By Josh Gerstein
Two journalists who believe they are on the so-called "kill list" of individuals targeted by the U.S. for deadly drone strikes are suing President Donald Trump and other top administration officials.
Former Al Jazeera Islamabad bureau chief Ahmad Zaidan and freelance journalist Bilal Kareem filed a lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, contending that they were erroneously placed on the "kill list" during the Obama administration and that Trump has illegally maintained that designation. The suit also alleges that Trump has loosened some of the safeguards the previous administration placed on the program.
Files leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept in 2015 indicate that U.S. officials claimed in a private presentation that Zaidan, a Pakistani and Syria citizen who conducted a series of interviews with terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, was a member of Al Qaeda and of the Muslim Brotherhood and appeared on a terror watch list.
Kareem, a U.S. citizen reporting from Syria in recent years, claims in the suit that he has "narrowly avoided being killed by five separate air strikes" over the past year.
In the suit, filed by human rights group Reprieve, both men deny any association with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. The men also allege that their targeting violates a longstanding presidential executive order against assassination and that they are not lawful targets under the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by
Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The suit seems certain to face an uphill battle in the courts, which have previously rejected two suits relating to the targeting of alleged Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar Al-Awlaki. In 2010, a federal judge in Washington dismissed a suit brought by Al-Awlaki's father on his son's behalf, seeking to challenge the son's placement on the so-called "kill list."
The following year, Al-Awlaki was killed in a CIA-run drone strike in Yemen. Two weeks later, another drone strike killed Al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, although U.S. officials said he was not the target of that attack. A second lawsuit challenging the legality of the deadly attacks was filed in 2012, but a judge threw that case out in 2014.
A lawyer for Zaidan and Kareem, Jeffrey Robinson, told POLITICO that he's optimistic that the new suit will get more traction in the courts.
"There are some differences which I think will be legally significant," Robinson said. "At its heart, the Al-Awlaki litigation sought to directly challenge the use of drones and targeted strikes as a tool in fighting Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. This suit doesn't really seek to challenge that policy or seek to say that tool isn't the right one to use."
Instead, the attorney said, the new suit contends that Zaidan and Kareem must have a mechanism to challenge their inclusion on the "kill list."
"This is a very deliberate process that needs to give some access to people who deny they should be included," Robinson said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit.
The suit says the Intercept report led to Zaidan being forced to leave Pakistan, where he'd worked for Al Jazeera for 20 years, and take a new post in Qatar. Kareem is believed to still be reporting from inside Syria.
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