Killing us softly

I accept that the government carries out violence on my behalf. I believe it is frequently justified in doing so.

And I know I have a say in changing the government if I disagree with it.

That is why the Department of Justice “drone memo” published by NBC last week chills me.

The memo says the government can kill one of its own citizens without due process if he is a “senior, operational leader” of al-Qaeda or an associated group, poses an “imminent threat” to the United States and the kill order is given by an “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government.”

President Barack Obama asks us to accept some weighty propositions in this memo.

He asks us to accept that an individual government official can exercise sound judgment in ordering an extrajudicial killing.

He asks us to accept that the government may order those killings without clear evidence of any particular attack on American interests in the near future.  

And while al-Qaeda is a long-established nemesis, the Obama administration asks us to accept that it can draw up a similar justification to kill members of other groups it deems a threat.

But what concerns me even more than the contents of the memo is that the Obama administration repeatedly refused to show it to legislators, journalists and civil rights organizations.

John Brennan, Obama’s nominee to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, insisted at his confirmation hearing last week that the president acts legally in ordering drone strikes.

The catch is that Obama’s lawyers define “legal.” Brennan, by his own admission, is “not a lawyer.”

Brennan uses the same logic the George W. Bush administration used in defending its use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” against terror suspects. He’s saying that an administration’s actions are legal so long as that administration’s lawyers whip up a justification for those actions.

It’s even better if that administration can withhold its legal reasoning from public scrutiny.

The Bush “torture” memos, also crafted at the U.S. Department of Justice, provided legal justifications for American officials to engage in detainment and interrogation techniques that could have otherwise exposed them to prosecution for war crimes.

Obama released those memos in 2009 and rejected the use of torture. He was right to do so, by the tenets of international law and, much more importantly, by our Constitution.

It is terribly hypocritical that he refused to release his own legal justification for utilizing violence far more permanent than torture against American citizens.

There are indeed circumstances in which it is justified to kill American citizens without due process, such as when police kill a criminal who poses an immediate and lethal risk to others, or when U.S. soldiers kill an American national who has taken up arms against them on a battlefield.

But it profoundly cheapens the meaning of American citizenship when the government refuses to even come forward with a case for a killing.

When that happens, the American people and their elected representatives have no way of judging whether the government’s behavior is unjust or overreaching.

Any legal framework created by the government to justify violence is meaningless if citizens are not even able to read it. And as a voter, I want to know when and why my government kills people in my name and in the name of fellow citizens.


­— danoconn@indiana.edu