There is a lot ofnewsout there this morning that an air-strike has killed Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar al-Awlaki. It might be too soon to know if this is accurate, as the Yemeni government has claimed the death of other Al-Qaeda leaders and had it turn out to be false in the past.
However it is not too soon to mourn for the rule of law. The placing of anyone on an assassination list is bad news for any nation that wants to be one of laws. To place a citizen of your nation, as Anwar al-Awlaki was, on it and then carry it out is just another strong step towards a police state.
One of the things that has made the U.S. special in the world over the last 237 years has been our founding principle that all men are entitled to equal protection under the law. It took us until after the Civil War to make this explicit, but we did with the 14th Amendment.
I am willing to say that Mr. al-Awlaki was definitely involved encouraging terrorist attacks against the United States. This is a serious crime, and it seems as though he was not more successful because of the failures of the want-to-be-terrorists rather than in recruitment and help, he still has made no pretense that he wanted anything other than the death of Americans in America.
But that can not excuse the extra-legal killing of United States citizens away from a battle field. Of course the Obama Administration will claim that he was on a battlefield since entire freaking planet has been defined that way, thanks the criminal Bush Administration.
We don’t know for sure that it was a U.S. drone that carried out the air strike. The Yemeni government is not saying, but given that we have been flying drones and carrying out airstrikes in that country for more than a year, it is a pretty good bet that it was us.
There is probably going to be some quite triumphalism from the Right on this. It won’t be as loud as it would if there were a Republican president, but they will be happy that we carried out (if we indeed did) this assassination. And that is a real tragedy.
I know that I make the slippery slope argument a lot, but the fact that there will be any celebration of this act is just another normalization of something we used to think unthinkable. The problem is that unlike Osama bin Laden, al-Awlaki was an American citizen. He was clearly entitled to due process and we just brushed that aside.
If we are not willing to make the case for due process for the worst of our citizens, where does it end? Most people will agree that al-Awlaki was a criminal and a completely unrepentant one. So, a bad man. But where do you draw the line?
He encouraged the killing of Americans. Well, so do some of the militia’s out there. Should we be targeting them for death?
Or going another direction, if we are willing to assassinate someone who is at “war” with us, what is to prevent us from doing so with someone like the president of Syria if we ever start active war with them? And from there it is all open season, isn’t it?
Terrorism is a problem. It will be with us for a very long time, there is no getting around that. But is in our effort to combat it should we really be undermining the very fabric of our status as a nation of laws?
The floor is yours.