Is this the world we want? Where the president of the United States can place an American citizen, or anyone else for that matter, living outside a war zone on a targeted assassination list, and then have him murdered by drone strike.
This was the very result we at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU feared when we brought a case in US federal court on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki's father, hoping to prevent this targeted killing. We lost the case on procedural grounds, but the judge considered the implications of the practice as raising "serious questions", asking:
"Can the executive order the assassination of a US citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organisation?"
-- the Center for Constitutional Right's Michael Ratner, "Anwar al-Awlaki's extrajudicial murder" (Just Left). Michael Ratner co-hosts the radio program Law and Disorder Radio -- a weekly hour long program that airs Monday mornings on WBAI and around the country throughout the week -- with fellow attorneys Heidi Boghosian and Michael S. Smith.
