Over at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece outlining the secret White House committee that has been empowered by….well, no one’s really sure who set up the committee…which has been empowered to decide which American citizens should be placed on a list for assassination by the CIA.
Greenwald cites a Reuters report thusly:
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions . . . . There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council . . . . Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate. . . . The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process. . . .
While I wholeheartedly support bringing terrorists to justice for the crimes they’ve committed, I simply cannot support throwing away the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to do so. When our government starts ignoring the very documents that give us our freedoms, we become no better than some of the countries whose leaders we’ve worked to depose.
Frankly, I’m shocked and disappointed so many “freedom-loving” conservatives (not to mention my fellow liberals) are so supportive of a policy that allows a secret committee to decide without any oversight or scrutiny that American citizens should be assassinated without the benefit of due process for crimes they may or may not have actually committed, considering they have never been convicted in any court of law.
I do not support assassination, period.
Agreed, period.