That headline is NOT hyperbole.
It's a reality that most Americans could never believe would ever occur.
But occur it has, and it's getting precious little discussion, outrage, or even coverage by the major media outlets.
The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes most legal authorities deeply uneasy.
And it should make every American outraged.
Because as noted above, there is absolutely no due process, and no accountability for the precedent it sets.
It doesn't matter who the person is, or what crimes they may have committed, the America I know and love follows the law, follows the Constitution, and guarantees its citizens rights.
If not, then bring all our soldiers, sailors, and airmen home, because there is nothing worth fighting for.
The person in question is the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen.
Clearly, not a nice person, but one who has American citizenship nonetheless.
To even eavesdrop on this terrorism suspect, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant.
To do that, they would have to follow the law, follow the Constitution, and proceed through due process.
That's what warrants are for --- to insure our rights are protected.
But that's inconvenient, intrusive, and too much of a bother for the O-man's administration.
So instead, they trageted him for death and authorized his killing --- with no due process.
Designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, requires no judicial review.
No pesky preservation of rights.
Administration officials take the view that no legal or constitutional rights can protect Mr. Awlaki, a charismatic preacher who has said it is a religious duty to attack the United States and who the C.I.A. believes is actively plotting violence.
The attempted bombing of Times Square on May 1 is the latest of more than a dozen terrorist plots in the West that investigators believe were inspired in part by Mr. Awlaki’s rhetoric.
Believe, but haven't proven.
President Obama, who campaigned for the presidency against George W. Bush-era interrogation and detention practices, has implicitly invited moral and legal scrutiny of his own policies.
But like the debate over torture during the Bush administration, public discussion of what officials call targeted killing has been limited by the secrecy of the C.I.A. drone program.
Representative John F. Tierney, who on April 28 held the first Congressional hearing focused on the lawfulness of targeted killing, said he was determined to air the contentious questions publicly and possibly seek legislation to govern such operations.
The reported targeting of Mr. Awlaki “certainly raises the question of what rights a citizen has and what steps must be taken before he’s put on the list,” said Mr. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of a House subcommittee on national security.
But not everyone is so concerned.
“American citizenship doesn’t give you carte blanche to wage war against your own country,” said a counterterrorism official who discussed the classified program on condition of anonymity. “If you cast your lot with its enemies, you may well share their fate.”
Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, said in a March 24 speech the drone strikes against Al Qaeda and its allies were lawful as part of the military action authorized by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as under the general principle of self-defense.
By those rules, he said, such targeted killing was not assassination, which is banned by executive order.
But the disclosure last month by news organizations that Mr. Awlaki, 39, had been added to the C.I.A. kill list shifted the terms of the legal debate in several ways.
He is located far from hostilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the perpetrators of 9/11 are believed to be hiding.
He is alleged to be affiliated with a Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda.
Intelligence analysts believe that only recently he began to help plot strikes, including the failed attempt to bomb an airliner on Dec. 25.
Most significantly, he is an American, born in New Mexico, arguably protected by the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee not to be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
In a traditional war, anyone allied with the enemy, regardless of citizenship, is a legitimate target; German-Americans who fought with the Nazis in World War II were given no special treatment.
But this administration, and those before it, have refused to classify the war on terror as a traditional war, or even make an official declaration of war, so those provisions are not in effect.
“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life."
"That makes no sense.”
"Some judicial process should be required before the government kills an American away from a traditional battlefield." she said.
It's amazing that the media is all up in arms about the Arizona immigration bil because some illegal might have his rights infringed upon and be sent homw to Mexico, but here we have a total stripping of rights with no due process, and a targeted assination, and nobody cares.
What if a member of the press becomes a target?
Do you think they might be outraged then?
Do you think maybe just a little judicial review and due process might be a reasonable expectation?
Apparently not.
A former C.I.A. lawyer, John Radsan, said prior judicial review of additions to the target list might be unconstitutional. “That sort of review goes to the core of presidential power,” he said.
Actually, it goes a bit deeper than that.
It goes directly to the protection guaranteed American citizens by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
And the last I checked, Presidential powers don't include shredding that document.
The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting. ---- Justice William J. Brennan, 1982
No man is above the law and no man below it. ~Theodore Roosevelt
PORK OF THE DAY:
$380,000 by Senate appropriator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) for construction of a recreation and fairgrounds area in Kotzebue. That works out to $123.30 for each of Kotzebue’s 3,082 residents. Perhaps the town should have used the approximately $350,000 it spent on lobbying since 2000 for the fairgrounds, saving federal taxpayers a bundle. Even the Anchorage Daily News was outraged by the project: “The federal dollar that the stimulus might have spent on recreation projects is no different from the federal dollar spent on recreation in the pending appropriations bill. It all comes from the same pot of borrowed money.”
Welcome Back Pard!
12 years ago
