Is difficult for me to admit that I agree with anything published by The Nation. But I do.
Hey, if Eric Holder says the government can kill anyone they want at any time, then that’s good enough for me! [/s]
Lincoln did much worse. Now the National Defense Act recently signed, that's NOT an exaggeration. We need it repealed.
“No person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Secondly, he was engaged in a war against the United States. Imagine a German American in 1942 going to Germany and joining the Wehrmacht and shooting at Americans. Do we worry he was killed without "due process?" There is a regular disease in our society where everyone worries about the criminal and not the victim.
Kill them, kill them all.
It must be recognized that this is war. Not a classic set piece kind of thing like 1812, but a completely fluid, invisible enemy, they can be anywhere kind of thing.
To serve the interests of the country, the President and his people need to be able to act.
That being said, it is necessary that those in power have the best interests of the people at heart.
THIS IS CLEARLY NOT THE CASE.
So either the Obamites get us or the others do.
What? Ya wanna live forever?
There appears to be evidence that he was an active Al Qaeda terrorist, not just preaching Islamic terrorism. It is hard to sympathize with him, or consider him a US citizen.
BTW, this placement in Nation magazine alongside all sorts of Israel bashing doesn’t exactly help his case.
I just can’t get all worked up over killing this piece of Shiite. We should be deporting them all (muslims. Including the HMIC himself.
While I agree with the arguments presented in this piece, I disagree with the entire premise. This guy, together with the rest of Al Qaeda are outside the law. They are waging war against the United States and we have every right to take the war to them, killing them whenever and where ever we can. They need not be armed with an AK-47, you can wage war with a laptop just as well.
As combatants, they are entitled to treatment as POWs should they be captured and we can keep them as long as the war continues. They can be tried by military tribunals for crimes that they may have committed during the conflict. For example, we did this to members of Kampfgruppe Peiper for the murder of U.S. POWs during the battle of the bulge. Several were hanged.
Where we have gone astray is by pretending that we can treat acts of war as ordinary criminal behavior and deal with it within our civilian legal system which is patently absurd on its face. The fact that Al Qaeda chose to ignore the laws of land warfare and refuses to wear uniforms and observe the international conventions of warfare does not entitle them to treatment as criminal suspects entitled to presumption of innocence and due process of a jury trial with full disclosure of all lawfully obtained evidence. They are declared enemies and anyone who joins their ranks should receive the same treatment, even it they happen to be American citizens.
While the United States has generally avoided the targeting of enemy leaders, we are certainly entitled to do so. We shot down a Mitsubishi “Betty” bomber carrying Admiral Yamamoto during World War II. We knew he was on board and we knew where the plane was going. We ambushed the plane and shot it down. Admiral Yamamoto never shot an American soldier or sailor, he never planted a bomb. But, he was an enemy combatant and he was killed during the performance of his duties. That’s what happened to this guy.
The result was good, the convoluted rationale put forward by the Obama Administration is not.
The Obamanites can kill you if they want, for whatever reason, but an illegal invader gets a welcome, a lawyer, a hearing date, bail-free release and a `wink-and-a-nod’ that he won’t see another courtroom ... until he’s arrested for vehicular homicide, at which time he will get a lawyer, a hearing date ...