Don’t kill U.S. citizens without due process

Since the death of U.S.-born suspected terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki on Sept. 30, there has been renewed debate about the way our federal government wages the War on Terror.

This debate is currently emphasizing the president’s policy of using unmanned aerial drones to carry out “targeted killings” of suspected terrorists, and it has been complicated by the fact that Awlaki was a U.S. citizen that presumably should have been afforded his rights to due process under the law.

I am inclined to believe the government’s claims about Awlaki’s actions, but I believe his killing was an unjustified assassination. I also believe that actions of this kind do not contribute to the safety of the American people and that they actually help foment hatred of this country among impressionable young people.

Why do I believe this was an unjustified assassination?

First, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that “No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

As an American citizen, even as one notorious for murderous aims, Awlaki should have been afforded his rights, just as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was and Tucson shooter Jared Lee Loughner will be.

Second, the administration’s rationale for depriving Awlaki of his due process rights is unconvincing.

According to a New York Times article on the issue, the legal argument had “three elements. First, he posed an imminent threat to the lives of Americans ... Second, he was fighting alongside the enemy in the armed conflict with Al-Qaida. And finally, in the chaos of Yemen, there was no feasible way to arrest him.”

While it may be that all three of these things are true, the trouble is that the evidence against Awlaki has been kept secret from both the public and the courts and is likely to remain so.

The argument that the government should not have, let alone exercise, this power was made persuasively by Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com recently.

He discusses the fact that many people who are fine with the current policy were harshly critical of these sorts of actions during the previous administration.  

“For you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this: ‘How would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?’” he asked.

Now, on to the question of whether, morals aside, this action makes the American people safer.

In his remarks on the killing, President Barack Obama referred to Awlaki’s death as “another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat Al-Qaida and its affiliates.”
This was after he referred to Awlaki’s organization, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), as “Al-Qaida’s most active operational affiliate.” He went on to say the assassination was “further proof that Al-Qaida and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.”

As I’m sure the president is aware, AQAP has only been the most active Al-Qaida affiliate for a couple of years. It was formed by a merger of the organization’s Saudi and Yemeni affiliates just as a swarm of Al-Qaida operatives were fleeing Saudi Arabia for the safer haven of Yemen, joining fighters who were doing the same from countries such as Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan.

The fact that AQAP became prominent in this way is evidence that the Bush/Obama strategy of combating terrorism by waging a multi-front war in Asia and Africa is not working.

Instead of depriving Al-Qaida of safe havens, this strategy merely causes them to find new ones from time to time as we chase them out of one country and then the next, leaving death, destruction and plenty of fodder for anti-American
propagandists behind.

The president would have been right if he had said Awlaki’s death was proof that Al-Qaida will find no permanent safe haven anywhere in the world, but I doubt that even the drone-operator-in-chief can permanently remove terrorists’ safe havens from the entire planet.

­— jarlower@indiana.edu