Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law. Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law. Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens he deems to be a "threat," without due process of law.
In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence.
On September 30 Obama used this asserted new power of the president and had two American citizens, Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan, murdered.
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A CIA-JSOC coordinated attack against a vehicle convoy in Yemen today left two American citizens dead along with “some companions.” The slain were high profile Sunni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and magazine editor Samir Khan.
This was the latest in a long series of attempted assassinations of Awlaki, who the National Intelligence Director confirmed in April 2010 was the first American citizen ever added to President Obama’s official list of assassination targets for the CIA.
The confirmation sparked immediate concern because despite repeatedly railing at Awlaki for his anti-US sermons and implying he had some sort of tie with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was not charged with any crimes at all, let alone a capital offense.
It also spawned an attempted lawsuit by Awlaki’s father and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who argued that it was inappropriate for the president to order the execution of American citizens without formal charges and a trial. The Justice Department demanded the case be thrown out on the grounds that the courts have no oversight over who the president can assassinate on the grounds of national security. Eventually the court dismissed the lawsuit, saying it was up to “elected branches of government” to decide if people were to be assassinated.
The Obama Administration had been working with Yemen’s Saleh regime to track down Awlaki, but the New Mexico-born cleric’s tribe is vast and powerful in Yemen’s interior, and the government had long been unsuccessful in moving against him.
His killing was immediately praised by President Obama, saying it was “further proof” of America’s global reach and that there was “no safe haven anywhere in the world” from potential assassination once marked by a president. Most of the domestic coverage in the US centered around praise for the killings and reiterating the half-formed allegations against Awlaki, while glossing over the fact that the administration’s primary objection to Awlaki, and the one which actually put him in US sights in the first place, was his collection of religious sermons critical of America’s imperial ambitions.
This of course explains why there was no trial, because religious sermons critical of a president’s foreign policy are not against the law. Interestingly the closest thing to an allegation of direct AQAP ties was his putative influence on the December 2009 Christmas underbomber. This of course came just days after another failed assassination attempt by US cruise missiles killed a large number of Yemeni civilians.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Day-America-Died-by-paul-craig-roberts-111003-824.html
http://news.antiwar.com/2011/09/30/cia-assassinates-two-american-citizens-in-yemen/print/
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