Assassination of US citizens

[doctork]

I do not believe by any means that Anwar al-Awlaki was any kind of "good guy," or anything short of an evil SOB. But it makes me very uncomfortable to know that my government feels free to assassinate an American without any judicial action or approval.

That just seems un-American to me.

And now it looks like our government is trying hard to puff up the guy, making him look like a real big shot, a mastermind of al Qaeda activities, the architect of the "Underwear bomber" of Christmas 2009.

It's my belief that the "Underwear Bomber" event was:

1) A clumsily handled failure to pay one shred of attention to many obvious warnings or

2) A US government operation to begin with, in which they hoped at best to trace Qaeda contacts in the Detroit area or even worse,

3) A blatant decision that it was fine to sacrifice a few hundred people in a plane in order to build up a bigger government spy security operation where privileged contractors make lots of money.

I'm glad al-Awlaki is gone, but the associated assassination methodology makes me uncomfortable.

[BoatBabe]

May I assume from your post that the assassination of other people (not US citizens) does not bother you?


How about bin Laden?


I am not much for conspiracy theories and have never heard the theory that the Underwear Bomber was a US government operative and operation.


Seems a little far fetched to me.

[doctork]

I do not approve of our government assassinating other people either, though these efforts are usually either covered up (mysterious Third World plane crashes), or occur in the course of declared war. I believe the latter was the case with OBL.

My concern is with that pesky Constitution and its Bill of Rights, specifically the 5th amendment:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

I believe in "due process." There should have been due process before killing the "bad guy" (or anyone else).

IANAL, especially not a Constitutional lawyer, but the preamble to the Constitution makes reference to those under US jurisdiction, implying that the 5th amendment applies to American citizens, but (possibly) not non-citizens. So here I limit my comments to the rights of US citizens.

As for Abdulmutallab, it was widely reported that he should not have been approved for a US visa, and his father had reported him to the US Embassy as a terrorist. He was observed to board the flight without proper documentation and without meeting security screening standards, at the insistence of two men who appeared to be US government employees, despite KLM/Northwest's objections.

It is indeed just speculation that there was mal-intent on the part of our government, but most have no doubt that Abdulmutallab should not have been allowed on the flight. No diabolical "mastermind" required.

[BoatBabe]

"As for Abdulmutallab, it was widely reported that he should not have been approved for a US visa, and his father had reported him to the US Embassy as a terrorist. He was observed to board the flight without proper documentation and without meeting security screening standards, at the insistence of two men who appeared to be US government employees, despite KLM/Northwest's objections.

It is indeed just speculation that there was mal-intent on the part of our government, but most have no doubt that Abdulmutallab should not have been allowed on the flight. No diabolical "mastermind" required. "


Yes, that pesky Constitution and The Bill of Rights . . .


In the previous paragraphs you pointed out that the diabolic mastermind's illegal activity was carried out by two US government employees, allowing (or forcing) this US citizen to board a plane, be taken to foreign soil, and then murdered by the US government.


It sounds as though you have identified the Bad Guys.

[joew]

IMO al Qaeda is the functional equivalent of an attacking country without whatever benefits would accrue to a nation state which sent its armed forces into the field against ours. It seems to me that wherever in the world they are, they are subject to military or paramilitary action to defeat al Qaeda's ongoing war against us. Therefore the due process requirements of a criminal trial are inapplicable.

[doctork]

If there is a formal declaration of war against al Qaeda (not a jingoistic "War on Terror") then that may be a justification. However, Awlaki has not been convicted of a crime, and it is my reading of the Constitution that one should be convicted and tried for a crime ("due process") before punishment. Even the prisoners in Gitmo are so entitled and they aren't even US citizens.

Abdulmutallab is in prison, he was not murdered; due process is being followed. The two men who assisted him in boarding the plane have not been identified, though attorneys who viewed the incident reported they seemed to be US government agents.

Achmed Ressam, who plotted the (failed) Y2K bombing of LAX, was tried and imprisoned, after giving up a lot of very valuable information about al Qaeda training and personnel. Though he was arrested in Port Angeles by an alert Customs official, his accomplice who boarded a plane in Bellingham heading for Seattle, has never been apprehended.

When we don't follow our own US law, it diminishes us and our criminal justice system no matter how bad and deserving the bad guy is/was. Repeated, blatant disregard for the Bill of Rights bothers me, even when the victims are clearly bad guys. Those of us who are law-abiding citizens are next, (says she whose phone calls between the US and Afghanistan are recorded without a warrant.)

[BoatBabe]

There was never a formal declaration of war in Viet Nam. It was jingoist Police Action.


What does that make the over 50,000 US kids who died, and the untold numbers who served there?


US assassins?

[brutus]

Oct 1, 2011 21:37:46 GMT -5 BoatBabe said:

There was never a formal declaration of war in Viet Nam. It was jingoist Police Action.


What does that make the over 50,000 US kids who died, and the untold numbers who served there?


US assassins?

Heroes.

~B~

[BoatBabe]

Thank you.

[gailkate]

Whoa, I don't think K said anything at all critical of the guys who fought in Vietnam. (But don't get me started: then Defense Secretary McNamara could be called the assassin of our soldiers - his last memoir admitted how culpable he was.) Fighting and dying or suffering grievous wounds in any war is never shameful. Only mercenaries are complicit in that they fight for anyone with enough cash.

The assassination of a citizen is worrying to me, too, because I'm concerned about any action that seems to blur the edges of what we have set to be our rules. This guy seems to me a traitor - there is lots of evidence in his own voice, as he incited American Muslim boys to attack our country.

Further, he hid out in another country where he could not be found and tried. I am fundamentally against the death penalty, but taking out this powerful voice for jihad doesn't break my heart. In MN we have a large population of Somali refugees, perhaps the largest in our nation. Young men who find it hard to assimilate have been lured to al Quaida training grounds and are known to have died in battles and as suicide bombers. Their parents and their peaceful communities aren't sorry to see al-Awlaki silenced.

I know tampering with the Constitution is fraught with danger, but I wonder if there should be some provision for revoking citizenship when someone unarguably advocates treason. In 1787 there was no way other than proof in a court of law to determine treason, but when you've got Internet videos and recordings as evidence, how much more do you need? After all, in a court, sworn evidence is often a lie, so it seems less solid than the evidence they had against this guy.

[BoatBabe]

Sorry.



It was a cheap shot to make a point: all the rules don't apply to everybody all of the time.

[doctork]

Oct 1, 2011 21:37:46 GMT -5 BoatBabe said:

There was never a formal declaration of war in Viet Nam. It was jingoist Police Action.


What does that make the over 50,000 US kids who died, and the untold numbers who served there?


US assassins?

I think most of them were called "soldiers" though quite a few were "marines" or "sailors" or airmen" and a few were even "Coasties."

One of the 58,000+ who died was someone I called "my boyfriend" until he graduated and went to war, and I moved from NYC to NOLA with my family. For a while I thought that the address change was the reason he stopped answering my letters, but then his younger brother (my friend and classmate) wrote to me to let me know that Steve was KIA in Nam. My heart was broken, and no I did not, and do not, think that Steve was an assassin. Nor any of the other 58,000+ as far as I know.

Regardless of political machinations & semantics, that was a war, and our military shoot back at those who try to shoot them. That war was/is considered wrong by many, and that Congress won't step up to the plate and accept its responsibility to declare war, doesn't changed the fact that our service members fight for us and defend our Constitution "from all enemies foreign and domestic."

I'm glad al-Awlaki is dead, but I wish due process had been followed. I've wondered why he was not charged with treason and tried in absentia. We are not at war with Yemen, and al-Awlaki was a member of al Qaeda, which is not a nation state, confounding the "usual" declaration of war.

Due process and proper warrants serve us all, even when they are applied to scumbags who don't seem to deserve those rights. Our Constitutional rights are the essence of American exceptionalism and they should be respected, not carelessly evaded (especially not by a President who presents himself as a professor of Constitutional Law.)

[doctork]

I haven't thought so much about Steve in a very long time, as those memories are extremely painful, all the more so in retrospect.

His letters to me were very passionate, full of his plans "for us" when he came back, and how much he loved me and missed me. I was 16, and the relationship wasn't that serious to me and I had probably moved on to a new boyfriend in the new town pretty quickly, though of course I wrote back to him regularly.

Now I look back and see that he was a scared 18 year old boy in a jungle war half-way around the world; letters from home, especially from his girlfriend, must have meant so much to him, and I was kind of casual about it. I wish I had done more, I just didn't know any better, I was a only kid really. But so was he. I feel terrible.

Those were terrible times. But it is even worse we would now just trash the Constitution, the 5th Amendment, due process, what all have given so much for, just so some politicians can crow about a headline: Wanted Dead or Alive! Got him!

I hope al-Awlaki's elimination saves lives, but I am afraid all we have done is create more angry jihadists.

[gailkate]

I think the word "soldier" has become almost a generic term for members of the armed forces because it's so hard to include all the specific services, ages and genders. I still think of them as boys or kids, although one of the dead I knew was my former biology teacher, a Reserve officer nearing 50 when he was killed. Women died there, too - nurses, workers for the Red Cross and other charities, even journalists. I think of them all, including civilians, as fighting in a war chosen for them by men far removed from the carnage.

Here's another take on the issue of targeting an American. It makes a good point about the "transparency" of Obama's war policies.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secret-memo-that-explains-why-obama-can-kill-americans/246004/

[BoatBabe]

I'm sorry that you lost Steve, doc, in the Viet Nam action.


I lost some myself.



I made the point that all the rules don't apply to everybody all the time for a specific reason.


The Fifth Amendment didn't apply to the niggers or the fags or the bitches who lost everything when their husbands died, including their children and their lives.




I just don't understand why you would bring up the Fifth Amendment to "protect" or to question the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki when this crap has been going on for decades.


It just seems to me that if you were going to get uncomfortable about what your government was doing, it might be about people who were a whole lot more than "short of an evil SOB."

[joew]

Oct 2, 2011 21:05:55 GMT -5 doctork said:

… defend our Constitution "from all enemies foreign and domestic."

I'm glad al-Awlaki is dead, but I wish due process had been followed. I've wondered why he was not charged with treason and tried in absentia. We are not at war with Yemen, and al-Awlaki was a member of al Qaeda, which is not a nation state, confounding the "usual" declaration of war. …

The thing is, if we grant that al Qaeda is a foreign enemy, even though it isn't a nation state or territorial potentate, which the Framers would have expected a foreign enemy to be, why shouldn't we take the logical next step of treating those who actively support it as enemy soldiers rather than common criminals.

[gailkate]

I had a feeling this subject came up under the Geneva Conventions, so I googled and came up with this admittedly general discussion on wiki.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing

I need to look at the specific article of the conventions, but I think the issue comes down to whether this guy can be said to be a citizen after leaving the country and actively inciting teerorism against it. I suppose K is right that he could have been tried in absentia, but the list of targets published by the US (which led to the family's lawsuit) might be seen as a verdict in a process similar to a trial. The Atlantic piece I referenced earlier focuses on the murkiness of the rationale, shrouded in secrecy and not open to examination. I'm wondering if the Geneva Conventions may not be part of the justification.

Most people I've read are troubled by the fact of his citizenship, because once you deny rights to any citizen it gets easier to justify doing that to others. But he just doesn't feel like the beginnings of a slippery slope to me.

[gailkate]

Recent info on the legal analysis that justified targeting Awlaki.

www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html?_r=1&hp

[doctork]

I'm not a fan of "secret memos" (or secret watch lists with no indication of why you are suddenly on the list, or who accused you and was the accusation well-founded) so I will have to take some time to think this over. IIRC there was a lot of justification about WMD before the invasion of Iraq, and all that talk about "quick efforts" in Afghanistan to eliminate al Qaeda training camps, which effort began, I think, exactly 10 years ago today.

Obama promised change and transparency. I know politicians often do not keep campaign promises, but increased use of secret memos as justification for allowing a practice long explicitly prohibited seems to me a significant variation.

I am concerned about this case because it feels like to me we are already well down a slippery slope, with increasing government intervention, repeated circumvention of basic rights, and outright defiance of the laws of the land - secret meetings during "ClintonCare," a host of events during Bush 43, refusal of DHS/TSA to comply with the Administrative Procedures Act.

None of this is "sudden" for me, as I have been an activist at least since I was in high school, which was the Civil Rights Era, then the Viet Nam War, union rights for coal miners, support for rape victims, anti-nukes when there was a plutonium nuclear plant proposed just outside Denver, malpractice reform when legal changes threatened the availability of maternity care in Colorado and then West Virginia, civil rights for those with "other-than-straight sexual orientation," and on into the current era.

It's pretty easy to ignore injustice and violation of civil rights when perpetrated on the unpopular, but from there the next step is to trample the rights of "the rest of us." Now is the time to speak up and raise the questions, discuss the issues. So I do.

[gailkate]

An editorial in today's New York Times. I've bolded the part which seems to explain what the administration thought was its justification.

Justifying the Killing of an AmericanPublished: October 11, 2011
The Obama administration apparently spent months considering the legal implications of targeting Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen who was killed in Yemen last month after being accused of being a terrorist organizer. It prepared a detailed and cautious memorandum to justify the decision — a refreshing change from the reckless legal thinking of the Bush administration, which rationalized torture, claimed unlimited presidential powers and drove the country’s fight against terrorists off the rails.

But the memo, as reported by Charlie Savage in The Times, is an insufficient foundation for a momentous decision by the government to kill one of its own citizens, no matter how dangerous a threat he was believed to be. For one thing, the administration has refused to make it public or even acknowledge its existence. It was described to Mr. Savage by anonymous officials, and the administration will not openly discuss even its most basic guidelines for choosing assassination targets.

The decision to kill Mr. Awlaki was made entirely within the executive branch. The memo was not shared with Congress, nor did any independent judge or panel of judges pass judgment. The administration set aside Mr. Awlaki’s rights to due process.

President Obama said Mr. Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, had taken “the lead role in planning and directing the efforts to murder innocent Americans.” The administration said he inspired several planned terrorist attacks, including the attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. (Testimony in the trial of the accused bomber began on Tuesday.) Officials have said Mr. Awlaki’s role went beyond inspiration into operational planning of attacks, though they have not supplied proof of that. If the White House would release the evidence it has to back up these claims, it would have a better chance of justifying the cleric’s death.

The memo, prepared by two lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said Mr. Awlaki could be killed because he was taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, but it stopped short of analyzing the quality of the evidence. It said joining an enemy force deprived him of a citizen’s due process rights, citing several Supreme Court rulings that put the protection of innocent lives above the risk of possible death of a suspect.

Mr. Awlaki was not entitled to full protections — an open-court trial in absentia would have been time-wasting and impractical — but as an American, he was entitled to some. The memo said Mr. Awlaki should be captured if feasible — an important principle, even though the government did not believe it could safely put commandos in Yemen to capture him.

Due process means more than a military risk analysis. It requires unambiguous and public guidelines for how the United States will follow federal and international law in approving targeted killings, particularly of Americans. And it means taking the decision beyond the executive echo chamber. We have argued that judicial review is required, perhaps a closed-door court similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, before anyone, especially a citizen, is placed on an assassination list.

The Obama administration seems to know that antiterrorist operations do not escape the rule of law. Its case would be far stronger if it would say so, out loud.

Again, it's very troubling. But taken on its own merits, without all the Bush-era excesses in response to 9/11, I at least understand the logic.
It ticks me off to see the NYT referring to this guy as a cleric. That's an insult to Muslims.

[doctork]

At least they referred to him as a radical cleric.

I'm still not convinced, though I suppose it is modestly reassuring that at least the Obama administration felt guilty enough to try to prepare a "justification." Just how is "rationalizing torture" worse than targeting a citizen for assassination? And what are those Supreme Court decisions affirming that due process can be omitted when a citizen joins an enemy force?

The FISC sounds like a reasonable alternative to secret memos that are still kept from any judicial or public scrutiny, so I wonder why that wasn't used.

As far as I can see, Obama is continuing to pursue unlimited presidential powers, very similar to Bush 43.

[gailkate]

Good grief, he's not even close.