The U.S. of Assassination

--Hunting Taliban,
Manny Francisco (Manilla)

I wish I was a neutron bomb,
for once I could go off.
I wish I was a sacrifice
but somehow still lived on
--Wishlist, Pearl Jam

We’ll spend a month obsessing about Terri Shiavo.
But dare we show the body of a fallen soldier?
--Boston Legal (206)

We should never confuse dissent
with disloyalty
--Edward R. Murrow
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Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, U.S. citizen, is officially on a U.S. "kill list". Do democracies remain liberal when they run hit lists? Does the President have the legal authority to sentence a U.S. citizen to death, sans trial?

"if the Constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes in an enemy of the state," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, who presented arguments in the case. "It's the government's responsibility to protect the nation from terrorist attacks, but the courts have a crucial role to play in ensuring that counterterrorism policies are consistent with the Constitution (Obama's Administration Claims Unchecked Authority).

FBI investigators sayAl-Awlaki's function may have been to keep the 9-11-01 hijackers "spiritually on-track". That IS the function of spiritual advisers, after all. And one could argue that U.S. military chaplains do the same for our soldiers. Both sides kill civilians, so the label terrorist could depend on which side of the fence one resides.

The U.S. did not target Shiite cleric Musa al-Sadr, whose preachings obviously led to U.S. deaths. How is one exempt, and another slated for dispatch into oblivion?

Truly, the U.S. President lacks the authority to sentence any one to death, nor can he legitimately authorize assassination. Assassination is not an option in the U.S. legal pantheon for responses to terrorist actions.

Definitions matter in a country under rule of law. Is al-Awlaki a belligerent, as claimed? Belligerent is a term of warfare as defined by the Geneva Conventions. Yet if we capture belligerents, we fail to afford them prisoner of war (POW) status and all rights that issue from that.

Further, we predict that al-Awlaki presents an imminent danger to U.S. citizens. Going with this line of predictability, do not serial killers also pose imminent threats to life? Yet, we do not target them for assassination. Likewise, we do not target Mexican or Columbian drug lords, yet just as surely they are imminent threats to life which bleeds over our borders. The U.S. has precedent for dealing with criminals, and it does not involve assassination.

We are assured that the Central Intelligence Agency will be prudent and apply due process in their assemblage if their kill lists and this elicits a snicker, for surely the CIA is composed of extremists every bit as much as the group al-Qaeda. There have been no charges of terrorism filed against al-Awlaki, and the administration refuses to release evidence (State secret, y'know.)

When the U.S. must maintain a death list and cannot extract a small-time operator like al-Awlaki from tribal areas in Yemen, how can we say we are a world power?