A little more on the way that patriotism may be used to sanction government immorality in our names. Over the weekend I was watching an interview with Michael Leiter, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff was asking him about the Obama administration’s decision to authorize the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen currently hiding in Yemen, alleged to have inspired Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, and to have played a more direct operational role in Abdulmutallab’s Christmas plot and Faisal Shahzad’s attempted Times Square bombing; I’ve written about this psychopath before.
Director Leiter was asked about the extraordinary claim of the executive branch that it can assassinate American citizens without due process. He answered:
I will tell you from my perspective as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, if someone like Anwar al-Awlaki is responsible for part of an operation to kill more than 300 people over the city of Detroit, I think it would be wholly irresponsible … not to at least think about and potentially direct all elements of national power to try to defend the American people. I think that’s what the American people expect….Ultimately, for us not to have that discussion and not make that decision if we have to, for me, would be reprehensible.
Well Mr. Leiter, I will tell you from my perspective what is reprehensible: That you advocate for the right to assassinate American citizens without indicting or charging them with any crime, or finding them guilty in a court of law. Am I to be comforted by the fact that you, Leon Panetta, and President Obama have the power to decide which Americans are worthy of trial by jury and which should just be summarily executed by a predator drone, their irrefutable guilt merely asserted by you?
The most disturbing part of Leiter’s answer is his expectation that the American people agree with him, and his insinuation that we should find reprehensible the idea that our government wouldn’t target bad Americans for assassination. Leiter says that Awlaki deserves an executive death warrant because he was part of an operation that, if successful, would have killed a whole bunch of people. Why not extend that moral argument to the plotters of serial murders or other habitual violent criminals?
To tie it in to yesterday’s discussion on patriotism: If patriotism is love of country, then in the American context love of country can only mean love of and fealty to a specific set of foundational principles and documents. These indeed are wonderful principles and documents, but what do they say in aggregate? I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that they, first and foremost, embody an attempt to circumscribe the powers of government as against the rights of its citizens. When the president empowers his secret intelligence agencies to kill American citizens without charge or trial, I find that antithetical to the letter and spirit of the foundational principles which serve as the common wellspring of American patriotism and exceptionalism. Why does Mr. Leiter’s version of patriotism lead him to argue that the president should be signing death warrants for U.S. citizens on the basis of secret evidence with absolutely no public oversight? Mr. Leiter admits that he is arguing from his perspective as director of the NCTC. Fair enough. But then who is arguing against him from my perspective? Where is Congress?
This is a part of the Obama adminstration’s troubling continuity with Bush-era wartime practices. Both administrations claim the same extraordinary executive power divined from one document that was passed three days after 9/11: the authorization of the use of military force, or AUMF. As Eli Lake wrote in Reason a few months ago, while President Obama often tries to emphasize a break from the previous administration on issues of counterterrorism, the difference is little more than rhetorical:
While it’s true that President Obama appears more reluctant to use these extraordinary powers than his predecessor, he is nonetheless asserting, enthusiastically at times, that he has such powers. And because so much of the American war on terror is conducted in secret, it is difficult to know what Obama is and is not doing to wage it.
And even though Obama has outlawed the most egregious Bush administration outrages like torture, Eli notes that he did so only by executive order, which can be reversed by any future president. Eli concludes:
Obama, like Bush, is committed to a long war against an amorphous network of terrorists. In at least the constitutional sense, he is no harder or softer than his predecessor. And like his predecessor, he has not come up with a plan for relinquishing these extraordinary powers once the long war ends, if it ever does. If change is going to come to U.S. policy on terrorism, it will have to come from a bipartisan recognition that Americans cannot trust their government to tell them when they are safe again.
Americans would indeed be safer if Anwar al-Awlaki wasn’t breathing any longer. But we and the president, and even Mr. Leiter, owe allegiance foremost to our foundational principles and documents, not to one feverish resolution passed in the bloodlust-fogged days after 9/11. Sadly, I think Eli’s call for "bipartisan recognition" of this is a long, long way off.
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