More details and commentary continue to trickle in regarding President Obama's claimed authority to assassinate American citizens as part of the fight against Islamic terrorism. Exhibit A is Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric from a Falls Church, VA mosque who was in contact with Nidal Hasan prior to his rampage at Fort Hood in November, and who, following that act of multiple murder, praised Hasan as a warrior for Islam. More recently, reports have emerged that al-Awlaki also had contact with Umar AbdulMutallab, the Christmas Day attempted bomber, and is also a top recruiter for al Qaeda in Yemen, our most recently opened front in the war on terror.
Wow. Pretty damned open and shut, wouldn't you say? All the evidence seems to point to this guy being a clear and present threat to the safety of American citizens, and if the CIA has the means and opportunity to take him out, who could call them wrong for doing so, Fifth Amendment or no Fifth Amendment? Except maybe, since we are after all talking about a death sentence here, perhaps looking just one layer deeper won't hurt.
Inconvenient fact #1: Authorities were aware of the emails between Hasan and al-Awlaki for months prior to the Fort Hood massacre. In those emails, the cleric sympathizes with Hasan's frustration at the Muslim casualties from the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, which far outweigh American losses, both military and civilian. But, officials found no direct incitement to violence in the correspondence. There was never even enough evidence to put Hasan on restricted duty, much less to charge his penpals with conspiracy to commit murder.
Inconvenient fact #2: Al-Awlaki's statements of support after the Ft. Hood murders, in which he praises Hasan's choice of a military target rather than a civilian one, are protected speech in this country. We are free to despise and vilify him for it, and to point out all the myriad ways in which he is wrong, but in a nation where we permit White Power parades to be put on by modern day Nazis and openly elude to armed revolution in the context of health care reform, that speech is, like it or not, legal. He can't even be arrested for it, much less executed without trial. Put it this way, if Jeremiah Wright came out and said the same things about Fort Hood, how would we respond?
Inconvenient fact #3: The evidence that (anonymous) officials tell us we have linking al-Awlaki to ongoing al Qaeda recruiting efforts comes from two places: Umar Farouk AbdulMuttalab and Yemeni intelligence. Now look, I'm the first one to say I'm thrilled that the Christmas bomber is cooperating with authorities after being arrested, Mirandized, and charged in the civilian justice system, but even so - can we really not think of any reason to take that son of a bitch's word with a grain of salt? And the Yemenis - please - we're giving them $70M in military aid to fight terrorism inside their borders. We're gonna want to see some results from that - handing us an American citizen who's on the record saying despicable things about us, and is probably somewhere in Yemen right now, costs them very little. Call me unconvinced.
According to Al-Awlaki's family, he's currently hiding in Yemen not with terrorists, but with local tribespeople. Naturally, since we've announced our intention to kill him, he's keeping his head down, except to give interviews to al Jazeera where he praises the actions of Hasan and wishes Abdulmuttalab had chosen a military target, even while insisting that he had nothing to do with the planning or execution of either of those attacks. Who the hell knows whether he's guilty of everything the government says he is, or if it's his family who's right, and the guy is just an outspoken fanatic with no operational impact on terrorist activities at all. The point is that adjudicating the distinction between those two possibilities is extraordinarily critical to our way of life in this country. Before the American government gets to just put someone's name on a list and execute them on sight, they're supposed to have to prove their case better than this.
I hold no particular sympathy for Anwar al-Awlaki - I find his his willingness to praise the actions of terrorists, and violence in general, totally and completely repugnant. For all I know there is plenty of evidence that I have not seen which would convict al-Awlaki of material support for such terrorism. But that's the point - no one has seen or evaluated that evidence, and the accused has had no opportunity to confront it. The decision to kill this cleric from Falls Church was made by the President of the United States alone, with no independent review by a judge or by Congress, and that too is repugnant to me. Extra-judicial assassination is one more authority our government has claimed, along with the torture of both the innocent and the guilty, that until now was the exclusive province of the most backward, fanatical, and theocratic regimes on the planet.
And if your response to all this angst is that this isn't about crime and punishment, it's about self-defense, and our President doesn't need an independent justification to do what he thinks is best when we're at war, then leaving aside just how comfortable we are with accepting the idea of a global battlefield and Presidential war powers without end, I'd like to understand just what's so wrong about Anwar Al-Awlaki's argument in the first place. If an individual like himself can be attacked and executed as a military target, plain and simple, then what do we say when he asks, what's different about Fort Hood? The USS Cole? The Pentagon? How do we justify our moral outrage at those acts of terrorism? Are we better than the enemy, or are we all just soldiers after all?
One final point. This whole discussion would be a hell of a lot more interesting to me if I thought that the execution of someone guilty of all the things of which Anwar al-Awlaki is accused would do much good in the overall fight. An analogy I've heard brought up is what we'd be justified in doing if an American nuclear scientist with classified information was defecting to the Soviets, and the CIA had him in their sights as he crossed through East Berlin. Well, candidly I'm not too sure about that situation either. But the comparison gives al-Awlaki far too much credit. If you think there is any shortage of charismatic Muslim extremists ready to encourage young fools to take up arms against the United States, and if you further think that we can reduce that overall number by sending in unmanned drones on bombing missions with individual targets (missions which have an unfortunate habit of also killing civilians), then I think you're way more credulous than me. Case in point: reports this week indicate that the US has successfully taken out the operational head of the Taliban in tribal Pakistan, Hakimullah Meshud. (This assumes we got him - he's been reported dead three times in the past four weeks). This victory comes six months after we successfully took out his predecessor, Baitulla Meshud. There are evidently three or four individuals in the Taliban hierarchy angling to replace the man recently killed...and maybe that replacement will be either less effective or less motivated to continue the fight. Maybe not. Around, and around, and around we go.
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