An American citizen and an accused terrorist killed by an airstrike.

This is the one I've been waiting for.

The question I pose is..

Should the US government be allowed to kill American citizens it deems are terrorists without attempting to capture them and putting them on trial?

If one considers waterboarding torture and that a war crime then assassinating an American citizen should rise to an even higher level of illegality and you then must support Obama being arrested and tried for the offense.




Anwar al-Aulaqi, U.S.-born cleric linked to al-Qaeda, reported killed in Yemen

Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical U.S.-born Muslim cleric and one of the most influential al-Qaeda operatives wanted by the United States, was killed Friday in an airstrike in northern Yemen, authorities said, eliminating a prominent recruiter who inspired attacks on U.S. soil.

In Washington, a senior Obama administration official confirmed that Aulaqi is dead.


A U.S. counterterrorism official said intelligence indicates that the 40-year-old cleric, a dual national of the United States and Yemen, perished in an attack on his convoy by a U.S. drone and jet, the Associated Press reported.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/anwar-al-aulaqi-us-born-cleric-linked-to-al-qaeda-killed-yemen-says/2011/09/30/gIQAsoWO9K_story.html

President Obama probably shouldn't be doing this kind of thing. Bad President!

David Patraeus did a great job on this one and sure saved Obama's a$$ once again!

The Texas Rangers have been killing bad guys since 1823.

I actually see this as a serious issue.

It is not so much an issue of whether or not the guy was a terrorist.

Clearly he was.

The issue is more of do American citizens no matter what they are accused of deserve a trial by jury or are we moving into an era where the President can arbitrarily okay assassination by drone?

I think these decisions have ramifications for all Americans.

In fact, I think it goes above and beyond any of the charges levied against Bush in the case of waterboarding.

They weren't American citizens and they weren't killed.

The Constitution of the United States, Art. III, defines treason against the United States to consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort. This offence is punished with death. By the same article of the Constitution, no person shall be convicted of treason, unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.



..I guess if it can be deemed a 'betrayal' by an american citizen, it could justify death

for those who are not opposed to the death penalty,, that is

I also wonder, when it comes to fighting 'enemies'

if direct strikes against a perpetrator dont make MORE SENSE(logically and morally) than broad strikes which have greater potential to cost civilian life.....

Does it say that the President can order an assassination?

Notice in the second part you posted that "no person can be CONVICTED of treason....................."

Was he convicted of treason?

He was a militant leader attacking US citizens.

WAS.

Good riddance.

IT seems the CIA has a kill or capture list that appears to be legal and also be possible for the president to sign off on

to add names to the CIA target list are "all reviewed carefully, not just by policy people but by attorneys," said the second U.S. official. "Principles like necessity, proportionality, and the minimization of collateral damage -- to persons and property -- always apply."

The memos proposing new targets are drafted by analysts in the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center. Former officials said analysts typically submit several new names each month to high-level officials, including the CIA general counsel and sometimes Director Leon E. Panetta.

Former officials involved in the program said it was handled with sober awareness of the stakes. All memos are circulated on paper, so those granting approval would "have to write their names in ink," said one former official. "It was a jarring thing, to sign off on people getting killed."

The program is governed by extensive procedures and rules, but targeting decisions come down to a single criterion: whether the individual in question is "deemed to be a continuing threat to U.S. persons or interests."

The list is scrutinized every six months, officials said, and in some cases names are removed if the intelligence on them has grown stale.

"If someone hadn't popped on the screen for over a year, or there was no intelligence linking him to known terrorists or plans, we'd take him off," the former official said.

The National Security Council oversees the program, which is based on a legal finding signed after the Sept. 11 attacks by then-President George W. Bush. But the CIA is given extensive latitude to execute the program, and generally does not need White House approval when adding names to the target list.



http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2034158

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — The killings of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and another American al-Qaida propagandist in a U.S. airstrike have wiped out the decisive factor that made the terrorist group's Yemen branch the most dangerous threat to the United States: its reach into the West.

Issuing English-language sermons on jihad on the Internet from his hideouts in Yemen's mountains, al-Awlaki drew Muslim recruits like the young Nigerian who tried to bring down a U.S. jet on Christmas and the Pakistani-American behind the botched car bombing in New York City's Times Square.

Friday's drone attack was believed to be the first instance in which a U.S. citizen was tracked and killed based on secret intelligence and the president's say-so. Al-Awlaki was placed on the CIA "kill or capture" list by the Obama administration in April 2010 — the first American to be so targeted.

The strike took place in the morning hours in the eastern Yemeni province of al-Jawf. A second American, Samir Khan, who edited al-Qaida's Internet magazine, was also killed in the airstrike.

Late Friday, two U.S. officials said intelligence had indicated that the top al-Qaida bomb-maker in Yemen also died in the strike — Ibrahim al-Asiri, who was linked to the bomb hidden in the underwear of the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because al-Asiri's death has not officially been confirmed. Al-Asiri is also believed to have built the bombs that al-Qaida slipped into printers and shipped to the U.S. last year in a nearly catastrophic attack.

Christopher Boucek, a scholar who studies Yemen and al-Qaida, said al-Asiri was so important to the organization that his death would "overshadow" the news of the deaths of al-Awlaki and Khan.

Khan published a slick English-language Web magazine, "Inspire," that spouted al-Qaida's anti-Western ideology and even offered how-to articles on terrorism — including one titled, "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom."

The voices of Khan and al-Awlaki elevated the several hundred al-Qaida fighters hiding out in Yemen into a greater threat than similar affiliates of the terror network in North Africa, Somalia or east Asia.

President Barack Obama heralded the strike as a "major blow to al-Qaida's most active operational affiliate," saying the 40-year-old al-Awlaki was the group's "leader of external operations."

"In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans," Obama told reporters in Washington, saying al-Awlaki plotted the Christmas 2009 airplane bombing attempt and a foiled attempt in 2010 to mail explosives to the United States.

Al-Awlaki's death was the biggest success in the Obama administration's intensified campaign to take out al-Qaida's leadership since the May killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The pursuit of al-Awlaki and Friday's strike were directed by the same U.S. special unit that directed the Navy SEALs raid on bin Laden's hideout.

After three weeks of tracking the targets, U.S. armed drones and fighter jets shadowed al-Awlaki's convoy, before drones launched the lethal strike early Friday, U.S. officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

Al-Awlaki and his comrades were moving through a desert region east of Yemen's capital near the village of Khasaf between mountain strongholds in the provinces of Jawf and Marib when the drone struck, U.S. and Yemeni officials said.

A tribal chief in the area told The Associated Press that the brother of one of those killed witnessed the strike. The brother, who had sheltered the group in his home nearby, said the group had stopped for breakfast in the desert and were sitting on the ground eating when they saw the drone approaching. They rushed to their truck to drive off when the missiles hit, incinerating the vehicle, according to the tribal chief, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be associated with the incident.

U.S. officials said two other militants were killed in the strike. But the tribal chief, who helped bury the bodies in a Jawf cemetery, said seven people were killed, including al-Awlaki, Khan, two midlevel Yemeni al-Qaida members, two Saudis and another Yemeni. The differing numbers could not immediately be reconciled.

Al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, had been in the U.S. cross-hairs since his killing was approved by Obama last year. At least twice, airstrikes were called in on locations in Yemen where al-Awlaki was suspected of being, but he wasn't harmed.

In July, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said al-Awlaki was a priority target alongside Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's successor as the terror network's leader.

Bruce Riedel, a Brookings senior fellow and former CIA officer, cautioned that while al-Awlaki was the "foremost propagandist," for al-Qaida's Yemen branch, his death "doesn't really significantly change its fortunes."

Al-Qaida's branch "is intact and arguably growing faster than ever before because of the chaos in Yemen," he said.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, as the terror branch in Yemen is called, has been operating in Yemen for years, led by a Yemeni militant and former bin Laden aide named Nasser al-Wahishi. Its main goal has been the toppling of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and targeting the monarchy in neighboring Saudi Arabia, and its several hundred militants have found refuge among tribes in Yemen's mountainous regions, where the Sanaa government has little control.

Amid the past seven months of political turmoil in Yemen, al-Qaida and other Islamic militants have gained even more of a foothold, seizing control of at least three towns and cities in the south and battling with the army.

Al-Wahishi placed major importance on propaganda efforts.

In the latest issue of Inspire, put out earlier this month, Khan — a U.S. citizen of Pakistani heritage — recounted meeting the Yemeni al-Qaida leader. "'Remember,' he said, as other mujahedeen were busy working on their computers in the background. 'The media work is half of the jihad,'" Khan wrote.

Al-Awlaki gave the group its international voice.

He was young, fluent in English, well-acquainted with Western culture and with the discontent of young Muslims there. His numerous video sermons, circulated on YouTube and other sites, offered a measured political argument — interspersed with religious lessons — that the United States must be fought for waging wars against Muslims.

Downloads of his sermons were found in the laptops and computers of several groups arrested for plotting attacks in the United States and Britain.

Al-Awlaki exchanged up to 20 emails with U.S. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of opening fire at the U.S. military base at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people, in a 2009 rampage. Hasan initiated the contacts, drawn by al-Awlaki's Internet sermons.

Al-Awlaki has said he didn't tell Hasan to carry out the shootings, but he later praised Hasan as a "hero" on his website.

In New York, the Pakistani-American who pleaded guilty to the May 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt told interrogators he was "inspired" by al-Awlaki after making contact over the Internet.

But U.S. officials say al-Awlaki moved beyond being just a mouthpiece into a direct operational role in organizing such attacks as he hid alongside al-Qaida militants in the rugged mountains of Yemen.

Most notably, they believe he was involved in recruiting and preparing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a U.S. airliner heading to Detroit on Christmas 2009, failing only because he botched the detonation of explosives sewn into his underpants.

Yemeni officials say they believe al-Awlaki and other al-Qaida leaders met with Abdulmutallab in a Yemen hideout in the weeks before the failed bombing. Al-Awlaki has said Abdulmutallab was his "student" but said he never told him to carry out the airline attack.

Al-Awlaki began as a mosque preacher as he conducted his university studies in the United States, and he was not seen by his congregations as radical. While preaching in San Diego, he came to know two of the men who would eventually become suicide-hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The FBI questioned al-Awlaki at the time but found no cause to detain him.

In 2004, al-Awlaki returned to Yemen, and in the years that followed, his English-language Internet sermons increasingly turned to denunciations of the United States and calls for jihad, or holy war. Since the Fort Hood attack, he has been on the run alongside al-Qaida militants.

U.S. terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann said al-Awlaki's death doesn't affect al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula's military capabilities. "The one area it makes a difference is, it limits the ability of AQAP to put out more English-language propaganda," at least in the short term.

"Al-Awlaki's greatest importance really is a recruiter for homegrown terrorism," he said. "There is no doubt he has provided assistance to recruiting people on behalf of AQAP."

But Kohlmann noted that al-Awlaki's sermons and calls for jihad remain on the Web and "in some ways you could say they may be even more effective now because he has been martyred for his cause. ... That is a powerful lesson."

____

AP correspondents Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Lolita Baldor and AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier in Washington and Lee Keath and Sarah El Deeb in Cairo contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/al-awlaki-dead-al-qaida-lacks-western-voice-225408268.html

"appears to be legal"

the memos authorizing waterboarding appeared to be legal as well.

it is funny how lawyers can make just about anything appear legal.

but in the end it doesn't matter what the lawyers say it matters what the courts say.

when courts start allowing a president to determine when American citizens can be killed without a trial, we are in serious trouble.

those are the kind of powers afforded tyrants.

and one day a tyrant may decide that what you believe is treason.

I would question his citizenship status - his actions were treasonous - all bets off

he doesn't even deserve to have us talking about him

I suppose if you wanted to call yourself an informed person you would look a little deeper than the propaganda.



The war on terror will never end untill this country is bankrupt and sold at fire sale prices.


“The Pentagon has offered no explanation of how a man, now on the CIA kills or capture list, ended up at a special lunch for Muslim outreach,” states the Fox News report.
The explanation is quite simple – Awlaki is the CIA’s chief patsy handler for planning and staging false flag terror attacks through the dupes that he radicalizes.
The US Special Operations Command’s Able Danger program identified the hijackers and their accomplices long before 9/11, and would undoubtedly have also picked up Awlaki.
As Webster Tarpley has documented, Awlaki is “an intelligence agency operative and patsy-minder” and “one of the premier terror impresarios of the age operating under Islamic fundamentalist cover” whose job it is to “motivate and encourage groups of mentally impaired and suggestible young dupes who were entrapped into “terrorist plots” by busy FBI and Canadian RCMP agents during recent years.”
http://redactednews.blogspot.com/2010/11/anwar-al-awlaki-invited-to-pentagon.html

It now appears anwar will never again enjoy the company of a street hooker! He love getting fellated by street hookers. He was twice arrested on prostitution charges while living in san diego. Avoided jail time. Fined. Placed on probation.

It now appears anwar will never again enjoy the company of a street hooker! He love getting fellated by street hookers. He was twice arrested on prostitution charges while living in san diego. Avoided jail time. Fined. Placed on probation.

I am all for putting one in the terrorists head no matter what nationality they are or if they are American.

The President cant just wake up one day and put an American citizen on the capture or kill list. Heads of several different agencies have to sign off on it as well as the head of the intelligance committe in Congress and the Senate.

Waterboarding is and was legal!

What kind of country is this when people cheer for torture? Its not only waterboarding its rape, sodamy and bloody beatings.

They are so discutsting I wouldnt dare post them here. If you have the stomach for it here is the link.

http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444

Rather horrible isnt it that the more we fight terror the more reasones we give the terrroist to hate us.

This country has lost its collective mind. I am ashamed to call myself an american.