The debate continues to rage over this administration's targeted attack on Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born individual who has been "the head of the spear" as far as terrorism goes, on the Internet and intimately involved for years in attempted attacks on Americans, such as the "Underwear Bomber", and many others. He provided the final "religious counselling" for a number of the 9/11 attackers.
We've been going around here, and just about everywhere else, about the legality of the operation that took him and his IT-guy to their well-deserved final resting place, courtesy of a United States Military drone.
It would be an act of completely incomprehensible faith if I could give credit to this "administration" for a job well-done. Nothing to date would signify that there is any reason whatsoever to believe that the "community organizer-in-Chief" has changed his ideological warfare against this nation that would serve to benefit us, other than the fact he was over-ruled by our Military, and the operation that took out this scum (Awlaki, not the CO-in-Chief) pre-dated his administration by a number of years. That being said, the question remains:
Is it legal?
Is it Constitutional?
Are we to be labeled terrorists (WOOPS-ALREADY ARE!!!!) and need to be watching the skies as we sidle out the back door to the grill with a plate-full of uncooked pork and a cold beer? The full spectrum of the debate has been airing out on Tea Party Radio lately, running the gamut of popular opinion. I'd like to add this little tid-bit to the discussion, as it looks to continue to be a long one:
This week's PC oxymoron, "U.S. citizen enemy combatant," has driven heated debates on the topic. Specifically, many on the Left, as well as GOP presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), have protested the U.S. drone strike death of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric linked to several terrorist plots and attacks against the U.S. (Fort Hood, the Christmas Day underwear bomber, the Times Square car bombing), on the basis of his U.S. citizenship.
Al-Awlaki, along with his understudy -- another U.S. citizen, Samir Khan -- were both killed on the Saudi-Yemen border by drone missiles specifically targeting al-Awlaki. The controversy surrounding the attack centers on the idea that the U.S. owes its citizens -- wherever they happen to be -- the constitutional protections afforded to all U.S. citizens, to include rights of due process as well as the ability to have "a day in court." The problem, of course, is that such thinking is simply wrong.
For starters, American citizens have never been accorded such "rights" when they have taken up arms against their own country. The Supreme Court has reinforced this fact several times. Notably, in World War II it ruled that the U.S. citizenship of captured German spy/saboteurs was irrelevant when the citizen associates himself with the enemy power and operates as an enemy belligerent. In essence, the Court used a walks-like-a-duck-and-quacks-like-a-duck analysis to conclude that U.S. citizens who operate as enemy combatants in wartime are, in fact, enemy combatants, and that the classification preempts any citizenship status.
More recently, the Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) added support to this conclusion, stating, "A citizen, no less than an alien, can be part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners and engaged in an armed conflict against the United States." In other words, independent of any "rights" Al-Awlaki and Khan may have claimed as U.S. citizens, when each joined a belligerent foreign military force -- al-Qa'ida -- and entered the battlefield as an enemy combatant against the U.S., they gave the U.S. the "right" to shoot back. And we did. End of (al-Awlaki's) story.
I tend to agree completely. This falls under the "natural rights" category, the right to defend oneself against any enemy, foreign or domestic. This does NOT abrogate the Rule of Law, but merely EXERCISES IT. The biggest problem we face now, is that we are confronted with an ideology and ideological misfits that will use the very existence of the Rule of Law against US as they pervert the very system of Laws we use to defend ourselves.
I bought 300 more rounds of ammo today.
God Bless America, and God Bless You!!
