Executives given too much power, vague boundaries
On Monday, a memo from the Justice Department justifying the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad was released by NBC News. The “white paper” gives the legal argument behind the death of suspected terrorists like Anwar al-Awlaki, who are still American citizens and, as such, seemingly entitled to due process. The Obama administration’s stance on the issue is quite alarming, and the legal justification sets up a very slippery slope.
This issue is inextricably linked to Obama’s “secret war,” the rampant use of drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists from Pakistan to Somalia. The use of drones began under Bush but has escalated under Obama, and al-Awlaki was killed by drone strike.
The memo sets up three criteria that must be met for extrajudicial assassination of a citizen and basically ignores the logical implications of such an interpretation on other cases. The three prerequisites are 1) an “informed, high ranking government official” must deem the person as an immediate threat; 2) capture of said suspect must not be feasible; and 3) the assassination must be consistent with war principles. This language is much too vague and allows for more room for maneuvering than the public should be comfortable with. There is no specification of how high an official has to be to order an assassination, and it seems hard to justify drone strikes which have killed almost 900 innocent civilians as consistent with war principles. While al-Awlaki was clearly a terrorist and needed to be taken out, the next person targeted may not be.
This process grants an extraordinary amount of power to the executive office. They are basically allowed to declare someone a combatant who cannot “feasibly” be captured and thereby sentence him/her to death without any type of check or balance. And some will contend that terrorists forfeit their right to due process, but anyone can be falsely accused, and intelligence can be wrong. The Fifth Amendment is central to our democracy and cannot be waived at the whim of one person.
I don’t think that the Obama administration is conspiring to deprive American citizens of their rights, but they are relying too heavily on the convenience of drone strikes to win the war on terror. This has subsequently led them to meander into very murky legal waters, so they hastily provided justification for their actions without considering the consequences. A “high-ranking government official” or even Obama himself simply can’t be judge, jury and executioner for an American citizen. Kanye West said it best: “No one man should have all that power.”