It's not often that I find myself agreeing with people like Dennis Kucinich and the ACLU, but when Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen last week by a U.S. military missile strike I think we created a problem and those who brought the problem to our attention have a legitimate point.
First, though, I give credit to President Obama for green-lighting the CIA's and the U.S. military's war on terror and for targeting terrorists wherever they're found around the world. I don't think anyone on the right or the left foresaw in 2008 that he would pursue such an aggressive policy. Terrorists are a cancerous tumor in the body of civilization and their eternal reward, whatever it is, needs to be expedited.
Second, I give the military credit for finding and killing Anwar al-Awlaki. He was a particularly virulent form of cancer, and I admire the skill and effort made to track him and bring an end to his lethal activities against the American people.
But that brings me to the problem. Awlaki and a companion who was also killed in the attack were American citizens, and I have serious misgivings about handing the president, any president, the power to simply execute, without some form of due process, any American citizen deemed to be a threat to the country.
Frankly, I'm surprised that neither the progressive left nor the tea party right seems overly concerned about this since the former was extremely upset about mistreatment of non-citizen enemy combatants at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and the latter has a very deep commitment and fidelity to the Constitution.
Nevertheless, people on both sides of the ideological divide seem to be averting their eyes from the camel's nose insinuating itself into the tent of our constitutional protections and creating an opening for real executive abuse by some future president.
By all means the Awlakis of the world should be put out of business, but we need some sort of standard or procedure, involving all three branches of government, not just administration lawyers, that would insure that such operations do not create a precedent for the erosion of constitutional safeguards, particularly the Fifth Amendment which guarantees that no American citizen will be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
The enemy today may be a terrorist, but tomorrow it could be anyone who opposes a president or his policy, whether foreign or domestic. It could be the rich, or the religious, the Wall Street protestor or the abortion clinic demonstrator. We must not allow our government to start us down the road that leads us there.
I'm not a constitutional lawyer so I don't know exactly what provisions can be put in place to prevent this, or how they may be established, but Washington is full of such experts, including one in the Oval Office. We should be demanding that they get about the business of building a firewall around the protections guaranteed to American citizens in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. There is bipartisan consensus that the death of Awlaki was necessary. There should also be bipartisan consensus on the need to find a way to insure that such measures don't become a habit.