Family Values, The Family Bates, The Family Al-Awlaki, Secret Courts, Drone Assassinations, And Trial By Internet

Eighteen years ago about this time of year my dear and much-admired father passed from this earth. When I had dealt with my grief sufficiently to be more philosophical about his death, I occasionally remarked that Bill Bates managed to stave off death until a Democrat held the big chair in the White House and Dad's beloved Houston Rockets held the NBA championship, assuming rightly or wrongly that the world could do without him in light of the trend of improvement he observed in his last year or two. Dad passed with no worries that I would be secretly ordered assassinated, let alone by the President of the United States.

Nasser al-Awlaki, father of Anwar al-Awlaki (American citizen, assassinated by an American drone in September 2011), grandfather of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (American citizen, assassinated by an American drone in October 2011), was not so fortunate. As we were informed by Nasser's NY Times op-ed a couple of days ago, he learned of the deaths of his son and grandson by news reports. Though both his son and his grandson were American citizens (the grandson by birth, in Denver), neither was afforded the constitutionally required "speedy and public trial": they were on an Obama administration list of people targeted for assassination by drone, and b'gawd they were assassinated by drones. Despite Nasser's repeated legal inquiries, he has received no meaningful response to his queries about his son's and grandson's deaths; it seems he lacks legal "standing" to ask. The op-ed is very moving. You will understand the fundamental wrongness of the process, or rather the absence of due process, much better if you read Nasser's words. Here is a sample:

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... I stood over it [his grandson's grave], asking why my grandchild was dead.

Nearly two years later, I still have no answers. The United States government has refused to explain why Abdulrahman was killed. It was not until May of this year that the Obama administration, in a supposed effort to be more transparent, publicly acknowledged what the world already knew — that it was responsible for his death.

The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., said only that Abdulrahman was not “specifically targeted,” raising more questions than he answered.

My grandson was killed by his own government. The Obama administration must answer for its actions and be held accountable. On Friday, I will petition a federal court in Washington to require the government to do just that.

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The NY Times often selects a reader's letter to publish first, a letter that seems to the editors to typify the opposition to an article. In this case, the published response letter was from "Ben" in Cincinnati, who had this, among other things, to say:

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It would be good to know why the grandson was targeted, but revealing any information must be weighed against the concurrent problems in making any intelligence available. It is obvious that any grandfather would pine for the memory of his son and grandson.

But It is highly disingenuous that an intelligent man writes so many words yet makes no mention whatsoever of the actions or rhetoric of his son, which were published on the Internet for all to see. He says that he loves the United States, its universities, and its national parks. How about its people? What did he feel, say, or do, when hearing his son advocating the death of American people? Was he really suprprised when the country came after his son?

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Bill Bates, may he rest in peace after experiencing as a combatant the horrors of war in his lifetime, lived long enough to see the first flowering of the Internet. As he was the person who initially taught me about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he would have been fascinated with what is available on the 'net today regarding those two documents and their application in these troubled times. But I am afraid I would not be able to explain to him Ben in Cincinnati's reference to trial by Internet; I just can't find it in the copies of the Constitution available to me.

Call me a terrorist if you want... if I live long enough, I'm certain one or another American government will call me such... but I have to agree that grandfather al-Awlaki has a right to his answers from the DoJ, unabridged, justified as best they can. Goodness knows I cannot for the life of me see any justification for killing anyone, let alone any American, far from any combat zone merely because they verbally advocated killing Americans when Americans had recently killed their own son father.

And to think I've been counting on that "free speech" thingy to save me...

UPDATE: 7/19/2013 the judge declined to rule immediately on the DoJ's motion to dismiss grandfather al-Awlaki's petition, expressing grave reservations about the government's claim that no court could reach the matter:

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer did not immediately rule on a government request to dismiss legal challenges to the killings of three Americans, including al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, brought by civil rights advocates and Anwar's father, Nasser al-Awlaki. But she strongly questioned the government's assertion that the courts were "not in a position to second-guess'' security officials when faced with an imminent threat.

Read the rest of the USA Today article and/or Judge Collyer's ruling, and stay tuned; I'll try to report when I have more information.

How To Rein In A President Who Kills Americans

That's every president in these troubled times, so what Ian Millhiser and Zack Beauchamp of Think Progress offer in "5 Practical Ideas To Rein In The Presidential Power To Kill Americans" is well worth contemplating. Reducing each idea to a single phrase, they are

• Public disclosure,
• Mandatory (presidential) consultation (with Congress),
• Special courts (which evaluate and approve or disapprove targeted killings),
• Lawsuits after-the-fact (allowing current courts to review the legality of targeted killings after-the-fact, circumventing the "state secrets" rebuttal),
• An outright ban (of targeted killings of American citizens).

I am the first to point out that every one of these entails a hornet's nest of constitutional issues, but we'd better start discussing these and other possible resolutions immediately, because after two administrations' use of targeted killings, including Obama's targeting of American citizens... one administration from each major political party... the provocation isn't going away any time soon.

How Does Obama Really Feel About His Drone 'Kill List'? And Will It Pass To The Next President?

Kevin Gosztola of FDL's The Dissenter reveals that "an unnamed official with the Obama administration" told Scott Shane of the New York Times that in seeking to answer that question, the Obama administration contemplated the very real possibility that the levers of power might pass from Obama's to Rmoney's hands, and sought to codify and restrict the targeted assassination powers. From Shane's article:

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... With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

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Gosztola's concerns are much like my own:

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The revelation is remarkable in that it shows GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney—not the fact that the power to extrajudicially kill people suspected of committing or having ties to terrorism was being claimed—was why the administration began to have increased concerns over drone warfare.

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Clearly there needs to be a formal policy in place regarding targeted assassinations using drones: they are sloppy weapons liable to kill far more people than the intended target, and in those few cases where the targeted person has been an American citizen, that citizen had no opportunity for a trial, a proof of his/her guilt before a court of law, and a formal sentence by such a court. In other words, if drone use were not bad enough on the grounds that America is murdering babies, it is still worse because it is used unapologetically to violate the Fourth Amendment. All of this needs to be thought out, debated and decided by a team of advisors not given to thinking in lock-step with the president.

That said, drone warfare is liable to continue and even increase into the indefinite future, including, yes, into a Republican presidency, if indeed that would be any worse. (I always said Obama is the lesser evil, not that he is not capable of evil.) If this haphazard, cowboy-shoot-first attitude continues, it will not be long before America has no friends among the nations and leaders of the world... and who can blame them. We need three things: real rules in place and implemented in the field, clear accountability for every drone strike, and... most of all... transparency. These acts are being committed in my name, and in yours if you're an American citizen: you deserve to know as specifically as possible who is being killed and why, what their nationality is, if they are noncombatants, whether their due process rights were preserved, and who dies as "collateral damage" from this most indiscriminate of weapons.

And Mr. Obama... well, he needs to pull out the book from which he used to teach Review of Constitutional Law (or whatever it's called), and spend some time with his nose in it. Apparently he's forgotten some things. Apparently, many of the rest of us have forgotten those same things. It's time for a serious review of the rightful limits on presidential power.