The White House staff for national security, exempt from review by Congress, plays a substantial role in the process for killing suspected terrorists, according to a newly released document on drone strikes.



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The 2013 document, known informally as the “playbook” for Barack Obama’s signature counterterrorism operations, was released on Saturday by the justice department as the result of court requests by the American Civil Liberties Union. The playbook provides the closest look to date at the bureaucratic machinery of global killing that Obama will pass on to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

The document designates the National Security Council (NSC) staff as a body of review over “all operational plans” for either killing or capturing terrorist subjects. Once representatives of various cabinet agencies and departments meet to discuss a specific plan, NSC attorneys provide legal input.

Those operational plans, which are conceived by the CIA or the Pentagon and not the NSC staff, provide granular details about life-or-death decision-making and address issues a level above the specific people or categories of people targeted for death or capture. While the NSC staff plays a role in nominating people for inclusion on the so-called “kill list”, it neither makes the nomination nor involves itself in carrying out a strike or raid.



Such plans include the length of time permissible for killing or capturing people in a designated place, the “strike and surveillance” assets to be used, the specific counter-terrorism objectives to be achieved, and a “near certainty” that civilians will neither be killed nor, for non-lethal action, injured while capturing a target. The NSC staff convenes meetings across agencies for nominating any named “high-value target” to the “kill list”, and passes on those considered validly marked for death to a meeting of cabinet deputies. It also receives written assessments of the results of each strike.



For capturing a terrorist suspect, any plan that involves the US taking “long term” custody is transmitted through the NSC staff for inter-agency review. The NSC staff, and in particular Obama’s director for counter-terrorism – Lisa Monaco, who succeeded John Brennan, now CIA director – reviews an intelligence profile of the person nominated for capture, and convenes a multi-agency review of relevant concerns.

Planning a drone strike, per the playbook, also involves the discussion of circumstances for “authorizing direct action against targets other than identified” senior suspected terrorist leaders. These targets including lower-level figures, or, in the case of so-called “signature strikes”, anonymous people whose involvement in terrorism the administration derives through surveillance.

Such strikes do not need to target people specifically. The playbook states that they can also target bombs, bomb factories or “infrastructure, including explosives storage facilities”.

Each operational plan “shall be presented to the president for decision”, the playbook stipulates. A member of the NSC staff communicates Obama’s life-or-death decision, along with any caveats he imposes.

Over the course of Obama’s presidency, a bureaucratic apparatus has emerged to conduct and oversee drone strikes and counter-terrorism raids outside declared battlefields like Iraq and Afghanistan. Ahead of the 2012 election, Obama sought to codify it and, he announced in a 2013 speech coinciding with the draft of this document, constrain it, so as to conform to rules his administration made for its conduct, however secret and unilateral.

The chief NSC spokesman, Ned Price, defended the propriety and lawfulness of the playbook. “Our counter-terrorism actions are effective and legal, and their legitimacy is best demonstrated by making public more information about these actions as well as setting clear standards for other nations to follow,” he said.

The US justice department released a public version of the three-year-old document, formally dubbed the Presidential Policy Guidance, after the ACLU persuaded a federal judge in February to decide against the Obama administration’s argument for total secrecy. The administration did not release it along with an internal death tally it disclosed in June, which claimed its drone strikes had killed between 64 and 116 civilians, a figure widely seen by human-rights groups as too low.

The administration also released a 2014 Pentagon document giving specifics about how it defines “associated forces” targeted with al-Qaida and the Taliban. The specific groups, with the exception of the widely known Yemen branch of al-Qaida, were blacked out in the public release.

However, the document states that groups not identified as associated forces may still be targeted: “The administration is prepared to review this question whenever a situation arises in which it may be necessary to take US military direct action against an organized terrorist group.”

Once the CIA or the Pentagon proposes a drone strike or a campaign, relevant cabinet secretaries and their deputies review the plans regarding “implications” to broader US “regional or international political interests” and the “necessity” of killing people other than so-called high value targets, often referred to as HVTs in the documents.

When it comes to detentions, which during the Obama era have been rarer than drone strikes, the documents refer to considering “interrogation of the suspect” as well as to a preference for “prosecution in a civilian court or, where available, a military commission”. The few such suspects that the Obama administration has captured and retained custody of in the past eight years have all received civilian legal proceedings.

“In no event will additional detainees be brought to the detention facilities at the Guantánamo Bay naval base,” the playbook reads.

The playbook also says “appropriate members of Congress”, rather than whole committees, must receive notification after a lethal or capture operation occurs, when a plan is approved by the executive branch, or when “authority is expanded under an operational plan”.

For those targeted for death and whom the CIA or military is unable to immediately kill, the NSC staff and the agency seeking the lethal operation conduct an annual review, to determine whether available intelligence continues to support a determination that the “individuals [redacted] qualify for lethal action”.

Much of the section governing strikes against non-“high value targets” remains blacked out in the public version of the playbook.

For the past 25 years, Democratic and Republican legislators have warned of growing power within the executive branch and in favor of the NSC staff. While those warnings are filtered through partisan politics – the party that does not hold the White House sounds them loudest – they reflect a pattern among presidents of both parties toward insulating decision-making within a body that is exempt from congressional review.

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Unlike senior cabinet appointees, NSC staff are not approved by the Senate and do not testify before Congress, and their records are presumptively privileged. The NSC currently consists of around 400 people, an estimated fourfold growth over a generation. The current defense authorization bill, which has yet to pass, includes a measure to shrink the NSC’s staff and role.

An administration official who would not speak for the record said there was a “profound difference” between the NSC staff reviewing lethal operations and planning or executing them.

“Given the significance of these operations, it would be irresponsible not to review such plans,” the official said.

Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU attorney who spearheaded the lawsuit for the playbook’s disclosure, noted the power of the NSC. “One of the really striking things about this document is the central role that the NSC is apparently playing,” he said, “both in programmatic decisions about the drone campaign and in the so-called nominating process.

“The Obama administration notably has taken the position that the NSC is not an agency and is therefore beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.”