We know that Anwar al-Awlaki (and Samir Khan) are noxious propagandists who are obviously guilty of incitement to murder. We know this because of their public writings and videos. Is that enough to warrant assassination?
I refuse to accept the word of any member of the Obama administration that they are worse than that. When any member of the administration shows me evidence that they are, then I will consider that they are. But the stakes of killing an American citizen on the say-so of the government are, in my non-lawyer perspectively, simply the gravest of all Constitutional questions.
Something must guard against President Whomever saying, "Oh, yeah, that guy's a dangerous terrorist. Order me up a double-tap." There must be evidence presented for that proposition. And then there must be a consideration of what the standards are for how great a threat a U.S. citizen represents.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Spencer Ackerman on al-Awlaki
Anita Hill in the New York Times
When Clarence Thomas called the proceedings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves,” he seemed to create a racial brier patch that no white senator would want to venture into.
I absolutely agree. After all, none of those historical lynchings that he is referring to involved a lynching on behalf of a black woman’s accusation. So that was sort of a twist. But the specter of racism loomed so large that he was able to get away with it, and it was as though my own race really didn’t matter.
Politics in the pulpit? Fine. Just give up your tax break.
This weekend, hundreds of pastors, including some of the nation’s evangelical leaders, will climb into their pulpits to preach about American politics, flouting a decades-old law that prohibits tax-exempt churches and other charities from campaigning on election issues.
The sermons, on what is called Pulpit Freedom Sunday, essentially represent a form of biblical bait, an effort by some churches to goad the Internal Revenue Service into court battles over the divide between religion and politics.
The Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal defense group whose founders include James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, sponsors the annual event, which started with 33 pastors in 2008. This year, Glenn Beck has been promoting it, calling for 1,000 religious leaders to sign on and generating additional interest at the beginning of a presidential election cycle.
“There should be no government intrusion in the pulpit,” said the Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor at Skyline Church in La Mesa, Calif., who led preachers in the battle to pass California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. “The freedom of speech and the freedom of religion promised under the First Amendment means pastors have full authority to say what they want to say.”
Here's the thing: If preachers want to endorse candidates from the pulpit, I have no problem with that. All I ask is that they give up their tax break.
That's what the debate—to the extent there is one—is about. Churches, as a general rule, don't pay taxes. We can discuss the merits of that, but one of the rules that go along with that special status is that they can't advocate for particular candidates. (They can—and do—advocate for particular causes.) And that's not a restriction on churches alone. Nonprofit organizations of all stripes—including very political stripes, like the Center for American Progress—give up the right to advocate for candidates in exchange for the official designation as a "nonprofit" and all the advantages that brings.
Nobody's keeping James Garlow from speaking his mind, in other words. But the tax-exempt status means, essentially, that the rest of us are already subsidizing his religious efforts. There's no reason we should have to subsidize his political efforts, as well.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Richard Miniter misleads the readers of The Daily Beast
Since Awlaki had not been convicted in a proper court or hasn’t been killed while shooting at American soldiers, they contend, his killing is unconstitutional. A side argument, beloved by the ACLU, is that the method of deciding who goes on the CIA target list is secret and therefore an illegal violation of due process.
These are clever arguments, but wrong. Federal courts have rejected the ACLU’s view when it brought a case seeking to bar the listing of U.S. citizens on the CIA’s terrorist hit list. Awlaki’s own father made a similar argument in another court and it too was rejected.
It's important to note that federal courts rejected those lawsuits over technical issues—standing—and not on the merits of the cases themselves. If Richard Miniter didn't know that, he should've. And if he did know that, he did a profound disservice to The Daily Beast's readers by suggesting otherwise.
Where is the 'battleground' anyway?
For purposes of combat actions such as the targeted killing of Awlaki, the battleground in our war against al-Qaeda is not “everywhere.” It is in those few countries that either willingly or unwillingly provide significant safe havens for al-Qaeda. Yemen is in the first rank of that group of countries, along with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
Victor Davis Hanson on al-Awlaki
Those on the left who made the argument — often quite vehemently and with plenty of personal invective (“war criminal”) — that water-boarding three known and quite proudly confessed foreign-national terrorists represented a “war crime” must now come forward and turn that vitriol on the Obama administration, which just executed an American citizen abroad on suspicions of terrorist activity. (Most nonpartisans might consider water-boarding three self-described terrorists less a “crime” than executing over 2,000 suspected terrorists — and any and all who, as collateral damage, happen to be in the general vicinity when the sentence is carried out.)
If we see anything less than commensurate protest against the present administration, then the entire hysteria of 2002–8 in retrospect becomes rank partisanship and hardly principled anguish. But as we have seen with the continuance of Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, and the Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, these once-acrimonious issues are simply not issues any more. I guess critics “moved on” around January 2009.
Conor Friedersdorf on the assassination of al-Awlaki
President Obama has perhaps forever changed the relationship between the United States government and its citizens, setting a precedent as damaging as anything a modern president has done, and the appropriate reaction, whatever one's partisan or ideological orientation, is shock and anger at his hubris and imprudence. Depending on the GOP nominee in 2012, I may well decide that I can't vote for him or her in good conscience. But today, as Obama celebrates the extra-legal assassination of an American, and sets the precedent that the president can kill citizens without due process if he or she pronounces them a terrorist, I know that I cannot in good conscience cast a vote to re-elect him. If you're even a little bit of a civil libertarian, and this didn't cost Obama your vote, I'd ask you to ponder this question: What transgression would?
-
Just finished the annual family viewing of "White Christmas." So good. And the movie's secret weapon? John Brascia. Who'...
-
Warning: This is really gross. When the doctors came to me that Saturday afternoon and told me I was probably going to need surgery, I got...
-
John Yoo believes that during wartime there's virtually no limit -- legal, constitutional, treaty or otherwise -- on a president's p...
