Questions for Andrew Sullivan – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com: “Questions for Andrew Sullivan BY GLENN GREENWALD (updated below – Update II [Friday])
Andrew Sullivan quotes from an excellent column by Alex Massie in The Spectator. Massie points to Obama’s assassination program and writes: ‘you can make an argument that Obama’s actions are worse than Bush’s since a) he wasn’t charged with cobbling together a security framework in the confused, panicked aftermath of 9/11 and b) he actually, you know, once campaigned against quite a lot of this stuff.’ Andrew, basically objecting to Massie’s claim, makes several points in response that merit attention and, at least for me, prompt various questions. Andrew:
But a single American al Qaeda terrorist in a foreign country actively waging war against us seems to me to be a pretty isolated example.
First, Awlaki is most certainly not a singular case. Obama’s ‘hit list’ has at least four Americans on it; Awlaki is the only one whose identity we know. From The Washington Post’s Dana Priest in January: ‘After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad . . . . The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. . . . . As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.’
Second, could Andrew please explain how he knows that Awlaki is an ‘al Qaeda terrorist’? Being an ‘al Qaeda terrorist’ is a crime with which many people have been charged and convicted. But Awlaki never has been. Are the untested, leaked accusations from government officials really enough for Andrew to conclude that an American citizen is a ‘terrorist’ and, accordingly, support the imposition of the death penalty? Does Andrew not need or want to see any actual evidence — let alone have that evidence subjected to due process and checks and balances — before simply assuming and asserting that an accusation like that is true? Does the lengthy record of error and/or abuse under both Bush and Obama — whereby countless people have been falsely accused of being Terrorists — not preclude a rational person from vesting blind faith in unchecked government accusations of this sort?
Third, the ‘just an isolated case’ defense was frequently invoked by Bush supporters. There were ‘only two’ American citizens detained for years without charges by the Bush administration — Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. Did that make the assertion of that tyrannical power more acceptable to Andrew? The claim at the time from those of us who vehemently opposed it was that if you endorse what is being done to those two individuals, then by necessity you’ve vested the President with the power to detain Americans without charges or due process — not just the current President but future ones as well. Isn’t that same concern exactly applicable to Obama’s asserted assassination power, no matter how many individuals –at the moment — are targeted? And can Andrew point to a single, similar awesome power seized by political leaders on the ground of ‘war’ that did not end up being severely abused when it was exercised in the dark?”