[Peace-discuss] Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens

	It was controversial when Bush imprisoned foreign nationals
	without charges; what about killing U.S. citizens?

	Glenn Greenwald
	Jan. 27, 2010 |

The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports that "U.S. military teams and 
intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni 
troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people."  That's no 
surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along 
with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some 
unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any 
public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional 
authorization.  The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile 
attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.

But buried in Priest's article is her revelation that American citizens are now 
being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally 
authorized to be killed:

     After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, 
authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an 
American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against 
the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

     The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen 
joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of 
whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are 
then part of the enemy."

     Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value 
Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture.  The 
JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric 
Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, 
the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said 
that Aulaqi's name has now been added.

Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile 
strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced -- falsely, as it 
turns out -- that he was killed in one of those strikes.

Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, 
has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on 
the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with 
Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and 
interests."  They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the 
accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning 
foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- 
based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced 
intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on 
the Constitution.  Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens 
assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, 
but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like 
everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, 
including American citizens.  That's just the essence of war.  That's why it's 
permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but 
not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained.  But 
combat is not what we're talking about here.  The people on this "hit list" are 
likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with 
friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities.  More 
critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration 
before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world.  So the President 
claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while 
engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual 
battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other 
checks.  That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both 
parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that 
the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death.  What they 
actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being 
Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing 
as being a Terrorist.  Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. 
Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and 
the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have 
found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against 
them, and thus ordered them released.  That includes scores of detainees held 
while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained 
at the camp.

No evidence should be required for rational people to avoid assuming that 
Government accusations are inherently true, but for those do need it, there is a 
mountain of evidence proving that.  And in this case, Anwar Aulaqi -- who, 
despite his name and religion, is every bit as much of an American citizen as 
Scott Brown and his daughters are -- has a family who vigorously denies that he 
is a Terrorist and is "pleading" with the U.S. Government not to murder their 
American son:

     His anguish apparent, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki told CNN that his son 
is not a member of al Qaeda and is not hiding out with terrorists in southern Yemen.

     "I am now afraid of what they will do with my son, he's not Osama Bin 
Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not," said Dr. Nasser 
al-Awlaki, the father of American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. . . .

     "I will do my best to convince my son to do this (surrender), to come back 
but they are not giving me time, they want to kill my son.  How can the American 
government kill one of their own citizens?  This is a legal issue that needs to 
be answered," he said.

     "If they give me time I can have some contact with my son but the problem 
is they are not giving me time," he said.

Who knows what the truth is here?  That's why we have what are called "trials" 
-- or at least some process -- before we assume that government accusations are 
true and then mete out punishment accordingly.  As Marcy Wheeler notes, the U.S. 
Government has not only repeatedly made false accusations of Terrorism against 
foreign nationals in the past, but against U.S. citizens as well.  She observes: 
  "I guess the tenuousness of those ties don’t really matter, when the President 
can dial up the assassination of an American citizen."

A 1981 Executive Order signed by Ronald Reagan provides: "No person employed by 
or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire 
to engage in, assassination."  Before the Geneva Conventions were first enacted, 
Abraham Lincoln -- in the middle of the Civil War -- directed Francis Lieber to 
articulate rules of conduct for war, and those were then incorporated into 
General Order 100, signed by Lincoln in April, 1863.  Here is part of what it 
provided, in Section IX, entitled "Assassinations":

     The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to 
the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an 
outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern 
law of peace allows such intentional outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such 
outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in 
consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations 
look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as 
relapses into barbarism.

Can anyone remotely reconcile that righteous proclamation with what the Obama 
administration is doing?  And more generally, what legal basis exists for the 
President to unilaterally compile hit lists of American citizens he wants to be 
killed?

What's most striking of all is that it was recently revealed that, in 
Afghanistan, the U.S. had compiled a "hit list" of Afghan citizens it suspects 
of being drug traffickers or somehow associated with the Taliban, in order to 
target them for assassination.  When that hit list was revealed, Afghan 
officials "fiercely" objected on the ground that it violates due process and 
undermines the rule of law to murder people without trials:

     Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for 
counternarcotics efforts, praised U.S. and British special forces for their help 
recently in destroying drug labs and stashes of opium. But he said he worried 
that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, 
based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial.

     "They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," Daud 
said. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own" . . . .

     Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister, said that he had long 
urged the Pentagon and its NATO allies to crack down on drug smugglers and 
suppliers, and that he was glad that the military alliance had finally agreed to 
provide operational support for Afghan counternarcotics agents. But he said 
foreign troops needed to avoid the temptation to hunt down and kill traffickers 
on their own.

     "There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven 
guilty," he said. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that 
they are really guilty in terms of legal process?" . . .

So we're in Afghanistan to teach them about democracy, the rule of law, and 
basic precepts of Western justice.  Meanwhile, Afghan officials vehemently 
object to the lawless, due-process-free assassination "hit list" of their 
citizens based on the unchecked say-so of the U.S. Government, and have to 
lecture us on the rule of law and Constitutional constraints.  By stark 
contrast, our own Government, our media and our citizenry appear to find nothing 
wrong whatsoever with lawless assassinations aimed at our own citizens.  And the 
most glaring question for those who critized Bush/Cheney detention policies but 
want to defend this:  how could anyone possibly object to imprisoning foreign 
nationals without charges or due process at Guantanamo while approving of the 
assassination of U.S. citizens without any charges or due process?



UPDATE:  In comments, sysprog documents the numerous countries condemned in 2009 
by the U.S. State Department for "extra-judicial killings."  I trust that it 
goes without saying that it's different (and better) when we do it than when 
They do it, because we're different (and better), but it still seems worth noting.



UPDATE II:  James Joyner argues that this "hit list" policy is not much 
different than our drone attacks in Pakistan, which Obama has substantially 
escalated, and that "no one seems to be complaining about the President's 
authority" to kill suspected Terrorists there.  Actually, there are substantial 
questions about the legality of those drone attacks, though the complete secrecy 
behind which the program operates makes those questions very difficult to 
address.  Beyond that, though, there's a substantial difference between a 
government which (a) targets foreign nationals whom it claims are part of a 
enemy organization and (b) targets its own citizens for assassination without 
any due process.  They both have substantial legal and moral problems, and 
killing innocent foreigners is obviously no better than killing one's own 
innocent citizens, but (a) is at least a fairly common act of war, whereas (b) 
-- as the U.S. Government itself has long argued -- is a hallmark of tyranny. 
There's a much greater danger from allowing a government to target its own 
citizens for extra-judicial killings.

-- Glenn Greenwald

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