Radical American Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki Killed

[SirNitram]

I'll be honest. The prospect of an american citizen being killed via predatory drone without any legal protection is.. Unnerving. However, it perhaps can be compared to use of lethal force by police. However, moving beyond this(As I do not pretend to have the information to process it all, and neither the naivete to beleive that actual assassination, as opposed to killed-during-war, is truly non-existant), this is an impressive display. Predator drones and their use weren't new under Obama. Bush used them alot. But under Obama, it seems things are going well against A-Q's leadership. This sort of sustained tempo is no doubt hurting the organization badly.

If I did call Bush evil for this sort of thing, I'm having trouble agreeing with my past self. I think I'd be pleased if Bush nailed Bin Laden.

[Simon_Jester]

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Which specifically does not make any exemptions for trials in absentia- the accused must be "confronted with the witnesses against him" and "be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation", both of which require the accused to be present.

It must be pointed out that there's a dispute in constitutional law over this, or reasonably could be: what do you do in cases where the accused is a fugitive and you can't get hold of him? Al-Awlaki ran off to the Yemeni hinterland, where we couldn't really grab him, even by sending an extradition request to Yemen. So we can ask the question:

Can a man waive his right to be present at his own trial by refusing to attend, and by fleeing justice in a such a way that the state lacks jurisdiction or practical ability to force him to attend? I have a right to confront the witnesses and hear the charges against me, but if the charges are a matter of widely publicized record and I decline to be on the same continent as the witnesses, what is the state supposed to do? Postpone the trial indefinitely?

I believe the current Supreme Court answer is "yes," that at the very least they have to be present at the beginning of trial proceedings, and that you can't waive the right to be present by refusing to show up. But it's not a trivial question: I can imagine a sane country with a non-kangaroo court system where it was possible to try someone in absentia after they ran off to the hills of Yemen.

Which the US, of course, did not do.

...there still is the matter of the Fifth Amendment, which states that no person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; it does not allow the US government to engage in mass slaughter or targeted executions of people just because they lack US citizenship. So this does not resolve anything with regards to the debate.

Question- does a declaration of war count as due process? I don't normally think of them under the same heading, but if they aren't, then... how do we apply the Fifth Amendment to declared wars, the next time a declared war happens?

[Bakustra]

The question of trying someone in absentia is dependent on the legal system. Whether the principle of the accused being able to present their arguments is fulfilled by the presence of counsel for the defense, or whether audi alteram partem is necessary, is largely a matter of opinion, but US law is clear that trials in absentia are not allowed.

As for the question of war declarations, I rather suspect that any such case would revolve around the question of defining war. I would personally say that, within the context of the US legal system, the common understanding of war means that belligerent individuals are understood to have, by taking up and maintaining arms, fulfilled due process of law for depriving them of life. However, surrendering or otherwise nonhostile individuals have not fulfilled due process in this case and it would be illegal to deprive them of life without some other due process. I am not a legal professional, of course, but if I wrote the laws.

This whole case resides on whether al-Awlaki could be said to be a belligerent against the US, or whether al-Qaeda as a whole could be considered to be capable of making war, or indeed if terrorists are armed forces at war or criminals (in practice they are whatever their opposition finds them most convenient to be, but whatever).

[Thanas]

*snip stuff*

That is quite unconvincing.

a) If Yemen is a warzone, then by definition any country where insurgencies against the local government happen is one where the US is in a state of war. Which is kinda funny since no war was ever declared there, nor did Obama widen the war against terror using any of the powers he had (as compared to the buildup to Iraq and Afghanistan, where congress explicitly gave approval). So how can you call this a warzone when there is no war in which the US is involved in?
b) Likewise, what is the actual evidence here? (And don't give me that "the US placed him on a list").
c) Disregarding the other stuff, please submit evidence for your claim that the US ever wanted to take him into custody or called upon him to surrender.
d) I find it chilling that you find nothing wrong with the president ordering somebody killed and then he is unwilling to give a court the case to review. Instead, "state secrets". THe reason for killing a citizen is...a state secret. Where are your papers, comrade?


EDIT: Specifically regarding the operational capabilities, the NYT:

Contrary to what the Obama administration would have you believe, he has always been a minor figure in Al Qaeda, and making a big deal of him now is backfiring.
[...]
He is far from the terrorist kingpin that the West has made him out to be. In fact, he isn’t even the head of his own organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That would be Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who was Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary for four years in Afghanistan.

Nor is Mr. Awlaki the deputy commander, a position held by Said Ali al-Shihri, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and put in a “terrorist rehabilitation” program. (The treatment, clearly, did not take.)

Mr. Awlaki isn’t the group’s top religious scholar (Adil al-Abab), its chief of military operations (Qassim al-Raymi), its bomb maker (Ibrahim Hassan Asiri) or even its leading ideologue (Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaysh).

Rather, he is a midlevel religious functionary who happens to have American citizenship and speak English. This makes him a propaganda threat, but not one whose elimination would do anything to limit the reach of the Qaeda branch.

He’s not even particularly good at what he does: Mr. Awlaki is a decidedly unoriginal thinker in Arabic and isn’t that well known in Yemen. His most famous production is a lengthy sermon-lecture series called “Constants on the Path of Jihad,” which emphasizes the global nature of holy war: “If a particular people or nation is classified as ... ‘the people of war’ in the Shariah, that classification applies to them all over the earth.” But “Constants” isn’t really his own creation; it’s an adaptation of a work written by a Saudi militant killed in 2003. At most, Mr. Awlaki is a popularizer, someone who takes the work of others and makes it his own.

When he preached in the United States, first in San Diego and then in Virginia, he exploited his knowledge of Arabic and his Yemeni heritage to burnish his credentials as a genuine Islamic voice. He has been linked to Maj. Nidal Hassan, the psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at a Texas Army base in 2009, and some of the 9/11 hijackers attended his services. But until the Obama administration put him on its hit list, he had little standing in the Arab world.

Now, however, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is taking advantage of this free advertising. No propaganda from the group had ever mentioned his name before it was reported in January that the United States had decided he could be legally assassinated. Shortly after, an article in the official Qaeda journal trumpeted that Mr. Awlaki had not been killed in December, as had been reported, in an air attack on a gathering in Shabwa Province.

So now that it has given Mr. Awlaki such a high profile, the administration is in a bind: if it ignores him, it will look powerless; if it succeeds in killing him, it will have manufactured a martyr. The best way out is to redouble its efforts to track down the real, more dangerous leaders of the Yemen group like Mr. Wuhayshi and Mr. Asiri, who likely made the bombs used in the parcel attacks and carried by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Christmas Day bomber.

Mr. Awlaki’s name may be the only one Americans know, but that doesn’t make him the most dangerous threat to our security.

So....what is your evidence for him being the great operational threat here?

[Ryan Thunder]

Exactly what "combat function" did he provide? Everything I've seen suggests he was nothing more than a propagandist. Is there any confirmed evidence that he was active in a combat or leadership role?

Psychological warfare. :v

[Simon_Jester]

Start convincing people not to take it lying down. We may get off the merry-go-round a hair faster for it.

We're trying, though some people consider peaceful civil disobedience to be more harmful than good. Then there is the fact that certain personages have screeched that we should not be allowed to 'invade' the Occupy Wall Street protests, eventhough there is a great deal of crossover between our respective groups (mostly we try and teach people the difference between Corporatism and actual Capitalism).

:shrugs:

And this is why I keep going on about the responsibility of libertarians to divorce themselves from corporatists if they want to be taken seriously as more than "the ideology of gimme." You've been infiltrated, and thus compromised, by people like this, and we're all paying the price.

If not... well. This is what we get for inflating a pack of guerillas and saboteurs into an existential threat, treating them as the militant arm of the enemy in a grand clash of civilizations. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, dontcha know.

Yea, there is that fact too. My buddy that asked did it as a rhetorical device since we know that other campaigns watch the website (frothy Santorum even tried that in the last debate to smash Dr. Paul over the head with something we were talking about on the forums).

Exactly what "combat function" did he provide? Everything I've seen suggests he was nothing more than a propagandist. Is there any confirmed evidence that he was active in a combat or leadership role?

Psychological warfare. :v

It's tricky- do we call al-Awlaki a member of (in some sense) an 'armed force' who just happens not to carry weapons? Or is he a civilian member of a movement with a militant arm?

[MarshalPurnell]

That is quite unconvincing.

a) If Yemen is a warzone, then by definition any country where insurgencies against the local government happen is one where the US is in a state of war. Which is kinda funny since no war was ever declared there, nor did Obama widen the war against terror using any of the powers he had (as compared to the buildup to Iraq and Afghanistan, where congress explicitly gave approval). So how can you call this a warzone when there is no war in which the US is involved in?
b) Likewise, what is the actual evidence here? (And don't give me that "the US placed him on a list").
c) Disregarding the other stuff, please submit evidence for your claim that the US ever wanted to take him into custody or called upon him to surrender.
d) I find it chilling that you find nothing wrong with the president ordering somebody killed and then he is unwilling to give a court the case to review. Instead, "state secrets". THe reason for killing a citizen is...a state secret. Where are your papers, comrade?

Congress authorized the use of military force against Al Qaeda specifically on September 14, 2001, allowing the President to utilize his powers as Commander-in-Chief to deal with it wherever it sought sanctuary. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is operating openly in parts of Yemen, an allied government. We are "at war" with Al Qaeda to the same degree we have been at war with anyone in the post-WWII timeframe, including North Korea, North Vietnam, and Iraq. The Yemeni government has in fact asked for American assistance in prosecuting their own campaign against Al Qaeda so our involvement there is as legal as involvement in Afghanistan.

The "proof" that al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula comes from his own videos available on youtube, as well as his interviews in Al Qaeda's media outlets like Inspire magazine. That Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has been carrying out attacks on Yemeni government forces is likewise a matter of public record, and demanding "evidence" to that effect is as retarded as demanding "evidence" that the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden after 9/11. A cursory google search turns up, to no surprise, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claiming a wave of attacks in the south on the day al-Awlaki was blown up. They are as much of a combatant organization as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and as such members of the group are legitimate military targets.

As for "evidence the US ever called on him to surrender or take him into custody" that is, unsurprising from you, a hair-splitting and pedantic point. By the time al-Awlaki came to public attention it was for committing the acts that made him a legitimate military target. Did the US ever call on Osama bin Laden to surrender? Or Mullah Omar? Taking him into custody was precluded by his own actions in fleeing to a part of Yemen outside of any central control and surrounding himself with armed militia that he joined to wage war on the Yemeni and American governments. Had he not gone to Yemen and proclaimed his allegiance to Al Qaeda, though, there is no evidence that he would have been placed on a list made up of people considered to be legitimate military targets. The "strike list" is explicitly a list of people who will be targeted in Yemen by drone strikes because they are military enemies, ergo if Al-Awlaki had not been in Yemen he would not have been subject to being killed by drone strike.

And there is nothing "secret" about al-Awlaki's placement on the strike list. As reported at the time, al-Awlaki was placed on it because of his role in Al Qaeda, which has been more than adequately substantiated by his own statements and propaganda. This was all public, none of it can be seriously doubted, and no other American citizen has gone on the list, which strongly suggests that the reasoning for placing him on it was, as argued, because he had made himself a legitimate military target like everyone on said list.

EDIT: Specifically regarding the operational capabilities, the NYT:

Contrary to what the Obama administration would have you believe, he has always been a minor figure in Al Qaeda, and making a big deal of him now is backfiring.
[...]
He is far from the terrorist kingpin that the West has made him out to be. In fact, he isn’t even the head of his own organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That would be Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who was Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary for four years in Afghanistan.

Nor is Mr. Awlaki the deputy commander, a position held by Said Ali al-Shihri, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and put in a “terrorist rehabilitation” program. (The treatment, clearly, did not take.)

Mr. Awlaki isn’t the group’s top religious scholar (Adil al-Abab), its chief of military operations (Qassim al-Raymi), its bomb maker (Ibrahim Hassan Asiri) or even its leading ideologue (Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaysh).

Rather, he is a midlevel religious functionary who happens to have American citizenship and speak English. This makes him a propaganda threat, but not one whose elimination would do anything to limit the reach of the Qaeda branch.

He’s not even particularly good at what he does: Mr. Awlaki is a decidedly unoriginal thinker in Arabic and isn’t that well known in Yemen. His most famous production is a lengthy sermon-lecture series called “Constants on the Path of Jihad,” which emphasizes the global nature of holy war: “If a particular people or nation is classified as ... ‘the people of war’ in the Shariah, that classification applies to them all over the earth.” But “Constants” isn’t really his own creation; it’s an adaptation of a work written by a Saudi militant killed in 2003. At most, Mr. Awlaki is a popularizer, someone who takes the work of others and makes it his own.

When he preached in the United States, first in San Diego and then in Virginia, he exploited his knowledge of Arabic and his Yemeni heritage to burnish his credentials as a genuine Islamic voice. He has been linked to Maj. Nidal Hassan, the psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at a Texas Army base in 2009, and some of the 9/11 hijackers attended his services. But until the Obama administration put him on its hit list, he had little standing in the Arab world.

Now, however, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is taking advantage of this free advertising. No propaganda from the group had ever mentioned his name before it was reported in January that the United States had decided he could be legally assassinated. Shortly after, an article in the official Qaeda journal trumpeted that Mr. Awlaki had not been killed in December, as had been reported, in an air attack on a gathering in Shabwa Province.

So now that it has given Mr. Awlaki such a high profile, the administration is in a bind: if it ignores him, it will look powerless; if it succeeds in killing him, it will have manufactured a martyr. The best way out is to redouble its efforts to track down the real, more dangerous leaders of the Yemen group like Mr. Wuhayshi and Mr. Asiri, who likely made the bombs used in the parcel attacks and carried by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Christmas Day bomber.

Mr. Awlaki’s name may be the only one Americans know, but that doesn’t make him the most dangerous threat to our security.

So....what is your evidence for him being the great operational threat here?

Whether or not his operational role was overblown is irrelevant to this. He was placed on the list because his participation as a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula made him an overt military enemy of the United States. He was just as much a combatant as a Taliban goatherd taking potshots at Marines in Afghanistan. As it happens, we do have his statements that he considered Nidal Hassan as a "student" and hopes for much such students, that he is at war with the United States, his obvious role as a propagandist for Al Qaeda to show that he was taking affirmative steps to levy war on America. The balance of publicly available evidence, counting his own words and his actions in taking sanctuary with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, points to a role exercising some operational authority.

[Andrew J.]

d) I find it chilling that you find nothing wrong with the president ordering somebody killed and then he is unwilling to give a court the case to review. Instead, "state secrets". THe reason for killing a citizen is...a state secret. Where are your papers, comrade?

Emphasis mine. Thanas, would you be as bothered by this if Awlaki was never an American citizen? Opposition to the targeted killing of any person, while hopelessly naive, would at least be intellectually consistent. To be particularly concerned with the citizenship status of the target vis-a-vis the targeting state, however, seems somewhat arbitrary.

[open_sketchbook]

I can't say I have a particular problem with this. The US kills people more innocent than this scumbag all the time. That they openly announced this assassination and targeted a person who can be said to be working against them makes it, to me, much less controversial than the casual murder of millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans and everyone else the USA has, directly or indirect, butchered over the past 60 years or so in the name of looting, colonization and political repression.

[Shroom Man 777]

That is a fair point. It's pointless to get upset over this when America already does things far worse all the time. In fact, isn't the fact that this guy isn't a non-American actually a good thing? If I were another nation or another people, I'd get pissed off if America was killing my fellow citizens without permission. But if America did it to its own? That's quite different. Well, yes, America did it on another nation's territory and I hope they correct that in the future. Just like how, with Anwar, it wasn't another nation's citizen they killed.

My hope is that in the future, this America won't have to involve non-Americans in places outside of America, whenever America does its... y'know, American thing.

[MKSheppard]

Aw damn, we didn't get the saudi bomb maker after all. Oh well, there's next time.

[Kamakazie Sith]

d) I find it chilling that you find nothing wrong with the president ordering somebody killed and then he is unwilling to give a court the case to review. Instead, "state secrets". THe reason for killing a citizen is...a state secret. Where are your papers, comrade?

Emphasis mine. Thanas, would you be as bothered by this if Awlaki was never an American citizen? Opposition to the targeted killing of any person, while hopelessly naive, would at least be intellectually consistent. To be particularly concerned with the citizenship status of the target vis-a-vis the targeting state, however, seems somewhat arbitrary.

Are you so sure his stance isn't consistent? I think Thanas is being consistent with his understand of US law. Specifically, that Anwar wasn't afforded due process.

However, what he and others in this thread fail to consider is that under US law due process does not take priority over the lives of others. Under US law deadly force can be used to prevent the escape of a person when probable cause exists that they pose a threat of serious bodily injury or death to others. This was covered in a previous thread and if I remember correctly nobody was able to challenge it.

Due process is important but the lives of other people are more important. My only issue, and it's a significant issue, is the state secrets part of this incident. This and any other incidents like it should be transparent and all information available to the public.

[Bakustra]

What about Manuel Noriega? Arresting him required a much greater risk to American armed forces and consequent risk of death than any arrest attempt on al-Awlaki would have. Do you believe that the US should simply have flattened the presidential palace in Panama City with a couple tons of high explosive instead of arresting him and having him stand trial? This is quite apart from whether the use of force against Panama was justified, of course.

For that matter, identifying al-Awlaki required the presence of US troops on the ground to get identifiable pieces of his body. Was that an unacceptable risk?

[Thanas]

d) I find it chilling that you find nothing wrong with the president ordering somebody killed and then he is unwilling to give a court the case to review. Instead, "state secrets". THe reason for killing a citizen is...a state secret. Where are your papers, comrade?

Emphasis mine. Thanas, would you be as bothered by this if Awlaki was never an American citizen? Opposition to the targeted killing of any person, while hopelessly naive, would at least be intellectually consistent. To be particularly concerned with the citizenship status of the target vis-a-vis the targeting state, however, seems somewhat arbitrary.

Are you so sure his stance isn't consistent? I think Thanas is being consistent with his understand of US law. Specifically, that Anwar wasn't afforded due process.

Yes, thank you.

However, what he and others in this thread fail to consider is that under US law due process does not take priority over the lives of others. Under US law deadly force can be used to prevent the escape of a person when probable cause exists that they pose a threat of serious bodily injury or death to others. This was covered in a previous thread and if I remember correctly nobody was able to challenge it.

In those instances though the aim was still to take the person alive or give them an opportunity to surrender. This was just announcing the death penalty for something that might even be protected by the First Amendment.

Due process is important but the lives of other people are more important. My only issue, and it's a significant issue, is the state secrets part of this incident. This and any other incidents like it should be transparent and all information available to the public.

It will never be public.

*********************

As for "evidence the US ever called on him to surrender or take him into custody" that is, unsurprising from you, a hair-splitting and pedantic point. By the time al-Awlaki came to public attention it was for committing the acts that made him a legitimate military target.

Unsurprising from you, you once more forget that agitating for violence does not make you a military target per se. Otherwise any gang member, drug enforcer, mob capo or whatever you have it would be a military target. It makes you a criminal in the vein of McVeigh, not a legitimate military target per se. The fact that the US is unable to afford due process to its own citizens is just that bad.

Did the US ever call on Osama bin Laden to surrender? Or Mullah Omar?

The US did in fact demand the surrender of bin Laden back in 2001 but that does not matter

Taking him into custody was precluded by his own actions in fleeing to a part of Yemen outside of any central control and surrounding himself with armed militia that he joined to wage war on the Yemeni and American governments. Had he not gone to Yemen and proclaimed his allegiance to Al Qaeda, though, there is no evidence that he would have been placed on a list made up of people considered to be legitimate military targets. The "strike list" is explicitly a list of people who will be targeted in Yemen by drone strikes because they are military enemies, ergo if Al-Awlaki had not been in Yemen he would not have been subject to being killed by drone strike.

None of that is in the least relevant concerning the issue that he was a citizen. You cannot just order a citizen killed. This is what you are not getting. Did he renounce his citizenship? No. Was he stripped of it? No. So what legal basis was there to kill him?

I'll be perfectly blunt - if somebody went over to the Nazis in WWII and actively fought against the US, it still did not automatically strip him of his citizenship.

So pray tell, what makess this situation special?

[TheHammer]

Well, I believe the only "state secret" part is the exact process by which someone gets put on "the list". But if you look at this example, it's not hard to guess as to how Awlaki got on it. Regardless, by whatever criteria they used does anyone really think that this guy didn't belong on the list?

[Bakustra]

Well, I believe the only "state secret" part is the exact process by which someone gets put on "the list". But if you look at this example, it's not hard to guess as to how Awlaki got on it. Regardless, by whatever criteria they used does anyone really think that this guy didn't belong on the list?

I believe that nobody belongs on "the list", as it is an incredible injustice and violation of the basic principles of US law as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of the way terrorism works and should be fought that concedes vital ground to terrorist organizations.

If you're talking a list of members of al-Qaeda, with the information that is publicly available, this is questionable and will not be known until decades later, if ever.

If you're talking about a list of supporters of terrorism, that counts a number of people throughout the world, including several US lawmakers.

If you're talking about propagandists for terrorist groups, that counts a number of people throughout the world, including a number of US lawmakers and military personnel. Should some conscientious power send a missile in the general direction of the aircraft crew that shot up a wedding in Afghanistan, seeing as that is effective propaganda against the US?

[Simon_Jester]

Well, I believe the only "state secret" part is the exact process by which someone gets put on "the list". But if you look at this example, it's not hard to guess as to how Awlaki got on it.

I should not have to guess at the process by which the state decided to kill one of its citizens. That's the whole point of due process: government officials can't just lock themselves in a room, and come out saying "yeah, we need to kill John Smith. CIA, go blow him up."

When the state is empowered to do this, as soon as they start using that power in any serious way, it kills any hope of the people enjoying real freedom. Terror spreads quickly among any group whose members are liable to be killed without warning by government officials who don't have to answer for the consequences of their action because they can invoke "state secrets" to cover the process that they used to decide who to kill.

Regardless, by whatever criteria they used does anyone really think that this guy didn't belong on the list?

Normally, the state does not get to kill people and then say "they needed killing." There really is supposed to be a procedure, and that's pretty important.

[Thanas]

Well, I believe the only "state secret" part is the exact process by which someone gets put on "the list". But if you look at this example, it's not hard to guess as to how Awlaki got on it. Regardless, by whatever criteria they used does anyone really think that this guy didn't belong on the list?

I don't doubt that the guy was a scumbag of the highest order. I also don't doubt that he was an Al-quida propagandist.

However, that still does not give the state permission to just get rid of him. Or do legal protections not exist anymore for citizens who we currently hate(tm)?

[TheHammer]

Well, I believe the only "state secret" part is the exact process by which someone gets put on "the list". But if you look at this example, it's not hard to guess as to how Awlaki got on it. Regardless, by whatever criteria they used does anyone really think that this guy didn't belong on the list?

I believe that nobody belongs on "the list", as it is an incredible injustice and violation of the basic principles of US law as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of the way terrorism works and should be fought that concedes vital ground to terrorist organizations.

The problem is that there is a giant hole in the U.S. law for dealing with men like Awlaki as cleanly as you might like. Believing that no one belongs on "the list" is an idealized notion. One that the President can't afford to have. But really, I don't think your problem is so much that there is a "list" its that you fear that a power like this can and will be abused. I can understand that, and a desire that some safeguards go into place to prevent an abuse of power. As soon as someone goes on the list that would seem to be questionable, then I'll be right there with you to denounce it. However, in this case it would seem completely justified given the extenuating circumstances of Awlaki.

If you're talking a list of members of al-Qaeda, with the information that is publicly available, this is questionable and will not be known until decades later, if ever.

If you're talking about a list of supporters of terrorism, that counts a number of people throughout the world, including several US lawmakers.

Its not merely as vague as "supporters of terrorism" going on the list. The U.S. is clearly in a hostile state with Al Qaeda and seeking to kill or capture its members. Awlaki was an active member of Al Qaeda. He was also a U.S. citizen. What to do... what to do? The list essentially answered that question.

If you're talking about propagandists for terrorist groups, that counts a number of people throughout the world, including a number of US lawmakers and military personnel. Should some conscientious power send a missile in the general direction of the aircraft crew that shot up a wedding in Afghanistan, seeing as that is effective propaganda against the US?

Awlaki was accused of being far more than a "propogandist". He was also a recruiter, and reportedly involved in handling operatives in some form or another. He was also convicted by a Yemeni court for plotting to kill foreigners. But regardless, even if he was the lowest ranking member of Al Qaeda, it really doesn't make him any less of a legitimate target.

Unless you are arguing he wasn't a member of Al Qaeda?

Well, I believe the only "state secret" part is the exact process by which someone gets put on "the list". But if you look at this example, it's not hard to guess as to how Awlaki got on it.

I should not have to guess at the process by which the state decided to kill one of its citizens. That's the whole point of due process: government officials can't just lock themselves in a room, and come out saying "yeah, we need to kill John Smith. CIA, go blow him up."

When the state is empowered to do this, as soon as they start using that power in any serious way, it kills any hope of the people enjoying real freedom. Terror spreads quickly among any group whose members are liable to be killed without warning by government officials who don't have to answer for the consequences of their action because they can invoke "state secrets" to cover the process that they used to decide who to kill.

As noted, clearly there is a glaring hole in U.S. law for dealing with men like Awlaki. But our pathetically ineffective congress is too busy being worthless to bother to pass any legislation. In the mean time, I don't think you can expect the President to sit on his hands and let Awlaki function with impunity outside of the reach of U.S. law as if he possessed some form of super diplomatic immunity...

Regardless, by whatever criteria they used does anyone really think that this guy didn't belong on the list?

Normally, the state does not get to kill people and then say "they needed killing." There really is supposed to be a procedure, and that's pretty important.

Well Simon, I happen to ascribe to the notion that sometimes there are people who just "need killing". And the reality is, the State does make these types of decisions all the time. Whether to use force against armed criminals at home or abroad. The only real key difference here is that a person's name appeared on a list. I consider that more of a technicality than anything else.

After all, like any other decision they make to use force clearly there is a procedure. To go on this list first of all you have to have to be considered a substantial threat. Second, they would have to decide if capturing him was a viable possibility given the circumstances of his whereabouts. But beyond that, the administration has to make a case as to whether or not they can legally justify killing the person. Apparently they felt that they can justify it under curent law and to the American people. Its not as if he disappeared and the administration is covering up the fact that he was targeted.

[TheHammer]

Well, I believe the only "state secret" part is the exact process by which someone gets put on "the list". But if you look at this example, it's not hard to guess as to how Awlaki got on it. Regardless, by whatever criteria they used does anyone really think that this guy didn't belong on the list?

I don't doubt that the guy was a scumbag of the highest order. I also don't doubt that he was an Al-quida propagandist.

However, that still does not give the state permission to just get rid of him. Or do legal protections not exist anymore for citizens who we currently hate(tm)?

Awlaki wasn't mearly someone we "didn't like". Clearly that's not the criteria to get on the list, otherwise I suspect Asange would have made it on there as well. If he were stateside and able to be apprehended by authorities then that is one thing. However, he was a member of a terrorist group who lived beyond the reach of the law. Unable to be captured, but still a significant threat. By doing so, he essentially removed himself from legal protections that would have been afforded to other citizens essentially saying that we'd never take him alive. I don't ascribe to the notion that we should have simply thrown up our hands and said "well he's an awful person, and it really sucks that a law doesn't exist for this situation, but we have to just let him keep doing what he's doing".

[Bakustra]

I actually don't know where to start, really. I think I'll begin with a little question. Do you sincerely believe that the US can murder people without due process of law as long as they are not US citizens, under US law? Because you may need to read the actual Bill of Rights again.

My problem is, in fact, with the very idea of a death list when the US is not at war. I would not support it if it were solely filled with active neo-Nazis, because I don't believe that this is compatible with the principles we think we ought to uphold. And if we throw out one under the grounds of "ideals are not a thing this country can afford", then- well, let me put it to you this way. I believe, for the sake of argument only, that this whole idea of "getting along with other people" and "not robbing them blind" is idealism I cannot afford to uphold. Should I meet you in person, I would beat the shit out of you and take your wallet, and this ought to be perfectly acceptable to you. But it isn't, because you believe that (arbitrarily-designated) groups of people don't have any sort of morality that they should uphold whereas individuals do. Would you support genocide if a group of talking heads declared that not killing millions of people was "idealism the President cannot afford"?

But the point of my statements is that Anwar al-Awlaki has not been proven to be a member of al-Qaeda of any sort, and although the evidence may be in favor of that, there is no accountability. Obama could have just declared him to be one and killed him with no reason. If he had been indicted, that at least would have required convincing a grand jury that he was a member. But either the US government was unable to do so, or unwilling to do so, and neither speaks highly of them.

Even if they had proved that, I still would oppose assassination on the grounds that I believe that al-Qaeda is not an entity that can reasonably be said to be at war with the US and treating them as though they were is self-defeating and is a strategy that concedes shitloads of important ground to terrorist and guerrilla organizations. My point about US military servicemembers serving as propagandists for terrorist organizations was meant to highlight one cost of this strategy, and one of the largest reasons why it's self-defeating.

PS: Prove that the US would be unable to capture him.

[MarshalPurnell]

Unsurprising from you, you once more forget that agitating for violence does not make you a military target per se. Otherwise any gang member, drug enforcer, mob capo or whatever you have it would be a military target. It makes you a criminal in the vein of McVeigh, not a legitimate military target per se. The fact that the US is unable to afford due process to its own citizens is just that bad.

And once again you ignore the central feature of this case. Al-Awlaki was not targeted because he incited jihadist violence. He was put on the list because he went to Yemen to enlist in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which was actively waging war on Yemen and the United States. He took up arms as a combatant and as such was liable to be killed as one in any circumstances other than an attempt to surrender.

None of that is in the least relevant concerning the issue that he was a citizen. You cannot just order a citizen killed. This is what you are not getting. Did he renounce his citizenship? No. Was he stripped of it? No. So what legal basis was there to kill him?

He was a combatant openly fighting the US government and its allies. Congress authorized the President to use military force against Al Qaeda and its adherents, which makes killing Al Qaeda combatants as legal as killing North Korean, North Vietnamese, and Iraqi combatants ever was. Al-Awlaki's presence on the battlefield as a combatant rendered his citizenship a moot point. As a self-declared enemy of the United States, waging a self-declared war against the same in the company of many other enemy combatants, his death was a consequence of going out on the battlefield. That it was administered by drone strike because we thought he was important in an operational capacity is merely a detail, since all of your barely veiled slippery-slope "qualms" would apply if we had just shot him dead in Afghanistan instead.

I'll be perfectly blunt - if somebody went over to the Nazis in WWII and actively fought against the US, it still did not automatically strip him of his citizenship.

So pray tell, what makess this situation special?

And if that hypothetical German-American was roasted alive in the firebombing of Hamburg, so what? Or blown apart in the Battle of the Bulge? Or killed by OSS operatives because he was an important technical specialist on some Nazi wonder-weapon? Did we also need to hold a tribunal before killing Confederate soldiers at Gettysburg

Seriously. Al-Awalki was operating as a member of an enemy armed force, against whom the President was duly authorized to apply American military force. He was killed as a consequence of fighting as a part of that armed enemy force. His citizenship cannot be used as a shield on the battlefield. And if he had not gone to an active war zone to participate as a combatant he would still be alive. That is all there really is to the case.

[Andrew J.]

d) I find it chilling that you find nothing wrong with the president ordering somebody killed and then he is unwilling to give a court the case to review. Instead, "state secrets". THe reason for killing a citizen is...a state secret. Where are your papers, comrade?

Emphasis mine. Thanas, would you be as bothered by this if Awlaki was never an American citizen? Opposition to the targeted killing of any person, while hopelessly naive, would at least be intellectually consistent. To be particularly concerned with the citizenship status of the target vis-a-vis the targeting state, however, seems somewhat arbitrary.

Are you so sure his stance isn't consistent? I think Thanas is being consistent with his understand of US law. Specifically, that Anwar wasn't afforded due process.

Except that criminal due process rights apply to non-US citizens.

Try again.

[Thanas]

And once again you ignore the central feature of this case. Al-Awlaki was not targeted because he incited jihadist violence. He was put on the list because he went to Yemen to enlist in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which was actively waging war on Yemen and the United States. He took up arms as a combatant and as such was liable to be killed as one in any circumstances other than an attempt to surrender.

What is the evidence that he took up arms? All that is available says that he was a propagandist for Al-Quaida. Is that "taking up arms" in a war now? He never fired a single shot.

That it was administered by drone strike because we thought he was important in an operational capacity is merely a detail, since all of your barely veiled slippery-slope "qualms" would apply if we had just shot him dead in Afghanistan instead.

No, they would not. I would have no issue if he had fired on American troops and they had freedomized him in return. I also would have no issue had they tried to apprehend him and he had resisted and had been shot then.

And if that hypothetical German-American was roasted alive in the firebombing of Hamburg, so what? Or blown apart in the Battle of the Bulge?

None of that applies here because this was a specific targeting of one individual.

Seriously. Al-Awalki was operating as a member of an enemy armed force, against whom the President was duly authorized to apply American military force. He was killed as a consequence of fighting as a part of that armed enemy force. His citizenship cannot be used as a shield on the battlefield.

Because clearly he was in a combat role on a battlefield? Are you that dense that your only argument here is "he went to Yemen, so he was a combatant"? Being a combatant requires one being actively involved in combat. He was not.

Except that criminal due process rights apply to non-US citizens.

Try again.

Are you now trying to tell me what you think I said instead of paying attention to what I actually said?

[Samuel]

What is the evidence that he took up arms? All that is available says that he was a propagandist for Al-Quaida. Is that "taking up arms" in a war now? He never fired a single shot.

Taking up arms does not mean a person became a soldier. Take up arms means to commence hostilities.