<Photo: Reuters>
In the first major speech on counter-terrorism of his second term, President Barack Obama plans to open a new phase in the United States’ long struggle with the scourge, and even foresees an unspecified day when the so-called war on terror might all but end.
According to people briefed on White House plans, Mr Obama, in a speech that was scheduled to be delivered after press time, would restrict the use of unmanned drone strikes that have been at the heart of his national security strategy.
Mr Obama was also expected to announce that he would renew his long-stalled effort to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Officials said they would make a fresh push to transfer detainees to home countries and lift the ban on sending some back to Yemen. The President plans to reappoint a high-level State Department official to oversee the effort to reduce the prison population.
The combined actions constitute a pivot point for a President who came to office highly critical of his predecessor, Mr George W Bush, but yet preserved and, in some cases, expanded on some of the counter-terrorism policies he inherited.
Significantly, Mr Obama was also expected to reject the notion of a perpetual war with terrorists, envisioning a day when Al Qaeda has been so incapacitated that wartime authority will end. However, because he is also institutionalising procedures for drone strikes, it does not appear that he thinks that day has come.
A new classified policy guidance signed by Mr Obama will sharply curtail the instances when unmanned aircraft can be used to attack in places that are not overt war zones — countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The rules will impose the same standard for strikes on foreign enemies now used only for US citizens deemed to be terrorists.
Lethal force will be used only against targets who pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and cannot feasibly be captured, Attorney-General Eric Holder Jr said in a letter to Congress, suggesting that threats to a partner like Afghanistan or Yemen alone would not be enough to justify being targeted.
The standard could signal an end to “signature strikes”, or attacks on groups of unknown men based only on their presumed status as members of Al Qaeda or some other enemy group — an approach that administration critics said has resulted in many civilian casualties.
As part of the new shift in counter-terrorism efforts, the administration on Wednesday formally acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four US citizens in drone strikes outside the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing that its actions were justified by the danger to the US.
Mr Holder said only Anwar Al Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric killed in September 2011, was specifically targeted. The others were Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, and Samir Khan, an Al Qaeda propagandist, both killed in Yemen; and Jude Kenan Mohammad, killed in Pakistan, who was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most-wanted list for supporting terrorism.
Mohammad was the only one of the four who was not previously identified as having been killed in a drone strike.
Source: AGENCIES