National Review editor Kevin Williamson once again tries to persuade his fellow conservatives that the American government should not have the right to assassinate American citizens:
I am not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me that the state of our law is such that anybody with sufficient legal training can make a reasonably strong-sounding argument for any policy he chooses, and that if his argument is wrong, it is likely to be wrong in ways that are non-obvious….So, set aside the legal questions for a second. The Awlaki case speaks to something even more fundamental than law: Decent nations do not permit their governments to assassinate their own citizens. I am willing to give the intelligence community, the covert-operations guys, and the military proper a pretty free hand when it comes to dealing with dispersed terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But citizenship, even when applied to a Grade-A certified rat like Awlaki, presents an important demarcation, a bright-line distinction in our politics.
….If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones.
Actually, I’d like to know if the Obama administration really does believe that it has the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens in Washington or Topeka in the same way it believes it has the authority to assassinate them in Sanaa and Karachi. And if not, why not?
Unfortunately, they’ve declared the entire thing to be a state secret, so we’ll never find out. But as far as any of us are allowed to know, their official stand is that the entire world is a battlefield in the war against terrorism, and therefore killing terrorists is fair game anywhere in the world. Even if Williamson is right that a good lawyer can defend pretty much any proposition, I’d sure like to see the legal justification for that. At a bare minimum, you’d think that in a free democracy we’d all have the right to hear at least that much.
