Obama’s wise kill-don’t-capture rule

Sins of the Father: How Team Obama Justifies the Killing of a 16-Year-Old American

[Abdulrahman al-Awlaki] was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their country — they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs against America and Americans: the rare man of words who could be said to have a body count. When he was killed, on September 30, 2011, President Obama made a speech about it; a few months later, when the Obama administraton’s public-relations campaign about its embrace of what has come to be called “targeted killing” reached its climax in a front-page story in the New York Times that presented the President of the United States as the last word in deciding who lives and who dies, he was quoted as saying that the decision to put Anwar al-Awlaki on the kill list — and then to kill him — was “an easy one.”

But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn’t on an American kill list.

Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla.

Nor was he “an inspiration,” as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood.

Nor had he gone “operational,” as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests.

He was a boy who hadn’t seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding.

He was a boy, who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family’s home in the early morning hours of 4 September 2011, to try to find him.

He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he’d lived while on his search, and the friends he’d made.

He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

How does Team Obama justify killing him?

The answer Robert Gibbs gave is chilling:

ADAMSON: …It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he’s underage. He’s a minor.

GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.

Again, note that this kid wasn’t killed in the same drone strike as his father. He was hit by a drone strike elsewhere, and by the time he was killed, his father had already been dead for two weeks. Gibbs nevertheless defends the strike, not by arguing that the kid was a threat, or that killing him was an accident, but by saying that his late father irresponsibly joined al Qaeda terrorists.

Killing an American citizen without due process on that logic ought to be grounds for impeachment. Is that the real answer? Or would the Obama Administration like to clarify its reasoning? Any Congress that respected its oversight responsibilities would get to the bottom of this.

Keep in mind, too, that it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL in the United States to execute a minor or a defendant sentenced for a crime committed as a minor. See: United States, Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005).

Furthermore, in May 2012, the New York Times, inadvertently, told us that President Barack Obama, PERSONALLY, ordered the execution of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki:

This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years…

…Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

Seven months before the NYT’s article, President Obama murdered a 16 year-old boy that was NOT a “top official” in al-Qaeda; was NOT a member of the group, was NOT an “inspiration,” had NOT gone “operational,” and had NOT been accused of any crimes whatsoever.

He was a 16 year-old boy from Denver, who had left to find his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader in AQ. He was not “collateral damage.” He was the TARGET. There was NO evidence of any crime committed – or even allegations of same – by Abdulrahman. He was denied due process. His death was premeditated and ordered by the President of the United States, a country where executing minors for FIRST-DEGREE MURDER or individuals, who committed first-degree murder as a minor, is UNCONSTITUTIONAL.

He wasn’t waterboarded. He was droned… in a country with which the United States is not at war.

He was sentenced to death because of the sins of his father.

And, there is NOTHING “wise” about that.

Resist We Much on February 7, 2013 at 3:16 PM