A Dangerous Mistake We Shouldn't Make Again

A lot of people have justified the extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki by saying it was basically an aberration – a unique situation where we needed to wipe out a terrorist threat and the guy we targeted just happened to be an American citizen. Surely these assassinations are not going to become a new trend, and the government would never carry out such an act unless it was absolutely necessary to the national defense.

Let’s put aside for a moment that the “emergency” rationale has been used to enable countless examples of bad policy, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Japanese-American internment camps to the 2008 bank bailout. The real cause for concern is that even if you accept the premise that this killing, just this one time, was ok, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the next one will be. And given the government’s history of taking a few hundred miles when given an inch, there is no reason we should trust it to restrain itself here.

By any measure, al-Awlaki was not a sympathetic figure. It’s easy to say “good riddance” to this one death in the faraway and war-torn Middle East, even if we aren’t entirely comfortable with how it took place. It’s easy to assure ourselves that the government wouldn’t dare kill a “real” American citizen, one who actually lived here and wasn’t plotting acts of terror against us. If any president ever thought of doing so, the potential public outcry and pure injustice of it would surely stop him in his tracks.

Unfortunately, we once said the same thing about the president making war.