On targeted assassinations, what about due process?

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Vatic Note:   Does anyone recognize this face??? Am trying to find the blog where this man showed  up as an Al Qaeda operative and yet, it turned out he was a controlled asset for the US and Israel and he lived in Israel…. will post the link when I find it.   This is just another distraction.   But the issues this raised are important and should be discussed.   please read and comment and help reolve the dilemma. 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/04/ED7E1LCQ7N.DTL
By: Dana E. Abizaid
Date: 2011-10-04

U.S. officials last week acknowledged that unmanned predator aircraft killed two U.S. citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, in Yemen. Yet, U.S. media outlets have chosen to refer to them as “American born” or “U.S.-born,” as in “the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by U.S. armed drones.”

No concrete proof of their guilt has been furnished beyond what the government and multiple media outlets have reported. In the case of the al-Awlaki killing, U.S. officials said, “Al-Awlaki played a ‘significant operational role’ in plotting and inspiring attacks on the United States,” as they justified the killing of an American citizen. In the post-9/11 world, such reporting garners little attention from the public. But those who believe in the rule of law find such mundane pronouncements frightening.

This in no way casts judgment on the guilt or innocence of the men killed. It is far beyond me – a U.S.-born U.S. citizen (though I do not refer to myself as such) – to come to such a decision. As far I remember, however, the Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused the right to a public trial by an impartial jury, regardless of his or her ethnic background or previous alleged activities. I am a bit perplexed thus by the government’s extrajudicial ability to target U.S. citizens for assassination.

We frequently talk of the slippery slope and the danger of governmental excess. However, with a government headed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, we are paying little attention and sparing little time to critically analyze decisions to kill U.S. citizens.

Our schools are deteriorating amid exclamations that we are educating a new generation of critical thinkers reared on the greatest technologies that give them access to streams of unending information. Yet we forget that information and knowledge are vastly different concepts: One is digested without thought while the other is arrived at after long periods of thoughtful contemplation.

Government-sanctioned assassinations of U.S. citizens without due process should be discussed rather than blindly accepted as a victory in the war on terror.

The obvious follow-up question is: What about other U.S. citizens? Might they also be targeted for assassination without due process?

The targeted killings of al-Awlaki and Khan should shock Americans reared on the rule of law, justice, liberty and freedom. In the old days, we used to say “every man gets his day in court.” For some, that day has been reduced to the instant it takes to launch a missile from a drone flying over faraway lands.

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