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Are American citizens fair game for extrajudicial assassination?

The Los Angeles Times says the CIA wants to kill a US citizen, Islamic scholar Anwar al-Awlaki, with a predator drone. They don’t want to, or can’t, produce any evidence that he has committed a crime. They just want to kill him.

We all know that if al-Awlaki were an accused Jewish terrorist or animal-rights terrorist or anti-abortion terrorist, he would not be targeted for extrajudicial assassination. It is his Muslim identity that makes him fair game.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees government neutrality in matters of religion. The Fourth Amendment guarantees that  no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The Sixth Amendment explains that due process consists, among other things, of the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.

Obviously the Constitution of the United States of America is a dead letter.

Killing people with predator drones is the most cowardly act imaginable–worse than dropping bombs on them from 30,000 feet. Apparently the US-taxpayer paid mass-murdering war criminals are no longer brave enough to fight their enemies face to face. They need their little multi-million dollar toys, looted from a crumbling economy, to do it for them. 

Why does the CIA want to murder the Constitution along with Anwar al-Awlaki? The Agency claims that since al-Awlaki is in Yemen, and flaming-underwear patsy Abdulmutallab went to Yemen, and they both have Muslim names, they must have conspired to set fire to a pair of underwear aboard Flight 253.

One small problem with that conspiracy theory: Passenger Kurt Haskell has revealed that it was a US government agent who escorted the flaming-underwear patsy aboard Flight 253 without a passport. No wonder they don’t want to bring al-Awlaki to trial. Haskell’s testimony, and corroborating testimony from his fellow passengers, would prove that the flaming-underwear operation was an inside job. 

Since the 9/11 inside job and the criminal wars of aggression it enabled, the ostensible US government has lost whatever shred of legitimacy it once possessed. Now that the Supreme Coup has made corporate money the supreme law of the land, and peace-prize warmonger Obama has revealed himself as a CIA/Wall Street fraud, US citizens could be forgiven if they decided that working within the system is no longer an option.

If Anwar al-Awlaki really has taken up arms against the rogue regime that has overthrown the Constitution of the United States of America, maybe the rest of us should follow his example.

2 Thoughts to “Are American citizens fair game for extrajudicial assassination?”

  1. So much that surrounds Awlaki is heresay and speculation-turned-fact. It seems like because OBL is a joke, they need someone they can find and kill (not that assassination is a new trick). I think all the publicity around it is to make it look like they're doing something moral, as if murder can actually be debated. In the past, the assassination would just happen. In my opinion, the targeting of Awlaki is part of the ideological war to wipe out the scholars that addresses America's foreign policy (regardless of whether or not Awlaki's opinions were correct, if even everything on his website WERE his opinions). It's also strange to me how his imprisonment in a location known for torture and subsequent release is hardly brought up. Why would they release him if he is some big bad?

  2. al-Awlaki is fair game because he's a tool of the government. I suspect, many common individual Americans may have disappeared already from extrajudicial actions? There's the odd case of thousands of pairs of shoes and other footwear dumped on the Palmetto Expressway outside Miami–just a year ago. There's Cynthia McKinney's report of possible executions of state prisoners in the lousiana swamps in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There's operation Falcon and it's many iterations of picked up sex offenders. It seems, there's some question accounting for them? It seems a distinct possibility extrajudicial disappearance is already with us?

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