Anwar Al-Awlaki is dead. We killed him. The man who we fingered as a siren of terror, who allegedly brought scores of converts to Al-Qaeda, including the Underwear Bomber, Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab, and the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan. To phrase it less positively, the United States government without trial, judicial oversight, or even a fig-leaf constitutional cover just summarily assassinated Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American citizen. This is not some great victory for America, or even a small landmark towards our greater national ideals, rather this stands as a landmark in the continuing deterioration of constitutional protections for Americans in the face of an all-consuming national security state.
What’s at stake here isn’t some ‘distant’ issue of what rights we afford to foreign nationals, but rather whether we as Americans have the most minimal protection against the executive branch standing as accuser, judge, jury, and executioner. The assassination of Al-Awlaki seems to signal that we are willing to forgo even that most basic right in the paranoid pursuit of safety. There is literally no excuse for our government to have taken such an action. Yes, Al-Awlaki was widely known as a supporter and organizer for Al-Qaeda, but that alone doesn’t forgo his constitutional protections. There is no stipulation under U.S or International Law that allowed Obama to order his death without trial. None. Even rightly accusing him of treason doesn’t have legal footing. In fact, constitutionally, this only raises the bar for his trial because as a citizen, because it is required that the government present at least two witnesses to testify to his treason. There is, of course, no clause or loophole that allows the U.S government to forgo that.
Even if we look at the the authority granted to the government during war time, there is no precedent for the government being able to order the targeted killing of its own citizens. Even pragmatically, this was not a race against the clock situation. There was no imminent attack against the U.S that could only be stopped with Al-Awlaki’s death that could justify this. Moreover, the use of drone strike means there was no possible situation where a U.S soldier could have felt the need to defend him or herself against Al-Awlaki using lethal force, instead of attempting to apprehend him. All that happened was that Obama approved the strike, and it was carried out remotely.
Even then, many will say, “so what, he was a bad guy who wanted to hurt Americans, so he deserved to die.” But fundamentally, that’s a shallow and frankly Orwellian response. Who said that Al-Awlaki was a threat? The executive branch. Who said that he was a danger to us? The executive branch. Who ordered the strike that killed him? The Executive branch. There was no oversight or trial to verify that charges against him were true.
If you boil it down to the minimum conditions, Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed because a few people in the executive branch wanted him dead. Whether he deserved it or not isn’t the question, but rather that this sets the precedent that the executive branch has summary powers to kill American citizens, when and where it wants. Looking objectively, where is the line in the sand that separates Al-Awlaki’s killing as a special case that doesn’t apply to the rest of America? Was the action only permissible because it was foreign soil? Why was whatever secret intelligence used to condemn him sufficient? Was it just because he posed enough of a possible danger that we took the action? These are all questions that can only be answered by the executive branch, and the fact they have that authority should terrify us all. Who gets to determine if you’re a danger? The Executive Branch. Who gets to determine whether the evidence against you is sufficient to merit your death? The Executive Branch. Who gets to carry out the punishment? The Executive Branch.
Quite literally, if one was to be targeted by the executive branch for assassination, even as an American citizen, one would have no recourse. You couldn’t appeal the drone strike or call for a new trial, once the President, the intelligence agencies, and the Defense Department decide you need to die. Now, many will try and dismiss this by saying that either “the people accused of such actions that the government needs to kill shouldn’t be given a trial that would allow them to trumpet their vile ideology.” Similarly, another camp would say, “We should just trust the judgement of the executive branch, besides who are you to second guess them.”
The former assertion displays a total lack of faith in American’s democratic institutions, if one truly believes that one mad man can take the stand and use it to promulgate an ideology that will be so piercing and incisive as to lead people to rally against America. Further, it’s just not supported by the facts. In war crimes tribunals around the world from Nuremberg to those in the Balkans, whenever someone does try to broadcast their ideology from that stand, it has always been repudiated and shown to be completely incoherent. To address the latter, it simply needs to be noted that the intelligence community is not infallible, nor does it have a sterling record of never falling prey to bad, or manipulated intelligence. That, among many other reasons, is why we try people before we execute them, to see if what the executive accuses them of is valid. To be blunt, the judiciary exists primarily to second guess and to repudiate executive and legislative overreach.
To conclude, the extra-legal assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki should deeply disturb us all as Americans. Liberal, conservative, centrist, Tea Party, progressive, or whatever label we use to describe themselves, the fact the President has taken the power to assassinate U.S citizens should profoundly unnerve us. Truly, what is ‘conservative’ about ceding the power of life and death to the executive and allowing the executive to have that power without any checks or balances? What is ‘liberal’ about throwing the fundamental right to a trial out of the window when it becomes inconvenient for the government to abide by them?
Moreover, if this is acceptable, where is the line? Where is the place the executive branch can’t cross? Do we need a secret police before we start to push back for our civil liberties? Do we need newspapers being censored because their content might ’embolden the enemy’? If we accept this, it seems we have few, if any, principled lines to draw on what rights the War on Terror cannot take away from us. And at root, that’s what this is, an issue of rights and whether we should even call the heady words of the Constitution ‘rights’ at all. Because if we refuse to stand up for our rights when it’s hard, when quite honestly the person taking advantage of those rights is despicable and hateful to America, then we lose our ability to truly claim we have rights because they would have ceased to be inalienable natural guarantees, but rather quaint privileges that can be revoked when the government finds them inconvenient.