Ron Paul seems to think it could happen. As the former Congressman from Texas recently told Fox News, "I'm worried [that] somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile."
Is that even possible? Paul's slight ambiguity aside--he laughs softly throughout the clip--is the specter of extrajudicial killing now just another thing to keep Snowden up at night? Given the US government's unsettling, if still nebulous criteria for assassinating its own citizens on foreign soil, it's certainly possible. Paul could have a point. And it's not like Snowden isn't expecting the hammer to drop in one way or another, and soon.
Asked by Scientific American about how he thinks the NSA will go after Snowden, who in a series of articles last week pulled the cover off what's a massive and all-seeing digital dragnet that can literally watch thoughts form, former NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake did not mince words: "With everything they've got."
What "everything they've got" will look like remains to be seen. And yet if closed-door discussions to build the case for droning Snowden are actually going down--hell, even if they aren't, or at least not yet--we can try to imagine how the US government is going about it by referring back to a curt White House factsheet (.pdf) that spells out something like America's "criteria" for snuffing out perceived bad guys. Here's what the Obama administration's "can we drone Snowden?" checklist would should look like.
IS THERE A LEGAL BASIS FOR THIS?
Presumably yes, there is. The only problem is we have absolutely no idea how that foundation was set, or if it's shifting.
Remember Anwar Al-Awlaki? The American-born Al-Qaeda cleric was killed by a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. (Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son, likewise a US citizen, suffered the same fate as his father.) The US insists, however begrudgingly, that the rationale behind the strike that took out Al-Awlaki does in fact exist, yet refuses to declassify the full legal memo. Droning Snowden wouldn't necessarily be without precedent, but how are we supposed to know that doing so would be in accord with a justification that's being kept behind the curtain?
Oh right, we can't.