A great debate has sprung about the legality of the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan: two sworn enemies of the United States that have incited mass murder. Civil libertarians and some constitutional scholars have claimed the Obama administrations execution of two “American citizens” is a violation of the Constitution:“The US Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (‘No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law’), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections,” writes Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator, in his Salon column.
“This is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts,” says Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), one party in a lawsuit seeking to prevent targeted killings.
“The government's authority to use lethal force against its own citizens should be limited to circumstances in which the threat to life is concrete, specific, and imminent,” he said in a statement Friday. “It is a mistake to invest the President – any President – with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country.”
The premise of these civil libertarians is based on American citizenship. I contend that neither al-Awlaki nor Samir Khan were citizens of the United States at the time of their execution.
Anwar al-Awlaki’s parents are Yemeni citizens who were granted student visas. During their brief stay in the United States they gave birth to a son. Because of a misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment by the Supreme Court and a complete bastardization of Natural Law, citizenship was conferred unto this Mohammedan. It is perverse and unnatural to politically separate a child from his parents. Anwar al-Awlaki was a Yemeni citizen at the time of his birth to his death.
Samir Khan was Saudi born. He and his family immigrated to New York City where they became naturalized citizens. Later they moved to Charlotte, North Carolina where Samir started a blog inciting terrorism on American Citizens. He then fled to Yemen. These are the words of Samir Khan:
“I am a traitor to America, because my religion requires me to be. We pledge to wage jihad for the rest of our lives, until either we implant Islam all over the world or meet our Lord as bearers of Islam.”
Samir Khan never took his oath seriously. He proclaimed himself a traitor, in essence renouncing his citizenship.
So to sum it up: Anwar al-Awlaki should never have been considered a citizen to begin with, and Samir Khan renounced his. They made allegiance with sworn enemies of the United States, thus making them enemy combatants and viable targets.
So to sum it up: Anwar al-Awlaki should never have been considered a citizen to begin with, and Samir Khan renounced his. They made allegiance with sworn enemies of the United States, thus making them enemy combatants and viable targets.
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