Judge Allows Obama Regime To Order Assassination Of U.S. Citizens Without Due Process

From Reading Eagle.com and Liberty Pulse:

Originally Published: 12/25/2010


Nat Hentoff: Judge allows Obama to order assassination of U.S. citizen





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On Dec. 7, the case before U.S. District Court Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C., was described by him as presenting stark and perplexing questions: Can the president order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization?



Bates dismissed the case, thereby greatly pleasing defendants President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta.



The plaintiff was Nasser al-Aulaqi, acting on behalf of his son, Anwar al-Aulaqi, who could not bring the lawsuit himself because he is hiding in Yemen, having been placed on a kill list by Obama that is being implemented by Gates and Panetta.



Bringing the lawsuit for al-Aulaqi's father were the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. They charged that under secret criteria approved by the president, Panetta and Gates were invested with sweeping authority to impose extrajudicial death sentences in violation of the Constitution and international law.



Al-Aulaqi will go down in history as the first American citizen to be placed on a secretly determined government kill list despite the clear requirement of the Fifth Amendment that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process.



If the Supreme Court eventually upholds Bates' decision, other Americans deemed as terrorists by executive branch standards we are not allowed to know could be added to the doomsday list.



There is indeed strong evidence that al-Aulaqi is an influential jihadist - much of that evidence provided by him in his many public statements, carried on jihadist websites, that sometimes call for putting Americans on target lists. Also he appears to be connected to certain terrorist organizations and even to certain specific terrorist attacks here.



But he is an American citizen, born in New Mexico in 1971 and having moved to Yemen in 2004. Nonetheless the Obama administration has decided that al-Aulaqi is fatally a man without a country with regard to his life.



Said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU: "If the court's ruling is correct, the government has unreviewable authority to carry out the targeted killing of any American, anywhere, whom the president deems to be a threat to the nation. It would be difficult to conceive of a proposition more inconsistent with the Constitution, or more dangerous to American liberty."



Even Bates in his opinion wondered why a judge's warrant was required for the government to target a U.S. citizen overseas for electronic surveillance but prohibited to target one for death.



This is one of an increasing number of times when our mortal enemies, the terrorists, have caused some of their intended American victims, "Is this still America?"



Bates decided that while the legal and policy questions posed by this case were controversial and of great public interest, they were a political question for executive-branch officials to make, not for judges.



Quoting from a 1973 Supreme Court decision in Gilligan v. Morgan, he wrote, "The judiciary lacks the competence to make complex, subtle, and professional decisions as to the composition, training, equipping and control of a military force the ultimate responsibility for these decisions is appropriately vested in branches of the government which are periodically subject to electoral accountability."



So this extrajudicial killing is up to the people and our representatives.



But Obama, Gates and Panetta have kept secret the criteria - as well as the precise language in the Constitution - by which al-Aulaqi and any future citizens can be obliterated.



Furthermore, what if the people don't care about getting rid of a citizen? Then this abandoned American has no recourse.



But Bates threw up his hands: "The court finds that the political question doctrine bars judicial resolution of this case."



Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine, "If Americans win a war and lose the Constitution, they will have lost everything."



Who will we be then?



Nat Hentoff is a syndicated columnist for Newspaper Enterprise Association. He is a renowned authority on the Bill of Rights. A native of Boston and a graduate of Northeastern University, Hentoff was a Fulbright fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950. He has written several books on subjects ranging from jazz to education.