According to various media sources, including the Associated Press where the story first broke and the New York Times, there is a debate going on at the highest levels of the Obama administration. That discussion is not one on broad policy issues but about a man's life. The question being mooted is whether to place the name of an American citizen, allegedly active with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, on Washington's so-called "kill list." The ongoing debate is fascinating for what it reveals about the continuing controversy around drone strikes, the willingness of the American government to carry out what might amount to an extra-judicial killing of one of its own citizens, and a fundamental double standard, seemingly unnoticed by the American media, in which killing an American leads to scrutiny and soul searching by the Obama administration, something often lacking when the target is non-American. If put on the kill list the anonymous individual would not be the first American citizen to face the possibility of death from above courtesy of his own government's counter-terrorism operations. At least five Americans have already died at the hands of their own government, four of them during Barack Obama's time in the presidency, although not all of them were deliberately targeted. The most famous example of an American deliberately targeted and killed took place in September 2011 when radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a missile fired from a drone in Yemen. The other three Americans killed in drone strikes were apparently not deliberately targeted and died as, in effect, collateral damage. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of al-Awlaki, was killed two weeks after his father. Samir Kahn perished in the same strike as al-Awlaki. The other dead American was Jude Kenan Mohammad who died in a strike in South Waziristan, Pakistan in 2011. Those are the Americans killed on Barack Obama's watch but they are not the only ones to die despite some media reports to the contrary. On 5 November 2002, a missile from a Central Intelligence Agency operated Predator drone struck a car carrying an American Ahmed Hijazi and five others in Yemen, killing all of the men. There is a two-fold peril for the Obama administration in the debate over whether to kill an American citizen. Any discussion about drone strikes serves as a reminder internationally of their controversy and unpopularity, particularly within the lands where they occur. Take such a reality and then add the fact that a detailed debate has occurred for over half year as to whether to deliberately target an American and an obvious point emerges: how extensive is the debate over marking for death citizens from other countries? After all, thousands have died in comparison to the handful of Americans. The answer to this pertinent question appears to be that at one time obviously not terribly detailed as exemplified by "signature strikes" whereby suspicious gatherings that match a pre-assigned pattern could inspire a missile attack even if the person pushing the button to launch the missile could not positively verify the identities of those on the receiving end. In the aftermath of the explosion, the evidence proving the attack was warranted came from the ages of the dead. If they were men of military age then from the perspective of the Obama administration they were militants and not civilians and thus worthy of having been killed. Such optics from both a practical and public relations point-of-view simply could not hold. In early 2013, the Obama administration imposed the same rules around drone strikes against non-Americans as against Americans. As a result, the number of attacks appears to have dropped. In Pakistan, where domestic political factors and/or a lack of targets may also relate to the decline, 28 strikes occurred in 2013, the lowest figure since 2007. There have been no attacks in the country at all so far in 2014. Nevertheless, the now potential targeting of an American reignites once more the debate around the more acceptability and practical effectiveness of targeted killings through drone strikes as a type of counter-terrorism. Ultimately, the extensive media coverage in the United States and the lengthy deliberations carried out by the Obama administration suggest a clear but not surprising inconsistency in which the lives of Americans are valued more highly than the lives of those who are not.
