Extrajudicial Targeting of Americans Challenged
Two civil liberties organizations said they will file a legal challenge against the government’s suspected targeting for assassination of an American supporter of Al Qaeda, arguing that under the U.S. Constitution no citizen can be “deprived of life… without due process of law.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights first filed suit against the Treasury Department, which said they needed a “license” in order to act on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been designated as a terrorist. After the lawsuit was filed yesterday, the Treasury Department said the license to proceed would be granted.
Meanwhile, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and several House colleagues introduced legislation last week “to prohibit the extrajudicial killing of United States citizens.”
“No United States citizen, regardless of location, can be ‘deprived of life, liberty, property, without due process of law’, as stated in Article XIV of the Constitution,” their bill said. [The cited statement is actually from the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.]
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday that the targeting of al-Awlaki was not done entirely without process. “There’s a process in place that I’m not at liberty to discuss,” he said.
“If… we think that direct action [against terrorists] will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that,” then-DNI Dennis C. Blair told a House Intelligence Committee hearing (pdf) on February 3, 2010.
But the Kucinich bill said that “No one, including the President, may instruct a person acting within the scope of employment with the United States Government or an agent acting on behalf of the United States Government to engage in, or conspire to engage in, the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen.”
A lack of sustained federal funding, deteriorating research infrastructure and networks, restrictive immigration policies, and waning international collaboration are driving this erosion into a full-scale “American Brain Drain.”
With 2000 nuclear weapons on alert, far more powerful than the first bomb tested in the Jornada Del Muerto during the Trinity Test 80 years ago, our world has been fundamentally altered.
As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”