Last Thursday afternoon, the President of the United States said this:
For the record, I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen — with a drone, or with a shotgun — without due process, nor should any President deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.
Less than 40 hours earlier, an FBI Agent shot and killed Ibragim Todashev during a 5-hour interrogation with at least 4 other law enforcement officers. As I noted yesterday, law enforcement sources now concede that Todashev was unarmed when he was killed. According to a lawyer from CAIR representing his family, Todashev was shot 7 times, including once in the head.
An ethnically Chechen Russian, Todashev was not a US citizen. Though he reportedly obtained his Green Card in February and as such became a US person for spying and law enforcement purposes.
While the FBI claims that Todashev was in the process of confessing to involvement, with Boston Marathon killer Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham, MA, newly revealed details –such as that the other law enforcement officers had left the room when Todashev was shot — suggests they were pressuring Todashev to confess and/or (I suspect) turn informant and did or said something that made him either react badly or feel the need to defend himself. Given those details, no credible press should report without far more proof — as many still are — that the dead man was willingly confessing or had confessed at all.
Now, the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling on DOJ’s Civil Rights division to investigate whether excessive force was used.
Recall that the MI chapter of CAIR conducted an extensive investigation of another Muslim (in that case, a US citizen) deprived of due process by quick FBI shotguns, Imam Abdullah Luqman, and is now suing for wrongful death.
Presumably, the FBI will maintain, as they have already claimed, that Todashev attacked the FBI Agent (who, according to reports, had been left alone with Todashev by the others), and he became an imminent threat to that now-exposed FBI Agent’s safety.
You know? Imminent threat? The same broad word game we use to target people with drones?