I am bearing witness as we abandon one of our most basic principles. At the confirmation hearings for CIA Director John Brennan earlier this month, several senators broached the idea of creating a special court to approve "targeted killings" of Americans suspected of terrorism. Alas, the proposed tribunal, modeled after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, is a charade, not a solution a Band-Aid on our national conscience designed to distract us from the fact that our government is killing its citizens without due process of law.
The impetus for the new court is the increased use of unmanned drone strikes to kill suspected enemy combatants in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. In September 2011, one of those strikes killed an American citizen and suspected member of Al Qaeda, Anwar al-Awlaki. While al-Awlaki likely deserved his fate I have only contempt for any American who would take up arms against his country, or plot to murder his fellow Americans one frightening fact remains: al-Awlaki was executed by executive order, by one branch of government acting as both accuser and executioner based on the threadbare cover that there was "credible evidence" of his guilt. And, given the Justice Department’s defense of the drone strike program, al-Awlaki will not be the last American that our government kills in this manner.
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