In 2016, Attorney General Eric Holder sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee while Senator Rand Paul asked him a question so direct it almost seemed impolite. Does the president of the United States have the authority to kill an American citizen on American soil… without a trial?
Holder’s answer, after some diplomatic circling, was yes.
Let that land for a second.
Not in a war zone. Not overseas. Here. On the street where you live. And without the inconvenience of due process, evidence, or a jury of your peers.
I spent years in law enforcement building federal cases brick by brick, doing it the right way. Every conviction I was part of went through a system. A quite imperfect system, a slow system, a sometimes-frustrating system… but a system with checks.
What Holder described has no checks. None. Just a meeting.
Kiriakou also told me something that illustrates how easily that meeting can go wrong. He described intelligence as “notoriously unreliable.” He gave me a concrete example: Two men in an Afghan village. One borrowed money from the other and couldn’t pay it back. The borrower’s solution? Call the Americans. Tell them the creditor is al-Qaeda. “We” put him on the list. He gets neutralized. Debt forgiven.
That’s not a war story. That’s a debt collection strategy.
And it worked.
Now transpose that logic onto a domestic setting. You don’t have to stretch very far. You just need someone with access to a room that meets on Tuesdays, a grievance, and a name.
This isn’t an indictment of the people who designed this framework after September 11th. Kiriakou himself was careful about that. He understood the emotional reality of that moment… three thousand Americans dead in a single morning, a country that had never felt that kind of vulnerability on its own soil, agencies scrambling to prevent the next attack by any means available.
He understood why the program existed. He also went to prison for saying it had gone too far.
That distinction matters. The people in those rooms in 2002 were not monsters. Most of them were true believers acting out of genuine fear and genuine patriotism. The problem was never the intention. The problem is what happens to a tool like this when the intention changes… when the administration changes… when the person running the meeting changes.
Power doesn’t come with an expiration date. It comes with momentum.
The Tuesday meetings may or may not still happen in the form Kiriakou described. The architecture that made them possible absolutely does. The legal precedent Holder confirmed absolutely does. The Special Activities Division absolutely does.
And somewhere, a very small number of people are still deciding things that the rest of us will never hear about, with authority the Constitution never explicitly granted them, in rooms that don’t appear on any public calendar.
The question was never whether the list exists. It’s whether we’ve ever seriously asked who ends up on it and who decides when the criteria change.
We haven’t.
The list doesn’t care.
And that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a Tuesday.
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“I don’t try to change minds… just deepen them.” — Tegan Broadwater
Tegan spent 13 years with the Fort Worth Police Department, including two years assigned to the FBI working deep undercover inside a violent Crip organization. That operation, detailed in his book Life in the Fishbowl, resulted in 51 convictions. He has since founded Tactical Systems Network, an armed security & protection firm primarily staffed by veterans, is a creative writer and musician, and hosts The Tegan Broadwater Podcast. All book profits benefit children of incarcerated parents. Learn more at TeganBroadwater.com
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