For those who have been following the U.S. government's War on Terror, or "Overseas Contingency Operation" as it is now called, it should be apparent that President Barack Obama has not thus far initiated the drastic changes that many of his supporters believed he would, based on promises he made during his campaign. For example, in his first year in office, Obama ordered more drone missile attacks in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region than former President George W. Bush ordered in his last three, and he added 30,000 more troops to the area. In addition, America has continued to abduct foreign suspects and transfer them to prisons in countries that allow torture without charging those suspects of any crime. The Daily understands that it is difficult to implement drastic changes rapidly, yet there are some instances in which it is unacceptable to leave former policies in place that completely contradict the declarations that Obama made during his campaign.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration gave the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and eventually the U.S. military, the authority to kill without trial U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence suggested that they were guilty of organizing or committing terrorist attacks against the United States. While many of the policies that carried over from the Bush administration do not coincide with Obama's professed views, it is particularly surprising that a policy that so blatantly violates the rights of U.S. citizens is still being carried out. According to a Jan. 27 Washington Post article, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command — a counterterrorism branch of the military — each maintain a list of targets for assassination that currently includes at least four American citizens, one of whom has been added to the list within the past few months and survived a missile strike in Yemen on Dec. 24.
This policy clearly violates the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which states that no person shall be "deprived of life ... without due process of law." The presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, the right to a speedy trial and all other aspects of the judicial process that Americans expect and deserve are completely disregarded by the government in its pursuit of this policy.
Moreover, the statute puts far too much power in the hands of the executive branch and the U.S. military, as it inherently bypasses the authority of the legislative and judicial branches. In a war in which the battlefield has been implicitly defined as the whole world, Obama technically has the ability to order the killing of anybody, anywhere outside the United States, without answering to a higher authority, based only on suspicion. Although it is unlikely that this power will be utilized except in very rare circumstances, no president should have this authority.
Americans, and their representatives in Congress, must demand an end to this policy. For a president who ran on a platform of greater accountability and who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to change America's foreign policy from the course it had taken under President Bush, maintaining this position is particularly troubling. Executing American citizens without due process contradicts the laws constructed to support those citizens.
