Over at NRO, Kevin D. Williamson is asking important questions about the Obama administration’s most recent foray in the war on terror, permitting the killing of American citizens targeted for their terrorist activities:
I hate to play the squish, but am I the only one who is just a little bit queasy over the fact that the president of the United States is authorizing the assassination of American citizens? . . . Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. It is not impossible to imagine a president who, for instance, sincerely believes that Andy McCarthy is undermining the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute the war on terror on the legal front. A government that can kill its citizens can shut them up, no? I ask this not as a legal question, but as a moral and political question: How is it that a government that can assassinate Citizen Awlaki is unable to censor Citizen McCarthy, or drop him in an oubliette? Practically every journalist of any consequence in Washington has illegally handled a piece of classified information. Can the president have them assassinated in the name of national security? Under the Awlaki standard, why not?
If worrying that the president might be overstepping his authority in approving the targeted killing of American citizens makes you a squish, Mr. Williamson, well, that makes two of us. Oh, wait. Make that three. Conor Friedersdorf is squishing out as well:
Is our polity losing it? In proposing that middle-aged citizens be counseled by medical advisers to prepare for end-of-life decisions, the president is widely accused of supporting “death panels”—a charge trumpeted loudly by select conservatives and repeated endlessly by the national media, though avoided by many serious Republicans.
Mere weeks later, it is revealed that President Obama presides over an actual death panel, shrouded in mystery except for the fact that it literally orders the killing of United States citizens, absent any oversight. Existing hit lists include at least three Americans.
And the response?
Crickets.
Sorry, make that four:
Here we are, almost four years later with a new party in power, and the President’s top intelligence official announces—without any real controversy— that the President claims the power to assassinate American citizens with no charges, no trials, no judicial oversight of any kind. The claimed power isn’t “inherent”—it’s based on alleged Congressional approval— but it’s safeguard-free and due-process-free just the same. As Gore asked of less severe policies in 2006, if the President can do that, “then what can’t he do?”
Or five:
Does it strike you as odd that we’re targeting US citizens with no judicial process? Does it strike you as odd that we’ve got two entirely separate sets of list on which Americans can be targeted to be killed? Does it strike you as odd that we’ve now got an apparent turf battle over who gets to kill al-Awlaki?
Do I hear six?
April 7th, 2010 | 4:26 pm
I’m sorry, but an absolute falsehood in Mr. Friedersdorf’s snippet has to be addressed:
“In proposing that middle-aged citizens be counseled by medical advisers to prepare for end-of-life decisions, the president is widely accused of supporting “death panels””
This is NOT what the “death panels” crack was about at all. It was addressing the fact that government advisory boards will be set up to determine what medical expenses are allowed, and that doing so on any sort of statistical basis will of course lead to literal life-and-death decisions for certain individuals. “Select conservatives” were ridiculed by our betters in the MSM and the Democrat party, because the latter groups are full of mental and moral midgets, but the likes of Paul Krugman already admit that the “death panels” will in fact exist, and that they’re truly awesome!
“The advisory path has the ability to make more or less binding judgments on saying this particular expensive treatment actually doesn’t do any good medically and so we’re not going to pay for it. That is actually going to save quite a lot of money.”
April 7th, 2010 | 5:00 pm
Part of my reaction is that even to ask this question is always already to expect a war to be conducted as a legal tribunal within a polity (if the US be at war with Islamist terror; if one believes it is not, let him make that case explicitly and honestly, rather than argue these question-begging details. It is surely not irrelevant that at least some of the linked authors don’t really have much enthusiasm for killing non-American terrorists).
But if one wants a relevant legal-sounding standard for what is ultimately not a legal question, how about “has declared war on the US government and encouraged acts of war against it.” Awlaki easily meets that standard, which is why there has been no protest.
April 7th, 2010 | 5:31 pm
Maybe we should make KSM an American citizen; then we wouldn’t have to worry where his trial will be.
April 7th, 2010 | 6:33 pm
I was not aware that this was a Bush policy; I would not have supported it then (I didn’t and don’t support wiretaps on citizens without a judicial approval). This is disgusting and a complete violation of the rule of law.
April 7th, 2010 | 11:20 pm
Ryan – If a U.S. citizen is working overseas with an Al Queda cell to wage terrorist-war on the United States, how shall we handle it? It seems to me that your approach would require that, at the moment the target is identified as a U.S citizen, the DOJ tells the military and intelligence agencies, “hands off” and passes the target package over to the FBI to develop as a criminal case with an objective of arresting and prosecuting the (former target) subject.
April 8th, 2010 | 9:01 am
In his book “Terror and Consent,” Philip Bobbitt makes a strong case that terrorism has created a new class of armed struggle that falls somewhere between war and crime. He argues forcefully that as a nation of laws, we need to develop adequate laws and rules for how we will conduct ourselves against terrorist threats. The debate and consensus required to craft adequate laws, rules of engagement, and so on are the hallmarks of a free and open society. Since 9/11, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, as well as the Congress, have failed to engage in the kind of legal debate necessary to create these laws (other than the hastily crafted and passed Patriot Act). The result is that we have become a nation in which the Executive branch feels free to justify any action it wants to take by invoking the “war on terror.” Surely investing a single branch of government with this level of authority and with no meaningful oversight should give any citizen of the left or right pause.
And even assuming that the Executive has a “right” to assassinate anyone it pleases in a time of war (or quasi-war), how are we in the case of Awlaki likely to carry out this assassination? By a carefully placed bullet to his head? More likely it will be by using a drone aircraft which we will fire at him when we have located him in a building or vehicle. We will drop a large bomb on that target and if we are lucky, kill our man and then regret the loss of any innocent lives that were also in the vicinity. None of this seems remotely justifiable given the minimal amount of damage, if any, this man has done to us. It smacks strongly of revenge for the Ft. Hood shootings and the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing.
And I might add, nothing about this seems particularly Christ-like or to come close to meeting the terms of a “just war” action.
April 8th, 2010 | 9:01 am
[...] Ryan posted an excerpt from Kevin D. Williamson at NRO on the legitimacy of targeting American citizens because [...]
April 8th, 2010 | 11:40 am
Question:
Are we at war?
or not?
If we are, and if a man chooses to become a leader of the opposing side, why would we consider that he has not rejected his citizenship in our country? why would he not expect to be considered simply a leader of the enemy force? why should _we_ consider him as anything other than a leader of the enemy force?
April 8th, 2010 | 1:34 pm
The question of whether we are at war is part of my point, and Bobbitt’s in his book. If we are “at war” in the sense that has applied to that term in the past, why don’t the Geneva Convention and other treaties to which we are legally bound signatories apply? If they don’t apply, then are we “at war”? If we are “at” something else, then we need to have an open debate and pass the laws and policies that would make our actions legal and constitutional. We have not done that, it seems to me, and simply abdicating our responsibility to do so by letting the Executive branch decide who is a traitor and who isn’t, and who deserves death and who doesn’t (as well as other non- and extra-constitutional powers the Executive has invoked in recent years) is tending in the wrong direction, maybe even a dangerous direction.
BTW, I have added my last initial to differentiate myself from another “Steve” who has posted here recently.
April 8th, 2010 | 7:51 pm
>> (if we are at war)why don’t the Geneva Convention and other treaties to which we are legally bound signatories apply?>>
Because the GC only applies to signatories of the treaty, and those with whom we are at war are _not_ signatories. Additionally, they do not represent national governments, so cannot really be _declared_ war opponents, and lastly, the combatants are not uniformed, so it isn’t possible to separate them from the civilian population. The GC specifically identifies uniformed combatants in order to protect the civilians as non-combatants.
April 9th, 2010 | 7:58 am
Suck, you are correct, and that is part of my point (and Bobbitt’s). The enemies with which we are engaged are not soldiers in the traditional sense, and are essentially stateless. So, yes, the conventional rules of war do not apply well, if at all. And yet these enemies are something more than mere criminals, and so the usual role of the criminal justice system, with its rights and due process as defined in the Constitution, does not apply well, if at all, either. The Bush administration created a new category of “unlawful combatant,” which may be a start at defining this new class of enemy. However, I don’t believe we have adequately addressed the laws, the rules, the procedures and other policies that would enable us to pursue these persons with the moral authority of a free and open society. I am not arguing that in the absence of these rules we should do nothing to thwart our enemies, just that to operate with the hodgepodge of criminal and military laws and policies currently on the books leads to confusion, conflicting aims and methods, and opens the door to more unchecked authority in the Executive branch than I am comfortable with. My unease with the Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings of American citizens is that it seems yet another step in the direction of relinquishing too much unchecked power to the Executive branch.
April 9th, 2010 | 8:59 am
Oops, I should have addressed that last post to “suek.” My apologies. Sometimes my middle-aged eyes don’t do well with certain fonts on web pages.
April 15th, 2010 | 1:08 pm
[...] week, Ryan, Micah, and I discussed the legal and moral implications of targeting Anwar Al-Awlaki, a terrorist [...]
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