VIEWS TO KILL

 
Abraham Lincoln. Anwar Sadat. John Lennon. Franz Ferdinand. Lee Harvey Oswald. John F. Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Osama bin Laden. Robert Kennedy. Mohandas Gandhi. Anwar al-Awlaki.
All these people died in the same manner — in a planned attack intended to kill. But the public reaction to each was different.
Why? Assassinations are wrong, right? They are generally considered criminal acts, and not openly practiced by institutions governed by law. Most recently, the news of apparent plot this week by Iranian operatives to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil has elicited anger (and threats of sanctions) from the Obama administration and others. (The veracity of the plot, the report of which involves an unlikely Iranian-American, high-level Iranian security officials and Mexican drug gangs, is being widely questioned — but still.)
Other recent events, though, have raised pundit debates, moral gray areas and big questions like: Are some assassinations justified? Does it matter who is assassinated? Or who does the assassinating?

Exhibit A in the current debate stretches way way back to last month, when a targeted C.I.A. drone strike killed the American-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Remember that? Not long after, a little more than a week ago, Reuters reported what many suspected.

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

To which some responded, essentially, “Wait, can we just do that?” Is it O.K. for the U.S. government to kill individuals with, as the blogger Crawdad emphasized, “No trial. No due process. No appeal. No protests.”
Before the story even hit the echo chamber, Reuters pointed out that the Obama administration’s bold move garnered nothing like the praise that followed the killing of Osama bin Laden. Instead the Obama White House was getting static on both ends. “Liberals criticized the drone attack on an American citizen as extra-judicial murder,” Reuters said. “Conservatives criticized Obama for refusing to release a Justice Department legal opinion that reportedly justified killing Awlaki.”
(That opinion, in the form of a secret memo, was described in a report the next day by The Times’s Charlie Savage. But critics were not appeased.)
The report of the secret committee opened the door to the kind of linguistic opportunity Obama opponents (and even some supporters) pounced on: reviving the “death panel” chant.
At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer chimed in:

During the debate over the Affordable Care Act, Sarah Palin … memorably accused the administration of trying to institute “death panels” through which “bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether [her family] are worthy of health care.” This was completely false, and it won Politfact’s “Lie of the Year” award in 2009, but some Republicans ran with the idea anyway. …
Turns out you can get both death panels and something approaching the nirvana of centrist, bipartisan consensus, as long as the death panel is staffed by “mid-level” NSC officials and not folks at Health and Human Services. Because that would be disturbing.

Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway was also disturbed: (“There Really Is a Death Panel”). Among the factors that stirred his ire was the attempt to distance the president from the messy implications of assassination, by theoretically leaving the decision to the panel:

That would be a little concept called deniability. Remove the decision from the President’s purview, and the argument can be made that he can’t be held responsible. If something goes wrong, someone else will be available to fall on their sword. If legal objections are raised, then the President is theoretically protected from liability. It’s a concept that goes as far back as the assassination of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170 by courtesans of King Henry II, but not on his direct order. It was the reason for the bizarre structure of the Iran-Contra scheme by Admiral John Poindexter and Col. Oliver North so as to shield President Reagan from direct knowledge of what was being done in his name. And, now, it’s apparently being used to compile lists of people to be targeted for killing without any kind of due process. The phrase Star Chamber comes to mind.

Emptywheel reached back for a comparison that could not have pleased Democrats, writing that “the Awlaki assassination is like Bush’s torture program.” She continued:

There, too, the Administration built in plausible deniability for the President. The initial authorization for the torture–Bush’s September 17, 2001 Finding authorizing the capture and detention of al Qaeda figures–didn’t mention torture at all. The Administration twice refused to tell Jane Harman whether the President had authorized the program. The White House only gave more formal Presidential torture authorization in 2003 and again in 2004 (though even there, it attempted to avoid doing so).
Sure, Bush ultimately boasted that he had approved torture. But for years, the Administration sustained the President’s plausible deniability for the illegal program.
The Obama White House efforts to do the same with Awalaki’s death are all the more striking given that it has not been so coy about Obama’s involvement in ordering hits in the past, most notably when we killed Osama bin Laden. Indeed, they worked hard to foster the narrative of Obama making the difficult decision to order the SEAL operation. …
With OBL, the Administration proudly highlighted Obama’s role in the decision-making process; here, they’re working hard to obscure it.

Pundit followers would probably not be surprised to learn that Glenn Greenwald at Salon was all over the issue. In a post last week, raising the specter of a moral double standard, he wrote: “I genuinely wonder whether the Good Democrats doing so actually first convince themselves that if this were the Bush White House’s hit list, or if it becomes Rick Perry’s, they would be supportive just the same. Seriously: if you’re willing to endorse having White House functionaries meet in secret — with no known guidelines, no oversight, no transparency — and compile lists of American citizens to be killed by the CIA without due process, what aren’t you willing to support?”
And this: “Remember, Good Democrats hate the death penalty because they think it’s so terribly barbaric to execute people whose guilt is in doubt (even if, unlike Awlaki, they’ve enjoyed an indictment and full jury trial, lawyers, the right to examine evidence and to confront witnesses, multiple appeals, and habeas petitions).”
In a post by the Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg asked a question that few in the media have thus far. He noted that Attorney General Eric Holder, in his announcement about the alleged Iranian plot, called it “a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law.” Then: “But wait a minute. Two weeks ago, the United States assassinated one of its enemies in Yemen, on Yemeni soil. If the U.S. believes it has the right to assassinate enemies like Anwar Awlaki anywhere in the world in the name of a “war on terror” that has no geographical limitation, how can it then argue that other nations don’t have a similar right to track down their enemies and kill them wherever they’re found?” Goldberg then points out the obvious differences between the two situations:

It’s true that the assassination of Awlaki was carried out with the cooperation of the government of Yemen. That makes a difference. But would the U.S. have hesitated to kill him if Yemen had not approved? Remember: There was no cooperation from the Pakistani government when Osama bin Laden was killed in May.
It’s also true that there’s a big difference between an Al Qaeda operative who, according to U.S. officials, had been deeply involved in planning terrorist activities, and a duly credited ambassador of a sovereign country. Still, the fact remains that all nations ought to think long and hard before gunning down their enemies in other countries.
As the United States continues down the path of state-sponsored assassination far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, all sorts of tricky moral questions are likely to arise. But this much is clear: The world is unlikely to accept that the United States has a right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.

Tricky moral questions indeed. And no doubt such questions elicit very different answers, depending upon whom you ask. What would Osama bin Laden say? Or Lee Harvey Oswald? Or Lennon? Or Lincoln? Or Gandhi?