Karma and the Constitution

In September of last year, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki ran away from his family’s home in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa to be with his father, al-Qaida operative Anwar al-Awlaki. A few days later the elder al-Awlaki was killed in a CIA drone strike, along with Samir Khan, an al-Qaida propagandist.

A few weeks later Abdulrahman and his 17-year-old Yemini cousin were among a group of older men killed in a drone strike.

Like his father, Abdulrahman was a U.S. citizen, as was Khan. Unlike his father, he and Khan had never done anything that might have been illegal in the United States.

Nevertheless, as The New York Times revealed last week, that second drone strike was ordered by President Obama—though there was nothing to indicate that he knew two children were among the targets.

Like many liberals, I’m deeply troubled by the use of targeted assassination, especially when the targets include U.S. citizens. I understand the president’s worries, however. It was Anwar al-Awlaki, after all, who trained Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber,” who had he been successful would have killed more than 100 people. And al-Awlaki apparently had a role in the murder of 13 people at Ft. Hood, Texas, and in training the Times Square bomber, as well.

I also appreciate that the president is assuming personal responsibility for the targeting decisions. He understands the terrible moral complexity of the situation and doesn’t want others to feel responsible for the deaths, especially if the dead turn out to be innocent people, as many have.

War is always horrible. Innocent people always die. During World War II, both Germany and the United States purposely killed civilians by the thousands in an effort to demoralize their enemies.

Good people can and will disagree on whether the president is doing the right thing to protect the American people while causing the fewest number of casualties. America’s experience in Iraq, where 4,409 U.S. military and 100,000 to 150,000 Iraqis died, suggests that far more people would perish if the United States invaded Yemen, or any other country, to ferret out terrorists.

A more difficult question to answer is: Is it legal to secretly target and kill American citizens living in countries with which we are not at war? The president says a legal opinion prepared in secret by his Department of Justice holds that it is—that the Fifth Amendment’s due-process requirements “could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch,” according to the Times.

But isn’t that crossing the line between executive and judicial powers? And isn’t it dangerous to cross that line? Since when do democracies make war, and kill their own citizens, on the basis of secret memos?

The drone attacks and civilian deaths come with a high cost in the form of the fierce resentment that al-Qaida effectively uses as a recruiting tool. The law of karma applies here as elsewhere, and any unjustifiable actions we take will inevitably come back to haunt us.

Robert Speer is editor of the CN&R.