At first look, the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, the most dangerous terrorist leader in al Qaeda if not the world, may have seamed an appropriate action to take. But as the British so eloquently like to say --- “there is a stickity wicket here old chap”. And if one is not independent in ones thinking, and just gets swept along with the broad broom of the liberal media, one might be inclined to agree with this action by Obama’s Department of Defense. But remember, our government has protested and condemned other countries for doing exactly this. This is not the American Constitutional Republic; this is not the American way. Or is it?Opinion:
By de Andréa
The stickity wicket here is that Anwar al-Awlaki, is a U.S. Citizen… Oh boy! I would have to bring that up, right?
Yes…Obama killed an innocent U.S. Citizen with all the rights and privileges of a United States of American Citizen. Now! As you are likely saying to yourself as you read this, well…so what! He is an enemy of the state, he’s a terrorist, and we are at war! And you would be right. But, you see… there is still that nasty little problem, he is an American citizen. He is, according to the United States Constitution entitled to a fair and impartial trial, whether it is a military tribunal, or a civilian criminal trial? Every American is guilty until proven innocent in a court of Law. Opp’s! I don’t think that’s exactly correct. But that is nevertheless the logic that must be assigned to this issue to justify al-Awlaki’s assassination. He was accused so kill him! The truth is that al-Awlaki was an innocent man that had not yet been proven guilty in a court of law. According to law, the U.S. government killed an innocent man. We are still a government of law - are we not? Maybe not! Maybe I just need to get out more.
Some of my readers know that I am not a big Ron Paul fan, but I will have to stand with Ron on this. This time I think Ronny is right on target and Obama’s Department of Justice and Pentagon has missed the mark. The last time I checked, all American citizens accused of a crime are presumed inn-o-cent. Yes, no matter who or what he/she is accused of, or no matter what nationality, religion, or political views they might have, they are still innocent, until he/she is proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt in a court of law. They ‘are, as I ‘said, inn-o-cent. Read here what Da Tagliare wrote about Ron Paul when he condemned the assassination.
Never in my wildest nightmares did I think for one nanosecond, that I would ever be defending a Muslim terrorist. Well… actually I’m not; I am defending the U.S. Constitution for everyone. If the Constitution isn’t for every American citizen, it isn’t for any American citizen, natural born or naturalized, guilty or innocent.
Author Pentangeli, a guest writer of Godfather Politics, agrees. He wrote: “Assassinating U.S. citizens is murder, and never legally acceptable. The Barack Obama administration apparently has some sort of legal ability to do this but says they have kept their legal reasoning classified due to its supposed sensitive nature. I’m not sure how sound a legal case can be made when you refuse to tell the American people you represent what it is. How can a president be held accountable? Why not just classify everything? Who knows, that time may be coming”.
Just a side bar… My personal opinion, (I can do that, it’s my column) is that the Osama Bin Laden assassination should not have been made public, and the Anwar al-Awlaki assassination should not have been made public either. One cannot publicize a covert mission and then when there are questions about it, then just excuse it by saying oh well, it’s classified, one just cannot put the genie back in the lamp. Government intelligence and/or covert missions are either classified or they are not. Been there, done that, as they say.
An American citizen has the right to trial by jury and due process of law no matter how bad or destructive he is. We haven’t just assassinated accused murderers in the past and if we did, we would go after the one who did the assassinating. Come on! I watch TV cop shows.
It is true that we had terrorist charges against al-Awlaki and he was a known al-Qaeda leader, but we never caught him nor put him on trial. Since when, do we assassinate or execute citizens caught in the U.S. when we only have charges on them for terrorism? Come on! We haven’t even executed those prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and they aren’t even American citizens!
What if al-Awlaki was engaged in terrorist activities in the United States? Unless he was engaged in the imminent act of murder, would’ we have blown up his house with a drone? Of course not!
Those who are accused of treason are even required to be put on trial and either convicted or found not-guilty. The idea that there are ‘exceptions’ in the Constitution to what limits are placed on our Federal government is a dangerous, slippery slope my friend.
Where do the assassinations stop? What defines a legal right to murder a U.S. citizen? And who ‘defines’ that right? It may seem ‘right’, now that Obama has so conveniently defined it as classified. But what happens when our country accepts this assassination as one of those Constitutional “exceptions” that we must act upon in certain situations? We become no better than the Communist lawless Liberals who are trying to destroy our Constitution. What happens when the definition of legal assassinations becomes more and more broad my friend? If there is not a legal fence to limit government power, then where are the boundaries? Well…It’s simple, there are none.
For a government that couldn’t outlaw alcohol without a Constitutional Amendment, we sure do allow it to do some very heinous things all in the name of “national security.” What happens when ‘political opponents’ are targeted in the name of “national security” and assassinated because they are labeled as homegrown terrorists? Ben Franklin said in 1759 "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." What if TEA Partiers are labeled as enemy combatants or terrorists against the United States? Well… they already are, by Home Land Security’s Janet Napolitano. With that kind of distorted logic all Obama has to do to get reelected, is to declare the opposition as home grown terrorists and have them all assassinated. I mean just where is the line here? Truth is, if this is allowed to stand, then there just isn’t one anymore. This assassination of an American citizen has created a precedent that is very real, and very dangerous
Months ago, Obama revealed that he would target al-Awlaki. He even managed to wriggle out of a lawsuit filed by al-Awlaki’s father to prevent the assassination of his son. But the actual legal reasoning the Department of Justice (DOJ) used to authorize the strike is classified. Information that the public or the courts aren’t permitted to read, mull over, and or challenge.
What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they’re asserting is a matter of sound law? This cannot be a military secret while making the mission public. It isn’t an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is a display of the unlimited power that Obama has in the use of military force against one of his own people. This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose any specific reasoning to the scrutiny of law.
Obama hasn’t just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set. It’s time for the president who promised to create “a White House that’s more transparent and accountable than anything we’ve seen before” to release the so-called classified DOJ memo. As David Shipler writes, “The legal questions are far from clear-cut, and the country needs to have this difficult discussion.” And then there’s the fact that “a good many Obama supporters thought that secret legal opinions by the Justice Department — rationalizing torture and domestic military arrests, for example — had gone out the door along with the Bush administration,” he adds. “But now comes a momentous change in policy with serious implications for the Constitution’s restraint on executive power,[to kill American citizens] and Obama refuses to allow his lawyers’ arguments to be laid out on the table for the American public to examine.” What secret to such a public display of tyranny doesn’t he want to get out???
THE BOTTOM LINE: The question that keeps gnawing at me about this predicament is, what have we done in the past and why did this problem just arise now? Well the only answer ‘is’, that we haven’t had this problem in the past, and it just arose now because this is the first time in our history that we have so ignorantly invited the enemy that we are at war with, not only to immigrate to our country, but to become citizens. But the blind stupidity doesn’t end there. Our government has put this enemy that we are at war with, into our military, so they kill our soldiers. They have put this enemy in our congress, so they make our laws. They have put this enemy in our police forces, and put the enemy’s law in our courts. Put their curriculum in our schools; put this enemy in the White House, and on and on --- so they ‘will’ defeat us. This’ my friend, is just what enemies do, anything they can do to defeat ‘their enemy’ the United States of America. Oh yes! They have told us so, over and over again. But we do nothing.
Now we have this dilemma that we shouldn’t have had, and wouldn’t have had if we had just not been so blinded by our own ignorant multi-cultural politically correct and socially political society, and instead, paid just a little attention to history and things like the articles of war and the war college manual. That’s the Military law, that has been ignored since long before 9/11.
We really do deserve this breakdown and loss of our constitution, because we said nothing at the beginning to stop it. And the worse part is that we are saying nothing now either. To prove my point my friend in just one small way, just take a look at how is this enemy Islam, is changing this country into a police state. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police no longer need a search warrant for example to force entry into anyone’s home. In one court decision the 14th Amendment is gone, all in the name of security that we wouldn’t need if we didn’t have our enemy wondering around our home. We no longer need the majority vote of congress and the ratification by the states to change or abolish our constitutional rights. We again said nothing! And when they come to assassinate ‘you’ or some member of your family simply because you have been accused of a crime against the people or the state, we again will say nothing. And so it goes, a totalitarian police state is born. And then you will wonder, how did this happen. If you know your history, the people of Germany wondered the same thing! But they said nothing until it was too late to say anything.
You see, once this dirty ball gets rolling, there’s no stopping it. All the beautiful deceptive butterflies will have gotten loose from Pandora’s Box, and they have turned into monsters, now it will be too late to put them back.
This blind benevolence to a fault, toward the enemy of the free world has got to be the most unintelligent decision our government has ever made in its short history. And now we are paying for it with the loss of our security our American culture, freedom and the protection of our constitutional rights. The Framers never covered this possibility in our constitution because the never thought the government of America could ever be so’ stupid as to put ourselves in this insane position.
Just a couple of parting questions: Why didn’t we invite Nazis to immigrate to the U.S. during our war with Nazism? Why didn’t we elect a Nazi as president in 1943? The answer should be something like, because we were at war with Nazis stupid!
The assassination was not about whether he was guilty. That had never been determined. It was the seriousness of the charges. Remember that the next time you or a loved one is accused of something my friend.
I rest my case. It is now in your hands. Now the question is: What are you going to do with it? I know…Just say nothing!
de Andréa.
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