Sunday, October 02, 2011

Truest statement of the week

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.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 
Poll1 { display:none; }