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On July 18, 2012, CCR and the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit against senior CIA and military officials challenging their decisions to authorize the “targeted killing” of three United States citizens, Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Samir Khan, and Anwar’s sixteen year-old son Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, in drone strikes in Yemen last year. In 2010, after reports that Anwar Al-Aulaqi had been placed on executive “kill lists,” CCR and the ACLU filed suit on behalf of his father, Nasser, challenging the government’s authorization for his son’s killing.
On September 30, 2011, U.S. strikes killed Anwar Al-Aulaqi, along with Samir Khan and three others. Two weeks later, the U.S. launched another drone strike at an open-air restaurant in Yemen, killing Anwar Al-Aulaqi’s son, Abdulrahman, and six other civilian bystanders, including another teenager. These killings, undertaken without due process, in circumstances where lethal force was not a last resort to address a specific, concrete and imminent threat, and where the government failed to take required measures to protect bystanders, rises to a violation of the most elementary constitutional right afforded to all U.S. citizens – deprivation of life without due process of law.
Plaintiffs in the case are Nasser Al-Aulaqi, the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, and Sarah Khan, the mother of Samir Khan. Defendants are Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Leon C. Panetta, Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command William H. McRaven, Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command Joseph Votel, and CIA Director David Petraeus.
Click here to read our press release about the lawsuit in Arabic.
For more information about CCR's work on targeted killing, visit the case page for our first lawsuit challenging the authorization for Anwar Al-Aulaqi's targeting, as well as the page for our Freedom of Information Act request about the deaths of 41 civilians by a U.S. strike in al-Majalah in December 2009.
The Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta complaint was filed on July 18, 2012.
