An article in the Atlantic magazine by Conor Friedersdorf raises serious concerns about President Obama's order to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process.
Outside the U.S. government, Friedersdorf writes, the order has been controversial, with experts in law and war reaching different conclusions.
Inside the Obama Administration, however, disagreement was apparently absent, or so say anonymous sources quoted by the Washington Post.
"The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials," the newspaper reported. "The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said."
There should have been. We would hope at least one or two administration officials would be concerned about setting a precedent that could lead to a very slippery slope.
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The assassination plans were no secret: Months ago, the Obama Administration revealed that it would target al-Awlaki. It even managed to wriggle out of a lawsuit filed by his father to prevent the assassination. But the actual legal reasoning the Department of Justice used to authorize the strike is a secret. Classified. Information that the public isn't permitted to read, mull over, or challenge.
Why? What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they're asserting is a matter of sound law
As Friedersdorf points out, this isn't a military secret. It isn't an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding a domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is an analysis of the power that the Constitution and Congress' post September 11 authorization of military force gives the executive branch.
President Bush came under heavy criticism for some of his decisions -- rationalizing torture and domestic military arrests, for example -- and Cabinet members threatened to resign if policies weren't changed.
Where are the dissenting voices in the Obama administration?
This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose his specific reasoning to scrutiny.
As the Post put it, "The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process."
Obama hasn't just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set.
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That's just unacceptable. It's time to release the DOJ memo.
