Legal As She Is Spoke

Editor’s Note:

Russell Smith has written for LASIS before. He believes (strongly) that we violated the law in assassinating a U.S. citizen without so much as a hearing, thus depriving him of his due process rights.

Lawrence Roarke is new to these pages. In his opinion (a strong one, too), the U.S. acted within its legal rights and did what it had to do to protect all of us.

Each of them analyzes the killing from a legal standpoint. Each makes good points.  Who’s right?

You decide.

Read Mr. Smith’s “The President’s License to Kill”

Read Mr. Roarke’s “Government Killing of Anwar al-Awlaki was Constitutional”

We’d love to hear from you about these viewpoints, and to start a conversation with other politically and legal minded folks.

By Russell Smith

In September, Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was blown to bits by a “barrage of Hellfire missiles” fired remotely from unmanned predator drones controlled by the CIA’s top video game player.

The death of a terrorist has been cheered by the vast majority of the media. Mr. al-Awlaki was an influential Al-Qaeda figure whose jihadist online lectures inspired several high-profile terror plotters, including the Fort Hood shooter, the “underwear bomber” and the Times Square bomber.

But Mr. al-Awlaki was also a United Stated citizen. He was born in New Mexico, attended college in Colorado and graduate schools in California and Washington D.C. He became a respected Imam at a California mosque, but drew the attention of the FBI because of alleged associations with known terrorists. Mr. al-Awlaki fled the U.S. for Yemen in March of 2002 and remained hiding there until his death.

The Obama Administration has touted the killing of Mr. al-Awlaki as the biggest victory in the war on terror since Osama bin Laden’s death. At the same time, some civil rights groups and politicians are reacting in horror to what is being called the first ever government-sanctioned assassination of a U.S. citizen.

And then, last week, the New York Times published a stunning secondhand account of a legal memo drafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2010, which provided the Obama Administration with a legal justification for the targeted killing of Mr. al-Awlaki.

Unfortunately, the justification is perplexing, at odds with both the U.S. Constitution and international law and, ultimately, provides the president with a license to kill.   (more…)

By Lawrence Roarke

Anwar al-Awlaki, a United States citizen and imam, preached to and interacted with three men who went on to become hijackers on September 11, 2001. Mr. al-Awlaki was also “chief of external operations” in Yemen, and played a significant operational role in both the attempted attack on a U.S. airliner in December 2009, and the plot to detonate explosives aboard a U.S. cargo aircraft in October 2010.  In Yemen, on September 30, a United States drone missile killed Mr. al-Awlaki.

The media has reported extensively on the drone strike itself, as well as the renewal of a fiery legal debate about whether U.S. law allows the government to target and kill an American citizen abroad. The ACLU has argued that the government killing of Mr. al-Awlaki violates the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees due process for U.S. citizens. In simple terms, the ACLU argues that all American citizens are entitled to an arrest and a trial before they may be sentenced to death. The ACLU feels that the drone attack denied these rights to Mr. al-Awlaki. LASIS is itching to take part in this national debate. Did the United States government have the legal authority to target and kill American citizen Mr. al-Awlaki? This author believes so.   (more…)