Avril Haines is, per John Kiriakou, a National Security Council official who later became CIA deputy director and personally approved lethal drone strike decisions. Kiriakou says that in the drone program, a drone operator with a target in the crosshairs would call in to ask whether to launch — early on to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center or the agency’s general counsel, and later, during the Obama administration, to Haines; it was Haines, Kiriakou says, “that decided whether it was legal to incinerate someone from the sky.”[1]
Kiriakou states that Haines approved the drone strikes that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who had never been charged with a crime; his teenage son; and a nephew, also American citizens — none of them afforded due process or the chance to face their accusers in court.[2]