Journalist says he was on ‘kill list’

A federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit by an American journalist challenging his alleged placement on a “kill-list” by U.S. authorities in Syria, saying he was exercising his constitutional right to due process in court.

The ruling this month clears the way for Bilal Abdul Kareem, a freelance journalist who grew up in New York, to seek answers and try to clear his name after what he claims were five near-misses by U.S. airstrikes in Syria after he said he was mistaken for a militant because of his frequent contact with alQaida-linked militants.

Government attorneys had asked U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer of the District of Columbia to toss out the lawsuit, saying Abdul Kareem could not substantiate his claims given the secrecy surrounding targeting decisions and asserting the executive branch’s unfettered authority to conduct military operations abroad.

Collyer, in a 30-page opinion, rejected a unilateral government authority to target a citizen for death, writing, “Due process is not merely an old and dusty procedural obligation .... It is a living, breathing concept that protects U.S. persons from overreaching government action even, perhaps, on an occasion of war.” Collyer ruled that Abdul Kareem could not challenge the program as arbitrary under administrative law or illegal by statute, but had a “birthright” as a citizen to assert his constitutional due process rights to be heard “and his First Amendment rights to free speech before he might be targeted for lethal action due to his profession.” Collyer distinguished the case from a 2014 ruling in which she dismissed a challenge to the Obama administration over drone-strike killings of three U.S. citizens in Yemen in 2011, including a U.S.-born al-Qaida planner and propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki.

In this case, she said, Abdul Kareem was seeking to directly challenge in court the procedures in Washington to place a citizen on the list without notice.