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20130
“Meet Obama’s Homeland Security Nominee: Ex-Pentagon Official Who Supports Drone Strikes on U.S. Citi”
by National Journal   
October 18th, 2013
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President Obama plans to nominate former Defense Department lawyer Jeh (pronounced “Jay”) Johnson for Homeland Security secretary on Friday, The Daily Beast‘s Daniel Klaidman reports. Johnson will replace acting Secretary Rand Beers, who has been filling in since Janet Napolitano left to become president of the University of California system in September. Johnson was the Defense Department’s general counsel from 2009 until last December.

Johnson’s legacy at the Defense Department is marked by two high-profile issues: his advocacy of the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and—as chief lawyer at the Pentagon—his legal authority over all drone strikes carried out by the Defense secretary and President Obama.

Johnson cowrote a report on gays in the military in 2010, an experience that helped turn him into the leading advocate for repeal of the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy. In 2010, he told The New York Times that people “underestimate the military’s ability to adapt.”

But despite that leading, public advocacy on a major social issue, Johnson’s role in the Obama administration’s drone policy is much more relevant to his possible new perch at Homeland Security. And it could speak volumes about how the administration will conduct security policy through the end of Obama’s term.

Johnson also suggested that U.S. citizens could be targeted in strikes in a February 2012 speech at Yale Law School. “Belligerents who also happen to be U.S. citizens do not enjoy immunity where noncitizen belligerents are valid military objectives,” Johnson said. In the same speech, Johnson pushed the Obama administration’s legal rationale for the targeted-killing program, saying that “under well-settled legal principles, lethal force against a valid military objective, in an armed conflict, is consistent with the law of war and does not, by definition, constitute an ‘assassination.’ “

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