethal force to stop a perceived threat—identified through particular behaviors—in the below citation from the Wilson Report issued by the Department of Justice into the police shooting of Michael Brown by Minnesota Police Officer Darren Wilson: While Brown did not use a gun on Wilson at the SUV, his aggressive actions would have given Wilson reason to at least question whether he might be armed, as would his subsequent forward advance and reach toward his waistband. This is especially so in light of the rapidly-evolving nature of the incident. Wilson did not have time to determine whether Brown had a gun and was not required to risk being shot himself in order to make a more definitive assessment.70 The citation from the Wilson Report justifies Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown by framing the killing around the perspective of Wilson in discerning the potentiality of threat in the assessment of Browns behavior as ‘aggressive.’ The “reasonableness” of killing Michael Brown is established not from Brown’s having actually posed a threat but from the perspective of Wilson that constructed him as a threat. Correspondingly, we see that the appropriateness of a drone strike can be discerned as distinct from its result or accuracy in cases in which civilians are killed. This expansionary orientation to locating potential threats—and the corresponding legal framework that privileges the state’s discretion in responding to perceived threats—is encountered in the production of drone targets. Walter Benjamin described police as an “all pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states.”71 We witness this description in the surveillance function of drones. Despite controversy surrounding drone warfare focusing on drone killings, the vast majority of drones are small machines used for surveillance.72 This surveillance follows a police logic both in its orientation to preventing future threats and in its holding in one space the collecting of knowledge—the determination of threats—and the immediate use of violence. Alongside this surveillance through drones has been the secret expansion of the conflict into new countries—Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia—that, notably, we are not in recognized conflicts with.73 This growth belies a police logic in that, unlike traditional military engagements in which defined battlefields are the site of engagement, police—like the surveillance function of drones—do not have delineated spaces in which they police. Neocleous, who argues that all air power is police power,74 writes that the “real potential of drone technology is ubiquitous and permanent police power exercised over the territory.”75

We also witness this expansionary orientation to locating potential threats through “signature strikes.” As quoted earlier, Barron writes, “on the battlefield, the Government’s interests and burdens preclude offering a process to judge whether a detainee is truly an enemy combatant.”76 This is in reference to the articulated inability to give Al-Aulaqi his due process rights as a U.S. citizen but it tellingly speaks to the government’s lack of discernment or care towards civilian casualties from drone strikes. The drone program has been described by U.S. intelligence officials as “the most precise and humane targeting program in the history of warfare.”77 Drone warfare is described by government officials as “precise,” “closely supervised, “effective,” “indispensable,” and, most importantly, “lawful”—with these claims then corroborated by carefully crafted internal leaked documents to the media.78 However, as Bruce Cronin writes, the attacks have been anything but precise”79 and are significantly more likely to result in civilian casualties than manned aircraft.80 A large portion of civilian casualties have resulted from “signature strikes.” Rather than targeting a known individual, signature strikes are “based on a pattern of activity,” or “signature” that is understood as “common to al Qaeda and its associated groups.”81 Signature strikes are preemptive; the state is assessing certain behaviors as suspicious or unreasonable and responding with violence before the threat has surfaced. Such ‘militant’ activities or behaviors include carrying a gun, riding in a flatbed truck, assembled in a group, and moving back and forth across the Afghanistan-Pakistan borders.82 In the surveillance and targeting of everyday scenes of life, the distinctions between civilian space and battlefield erode.83 This erosion risks high civilian casualties because of the similarity in behavior between civilians and combatants in communities outside of a battlefield.84

After an attack in Afghanistan in February of 2002 that killed three men who ended up having no affiliation to al-Qaeda as they were scavenging for scrap metal, the Pentagon stated: ‘we’re convinced that it was an appropriate target … [although] we do not yet know exactly who it was.’85 We do not definitively know if this drone strike was a signature strike as that is not information the government shares but that does not matter here. What matters is that the logic of a drone strike being based on the discernment of suspicious behavior provides a justification for the military to kill a group of people with no knowledge of who they are. Further concealing the dead, the U.S. military’s policy is to count all adult males within a strike zone as combatants “without actually verifying their identity.”86 Civilian casualties are included as combatant deaths unless they are “specifically exonerated after their death.”87 As Joseph Pugliese writes, the status of ‘civilian’ can only be reclaimed “retrospectively.”88 This policy enables the state to omit many civilian deaths from counts of civilian casualties. Furthermore, since the program is “shrouded in secrecy and the strikes occur in areas that are not easily accessible,”89 the government rarely even acknowledges attacks that occur “outside conventional battlefields”90 or bury drone reports in esoteric government websites. This echoes the secrecy that surrounds police killings as no government database tracks these numbers and no law mandates that police track how many people they kill.91 As in reasonable force, the appearance of a limit—drone warfare as ‘precise’—does not diminish but instead expands and legitimates the violence of the state. It is important to note that particular “explanations” of conflict “foregrounded the emergence of the imagination of policing war” and the narratives that would surround the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.92 In Policing Wars, Holmqvist delineates how these explanations produced an understanding of a ‘new terrorism’ engaged in “largely irrational, fanatical, and utterly irredeemable” violence and underpinned by deep religious motivations.93 The policing wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the tertiary conflicts surrounding these wars, are established as apolitical, as outside the realm of politics, because the enemy is composed of irrational actors fundamentally incompatible with reason. The response of violence is determined as reasonable through the constructed irrationality of the ‘utterly irredeemable’ ‘terrorist.’ Chris Woods quotes David Kilcullen, one of the architects of the Afghanistan Kill/Capture drone campaign: “The idea is, identify the 1% or 2% of people that are absolutely irreconcilable, kill only them, but do it so heavily that everybody who is reconcilable wants to make peace. And then give the people that want to make peace such a good deal that you suck oxygen from the irreconcilables.”94 The state defines targets based on their amenability to reason. Those who are “irreconcilable” to reason must be targeted. The primary concern of the controversy surrounding the targeted killing of al-Aulaqi was his American citizenship. Although I will not be addressing this fully, to allude to other places this essay can turn, I turn to the relationship between American policing and citizenship. To describe his theory of racial policing—a logic of repetition in which the killing of a Black body is repeated because “there is an insufficiency in the prior killings that is not resolved by subsequent killings”95—Barnor Hesse turns to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: … she identifies a familiar racial policing scenario: a black man’s car is blockaded and rapidly surrounded by police cars, and he is told to get on the ground. The stop results in the wrong and wronged black person, thereby reproducing a racial policing suspicion that proclaims “and you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description (Rankine 2014: 105). Racial profiling and racial suspicion repeat the racially twisted apartheid logic in which every mistaken identity or wronged black citizen is fungible and, at the same time, a potential threat averted as well as a readiness for the first next time… As Christina Sharpe observes, this terror means black populations fit the description of “the non-being, the being out of place, and the noncitizen always available to and for death.96 The primary influences in the development of U.S. policing were slave patrols and a tradition of racist terror through white citizen vigilantism.97 Central to the police project of maintaining (and expanding) an order of white supremacy was the grafting of citizenship along racial lines. Blackness was identified as ‘criminality’ and Black people were not only denied full citizenshi but “seen as anticitizens” and “treated by police as an existential threat to security.”98 I turn to this to note that there is a long history to the construction of certain bodies as always already posing a threat to the state that positions their citizenship as malleable. I believe this history is central to the construction of the military-aged Arab man as always already a ‘terrorist’ and what underpins the logic of the killing of innocent civilians being an ‘appropriate’ aversion of threat despite their posing no threat.99 Beyond the relationship between citizen and policing, this essay could be expanded by addressing, among other topics, the framing of drone attacks and police use of force as ‘self-defense,’ the deployment of drones in domestic policing, and other legal arguments that privilege the police perspective in perceiving threats (qualified immunity, stop and frisk/terry stops). By tracing the expansive and productively ambiguous police logics of insularity, legitimacy, immunity, and imminence in the legal arguments made by the state to legalize the killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi, I argue that the state loosens the restrictions on its ability to enact violence while obscuring this violence from outside view. Specifically, I locate how the memos attempt to supply drone warfare with the police discretion to respond with immediate violence to an insular determination of ‘suspicious’ and ‘threatening’ —unreasonable— behaviors. By locating these police logics, traditionally rendered to the domestic sphere, in foreign warfare, I follow Neocleous’ argument that “war and police” are “processes working in conjunction as state power.”100 However, I diverge from Neocleous in his claim that “the ‘war is becoming police’ approach does little to genuinely bring ‘war’ and ‘police’ together.” 101 In his disregard for the ‘war is becoming police’ narrative, Neocleous does not adequately account for the ways in which the state is avowedly defining its war-making as becoming policing. One must simultaneously recognize that the pairing of war and police in state power is not new, while also identifying the distinctness of the state employing the blurriness between military and policing as a narrative to rationalize war. It is vital to both view war and police as “always already together”102 and attend to the invocations of police in their specificity. This is especially true when, in the case of the U.S.’s 21st century military engagements in the Middle East, policing is evoked as a way to indicate a humanitarian mode of war.103 This framework of policing enables the state to simultaneously profess a concern for civilian populations and conduct violence that poses intense risk to civilian lives while obscuring this violence from sight.

 

ENDNOTE

1 US Army and Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, US Army Field Manual No. 3-24/Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5, 2006, Sects. 6-95, 7-26, quoted in Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 9.

2 Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 2.

3 Caroline Holmqvist, Policing Wars: On Military Interventions in the Twenty-First Century. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), vi.

4 Anwar al-Aulaqi has also been spelled Anwar al-Aulaqi. I am following the spelling used in the memos. 5 “The U.S. government’s practice of “targeted killing”—the killing of suspected terrorists and militants, typically using armed drones, often away from conventional battlefields.” Jameel Jaffer, The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law (New York: The New Press, 2016), 2.

6 David J. Barron, Memorandum for the Attorney General Re: Lethal Operation Against Shaykh Anwar Aulaqi (U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel February 19, 2010), 1.

7 Barry Ryan’s “Reasonable force: the emergence of global policing power,” Review of International Studies 39, no. 2 (April 2013): 442.

8 Tyler Wall, “Ordinary Emergency: Drones, Police, and Geographies of Legal Terror,” Antipode 48, no. 4 (March 2016).

9 Markus Dubber and Mariana Valverde, “Perspectives on the Power and Science of Police,” in The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance, ed. Markus Dubber and Mariana Valverde (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), 5.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Mariana Valverde, “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal ‘Technicalities as Resources for Theory, Social and Legal Studies 18, no. 2 (2009), 148.

13 Markus Dubber, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 120.

14 Ibid.

15 In The Police Power Dubber writes that, in continental police science, the householder was not concerned not only with preventing harm but increasing “the family’s welfare.” See notes 16, 17, and 18 for Neocleous and Ryan.

16 Markus Dubber, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 6.

17 Ryan, “Reasonable force: the emergence of global policing power,” 444.

18 Ibid, 445.

19 Ibid, 442.

20 Ben Brucato, “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy: From Slave Catchers to Petty Sovereigns,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 61, no. 141 (December 2014): 44.

21 Ryan, “Reasonable force: the emergence of global policing power,” 443.

22 Ibid, 435. Notably, Ryan identifies reasonable force as the police’s instrument to improve the order of the state.

23 Ibid, 436.

24 Barron February Memorandum, 7.

25 Ibid, 4. The dots indicate redacted sections of the memo.

26Scott Shane, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016), 218.

27 Ibid.

28 Leonard Feldman, “Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity,” Theory & Event 20, no.2 (April 2017): 336.

29 Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989), 396.

30 Brucato, “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy,” 44.

31 Feldman, “Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity,” 339. See also Brucato, “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy,” 44.

32 Feldman, “Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity,” 340.

33 Paul Butler, “The System Is Working the Way It Is Supposed To: The Limits of Criminal Justice Reform,” Georgetown Law Journal 104: 1452–56.

34 Wall, “Ordinary Emergency,” 9.

35 Dubber, The Police Power, 142-44, 147.

36 Ibid, 123.

37 Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 118-119.

38 Wall, “Ordinary Emergency,” 13.

39 Ibid.

40 Michel Foucault, Security,Territory,and Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4. Quoted in Nikhil Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 39.

41 It is important to note, as Jaffer notes in The Drone Memos, that “except on actual battlefields “imminence” marks the line between situations in which lethal force can be used without prior judicial approval and situations in which it cannot be.”

42 Shane, Objective Troy, 213-216. My italics added. This view is also witnessed in the November 8, 2011 Justice Department White Paper “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”: “First, 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. Given the nature of, for example, the terrorist attacks on September 11, in which civilian airliners were hijacked to strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, this definition of imminence, which would require the United States to refrain from action until preparations for an attack are concluded, would not allow the United States sufficient time to defend itself.”

43 Jennifer M. Page, “Reparations for Police Killings,” American Political Science Association 17, no. 4 (December 2019), 963.

44 Feldman, “Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity,” 338.

45 Smith v. Freland, 954 F.2d 343 (1992), 347. Quoted in Page, “Reparations for Police Killings,” 963.

46 Feldman, “Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity,” 340.

47 “In the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the nation’s highest court reviewed the detention of Yasser Hamdi, an American citizen who had been captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 and turned over to the U.S. military. The U.S. military transferred him to Guantanamo Bay and then, when it determined that he was an American citizen, to a naval brig in Norfolk, Virginia. When Hamdi challenged his detention, the Bush administration argued that whatever process Hamdi was owed because of his citizenship had already been supplied to him by the executive branch, and that any judicial review of Hamdi’s detention would be “constitutionally intolerable.” Jaffer, The Drone Memos, 53.

48 Barron February Memo, 6.

49 Wall, “Ordinary Emergency,” 6.

50 Jameel Jaffer, The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law (New York: The New Press, 2016), 26.“Official secrecy infected every discussion of the program. Congressional testimony was heard in closed session. Judicial hearings were likewise closed to the public, judicial filings sealed, and judges’ opinions redacted. One secret justified another—a secret fact required a secret brief, and a secret brief called for a secret hearing, and a secret hearing led to a secret judicial opinion.”

51 Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, 727 F. Supp. 2d 1, 51 (D.D.C. 2010).

52 Nasser al-Awlaki, “The Drone That Killed My Grandson,” New York Times, July 17, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-killed-my-grandson.html.

53 “Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta – Constitutional Challenge to Killing of Three U.S. Citizens,” ACLU, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.aclu.org/cases/al-aulaqi-v-panetta-constitutional-challenge-killing-three-us-citizens.

54 Jaffer, The Drone Memos, 6.

55 Declaration and Formal Claim of State Secrets Privilege and Statutory Privileges by Leon E. Panetta at 8 n.5, Al Aulaqi v. Obama, No. 10-1469 (D.D.C. Sept. 23, 2010). Quoted in Jaffer, The Drone Memos, 27.

56 Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss at 14, Al Aulaqi v. Panetta, No. 12-1192 (D.D.C., Dec. 14, 2012). Quoted in Jaffer, The Drone Memos, 27-28.

57 Jaffer, The Drone Memos, 7.

58 David J. Barron, Memorandum for the Attorney General Re: Applicability of Federal Criminal Laws and the Constitution to Contemplated Lethal Operations Against Shaykh Anwar al-Aulaqi, U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, July 16, 2010, 15-17.

59 Ibid, 16.

60 For other theorists who comment on police powers exceeding law see: Brucato, “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy,” 46: “Law provides a framework to make brutally violent and racist policing appear legitimate.” Also see, Ryan, “Reasonable force,” 436: “Police power operates sometimes beyond law in order to secure the norm; sometimes beyond norm to secure the law.”

61 Bernard Harcourt, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 183.

62 Wall, “Ordinary Emergency,” 6.

63 Ibid, 9.

64 Ibid, 15.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Patrick, Urey W. and John C. Hall, In Defense of Self and Others, 3rd edition. (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2017), 100. Quoted in Page, “Reparations for Police Killings,” 963.

68 Wall, “Ordinary Emergency, 7.

69 Patrick and Hall, In Defense of Self and Others, 100. Quoted in Page, “Reparations for Police Killings,” 963.

70 U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice: Report Regarding the Criminal Investigation into the Shooting Death of Michael Brown by Ferguson Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson (March 4, 2015). Quoted in Butler, “The System Is Working the Way It Is Supposed To,” 1423.

71 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence, in Walter Benjamin (ed.), One Way Street (London: Verso, 2006), 142. Quoted in Ryan, “Reasonable Force,” 437.

72 Mark Neocleous, “Air power as police power,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, no. 4 (August 2013): 589.

73 Jaffer, The Drone Memos, 9.

74 Neocleous’ makes this argument by turning to the British use of air power—described as air policing by the British—in the 1920’s. Air power was used as a tool of colonial administration and surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa. Colonial powers understood themselves as using air power as a tool in the moral project of ordering the behavior of the inhabitants in a way compliant to the needs of the colony.

75 Neocleous, War Power, Police Power, 161.

76 Barron February Memo, 6.

77 Bruce Cronin, Bugsplat: The Politics of Collateral Damage in Western Armed Conflicts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 121.

78 Jaffer, The Drone Memos, 26.

79 Cronin, Bugsplat, 110.

80 For an example of civilian casualties, Bruce Cronin calculates that drone strikes launched from June 2004 and July 2015 in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia had a “civilian casualty ratio of 10 to 23% on the low end and 36% on the high end.” Cronin goes on to explain that this is likely an undercount due to an array of factors, including who the military counts as combatants and the inaccessibility of strike locations. Cronin, Bugsplat, 110. A focus on civilian casualties also does not account for the terror produced in civilian populations when the potential of a drone attack is constant. A study by law students at Stanford and NYU, concluded from interviews conducted in Pakistan that the constant presence—the buzzing—of drones “terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilians.” International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan (2012). Further, only accounting for direct civilian casualties does not address the trauma experienced by drone operators. Chris Woods, Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 187.

81 Cronin, Bugsplat, 117.

82 Jaffer, The Drone Memos, 11.

83 This is influenced by Neocleous’ argument that air power destroys civilian space. Neocleous turns to the air power literature of the 1920’s to make this argument. He writes: “The language used in air power literature, from ‘strategic bombing’ to ‘morale bombing’, from ‘attacking ‘vital centres’ to bombarding ‘economic infrastructures’, from smashing ‘commercial hubs’ to destroying ‘communication networks’, points to the simple fact that the inhabitants of the network and infrastructures, the hubs and centres, the industrial fabric and commercial activities are, are all part of the war machine and are therefore no longer civilians.” Neocleous, War Power, Police Power, 159.

84 Cronin, Bugsplat, 117.

85 Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, cited in John F. Burns, ‘A Nation Challenged: The Manhunt’, New York Times, February 17, 2002. Quoted in Neocleous, War Power, Police Power, 161.

86 Cronin, Bugsplat, 119.

87 Holmqvist, Policing Wars, 12.

88 Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (London: Glasshouse, 2013), 199. Quoted in Neocleous, War Power, Police Power, 161.

89 Cronin, Bugsplat, 119.

90 Jaffer, The Drone memos, 13.

91 Wall, “Ordinary Emergency,” 6.

92 Holmqvist argues that four “explanations” of conflict “foregrounded the emergence of the imagination of policing war” and the narratives that would surround the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. 1. The narrative of the failed state, with Somalia as the archetype, in which conflicts whose central concern did not take place or cohere around the state were considered “degenerative and anarchic” and understood through a “decontextualized and ahistorical view” (21); 2. ‘Ethnic conflicts’ (Balkans, Rwanda, former Soviet Union, Bosnia) as the inevitable result of inherent predispositions to violence and primordial hatreds between ethnic communities; 3. Conflict as criminal in nature, premised on distinction between ‘criminal’ and ‘disciplined’ armies; 4. The emergence of a ‘new terrorism’ engaged in “largely irrational, fanatical, and utterly irredeemable” violence and underpinned by deep religious motivations (30). These narratives are all “variants” of a view of war as concerning disorder that is resolvable through liberal, Western states intervening to impose a new order (typically, setting up a police, military, and judiciary). Holmqvist, Policing Wars, 1, 21, 30.

93 Ibid, 30.

94 Woods, Sudden Justice, 13. My italics.

95 Barnor Hesse, “White Sovereignty ( . . . ), Black Life Politics: “The N****r They Couldn’t Kill,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 3 (July 2017): 601.

96 Ibid, 587-588.

97 Brucato, “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy,” 38, 41.

98 Ibid, 35, 37.

99 Further, recognizing the role of policing in demarcating citizenship—in other words, demarcating who is and who is not able to employ the reason of the state for their protection—poses the question of how the state uses violence as the means, through the tool of policing, to make legible what it considers reasonable. I do not feel I have the evidence to definitely answer this question this moment. However, I will suggest that there is a reading in which the adjudication of what is reasonable taking place after the fact of the officer’s violence supports the idea that violence is the tool in which the state makes legible its reason. Further, it could be argued that this also occurs in drone warfare through the status of civilian or non-combatant being available only after a violent attack.

100 Neocleous, War Power, Police Power, 13.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 Holmqvist, Policing Wars, 1.

 

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