Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American Muslim cleric of Yemeni descent and alleged al-Qaeda commander, was assasinated by a CIA drone yesterday on the orders of the US commander-in-chief. Once again, Barack Obama, the Drone President, has been given a pass by liberals.
Where was the trial?
Where was the evidence or indictment in a court of law?
Where was the attempt at an arrest or extradition?
Where was due process?
Even George W Bush didn’t assassinate US citizens, terror suspects or otherwise, in this brazen manner. And I can assure you that if he had done, most US liberals would have been up in arms, protesting and hollering.
To understand why, consider the legal and moral arguments offered by Glenn Greenwald, Adam Serwer and Michael Ratner, below:
1) From Glenn Greenwald’s Salon blog:
After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the US succeeded today (and it was the US). It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the US murder its. The US thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world. The government and media search for the Next Bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.
What’s most striking about this is not that the US government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting but will stand and cheer the US government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the US government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, tough president’s ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki — including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry’s execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists: criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.
From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s political culture. It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.
2) From Adam Serwer’s Mother Jones blog:
The central question in the death of American extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is not his innocence. That really misses the point. Awlaki was the only publicly known name on a covert list of American citizens the US government believes it can legally kill without charge or trial. Awlaki’s killing can’t be viewed as a one-off situation; what we’re talking about is the establishment of a precedent by which a US president can secretly order the death of an American citizen unchecked by any outside process. Rules that get established on the basis that they only apply to the “bad guys” tend to be ripe for abuse, particularly when they’re secret.
. . . Uncritically endorsing the administration’s authority to kill Awlaki on the basis that he was likely guilty, or an obviously terrible human being, is short-sighted. Because what we’re talking about here is not whether Awlaki in particular deserved to die. What we’re talking about is trusting the president with the authority to decide, with the minor bureaucratic burden of asking “specific permission”, whether an American citizen is or isn’t a terrorist and then quietly rendering a lethal sanction against them.
The question is not whether or not you trust that President Obama made the right decision here. It’s whether or not you trust him, and all future presidents, to do so — and to do so in complete secrecy.
3) From Michael Ratner’s CIF post:
Is this the world we want? Where the president of the United States can place an American citizen, or anyone else for that matter, living outside a war zone on a targeted assassination list, and then have him murdered by drone strike.
. . . Yes, Anwar al-Awlaki was a radical Muslim cleric. Yes, his language and speeches were incendiary. He may even have engaged in plots against the United States — but we do not know that because he was never indicted for a crime.
This profile should not have made him a target for a killing without due process and without any effort to capture, arrest and try him. The US government knew his location for purposes of a drone strike, so why was no effort made to arrest him in Yemen, a country that apparently was allied in the US efforts to track him down?
. . . We know the government makes mistakes, lots of them, in giving people a “terrorist” label. Hundreds of men were wrongfully detained at Guantánamo. Should this same government, or any government, be allowed to order people’s killing without due process?
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