The U.S. drone killing of American-born and raised Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a major figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has re-energized a national debate over the legal and moral quandaries of a government deliberately killing a citizen.If you take up arms against a country, then that country has the right to try to kill you, if they can. How is this different than the killing of Admiral Yamamoto?
The fact that this particular dead guy was a U.S. citizen makes no difference to me. You take up arms against the U.S. at your own risk.
8 comments:
I just watched your attorney general talk about it. Truth be told, I didn't catch the gist of his statements, he was either a incompetent public speaker or he didn't have faith in his own words...Allan
That should have read "Secretary of Defense" and not attorney general.
Leon Panetta is a career politician, not a career security professional like Robert Gates was. I suspect that makes a difference.
I am of two minds on this issue. On the one hand I completely agree with you: anybody trying to destroy the United States ought to die and if the only way to make him die is to kill him, kill the s.o.b..
On the other hand, I completely disagree with you. What is the evidence that this dead dude was anything more than a blowhard? And if the president has the right to decide the question by himself, what's to stop some future president from deciding that you and I are threats to the whatever, on the basis of our disloyal-sounding blogs, and that we ought to be killed.
On the other hand, Republicans have been trying to kill us all (unless we're the two percent filthy rich) by dismantling the economy, Social Security and Medicare. Taking out Al Awaki (or however he spelled it) could be a future Democratic president's precedent for packing every last member of the Republican party into a few tumbrils and guillotining them at the mall.
On the other hand....
Yours crankily,
The New York Crank
My understanding is that the dude ran a web site and made a video saying something along the lines of terrorism against Americans being okay because Americans were murdering innocents. That's it. Never fired a shot against any American. Never walked out onto a field of battle and actually made war against America (as vs. flap his gums). That web site and video, and the fact that he knew some of the 9/11 hijackers according to the U.S. government (and the U.S. government (Iraq) *never* (WMD) lies, right?) appears to be the sum total of his actions.
By this logic, we should dispatch a predator to Fremont, MI, immediately to execute via extrajucial process another dude who advocates killing Americans: Dr. Ronald Graeser. Except, oops, we have this little thing called the Constitution that prohibits killing Dr. Graeser just because he says killing abortion doctors is the right thing to do.
I'll point out we didn't just send a predator and blow up Eric Rudolph, who actually killed Americans, he didn't just talk about it. We arrested his butt and a court put him in jail for four consecutive life sentences. I'll point out we didn't dispatch a Predator to kill Ann Coulter when she said Timothy McVeigh should have bombed the NYT building. I'll point out that we didn't dispatch a predator to kill Governor Rick Perry of Texas when he suggested destroying the United States via "nullification". Instead, we let him run for President.
But I forget, there's two standards here in America, one if you're a white Christian, and one if you're a brown Muslim. The first is accorded rule of law. The second... not so much.
- Badtux the Beak-flappin' Penguin
(Which, apparently means that some future President, under the same logic, can dispatch a Predator and off *ME*. Except I'm a white Christian, which means that won't happen. Phew!).
Neither Coulter, Perry, Rudolph or, for that matter, Pat Robertson are part of a foreign organized group that is basically at war with the United States.
I don't think that is mere quibbling.
Perry, though, is a closer case. His teabagging during 2009 and `10 was very close to being seditious. that there are people in the GOP ready to vote for someone who is not a loyal American is troubling.
Well. It's this thing called due process and a fair trial with a jury of your peers, etc.; it's the right of American citizens. Had there been legal proceedings and the case against him tried in absentia and he was found guilty and sentenced to death, *then* executing him with a drone would have the end result of due process. Possibly had there been clear, immediate and present danger to America, it might have been justified.
Sure you want to squish terrorists like a bug...but then you're a vigilante. The wounds that America has self-inflicted on itself, its civil rights and democracy in the aftermath of 9/11 are much greater than any these terrorists have caused.
To go back to your original question, Admiral Yamamoto was a non-US-citizen uniformed military personnel of a nation at war with the United States. The whole point of a war is that your military is shooting at their military and their military is shooting at your military. Closer would have been if we had bombed the Imperial Palace and killed the Emperor -- a non-military leader of Japan. But I'll point out we purposely did *NOT* bomb the Imperial Palace, it was deliberate U.S. policy to not attack the Imperial Palace for fear of harming the Emperor. Hmm....
Regarding whether al-Awlaki was part of a foreign military group at war with the United States, I'll just point out that al-Awlaki attempted to get a trial here in the USA on exactly that question, and said trial was quashed by the U.S. government, which filed affidavits that said it couldn't present such evidence in a court of law for "national security reasons" and that we have to merely take them on their word that al-Awlaki is/was more than just a blowhard with a web site. So anyhow, al-Awlaki was notorious for being a 9/11 denier who claimed that Israel committed 9/11 and that the so-called hijackers were just random Arab names picked off the passenger rosters and blamed for the event. That tends to indicate that he wasn't part of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization, which was quite happy to take credit for 9/11. (For the record, I have no reason to disbelieve Osama bin Laden in this regard, Osama was a murderous a-hole, but as far as I can tell he never actually lied in his videos about what he did and why he did it).
So anyhow, chances are that al-Awlaki was more than just a guy with a web site. But taking the word of the U.S. government [Iraq] that he [WMD] was more than just a guy with a web site just on faith seems to me to be a stretch beyond the available evidence. The web site and calls for jihad are available to the world. The notion of this dude being part of some global conspiracy, as vs. just some idiot with a web site... not so much, and deliberately so, the U.S. government quashed any attempt to try that question in court.
- Badtux the Constitutional Penguin
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