The Right to Kill

President Obama ordered the execution of his fellow citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki. The deceased was a fierce Islamist Arab-American. It is a matter obscured by euphemisms. Presidents and judges — or presidents when they act as judges without appeal, as in this case — do not kill or murder: They execute.

Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman, says that Obama could be ousted for “murdering” al-Awlaki.

Why? Because the American Constitution does not give the president of the United States the right to execute any person who has not gone through the court process. The Fifth Amendment is clear: Nobody may be deprived of life without a fair trial.

Obama presides over a republic, and we know that this type of organization is governed by state laws that require compliance of all people. The main function of the Constitution is to limit the authority of rulers, and when they overstep their bounds, there is impeachment to evict them from power.

On the other hand, the U.S. president is the supreme military leader of the country, and it is expected of him to defend society from the situations that endanger national security.

If al-Awlaki, a hardened terrorist, threatened the existence of many Americans with the actions planned or carried out, isn’t it Obama’s duty to execute, kill or whatever it is that you want to call the act of killing? The problem is that there is a dangerous gap in the American legal system. Obama was right to decide to kill the terrorist.

Ron Paul is also right when he thinks that the president’s powers were not enough to organize this event.

It is inconceivable, as has been said recently, that President Obama has to seek permission from a judge to listen to al-Awlaki’s phone conversations, but on the other hand, does not need one to shoot a devastating missile.

To be fair, it is worth remembering that Obama is not the first American president to try to wipe out an enemy of the nation. Kennedy tried to attack Fidel Castro with the help of the Mafia (which perhaps cost him his life, because the other cowboy — who was a master in the art of killing, some say, as President Lyndon Johnson believed — fired faster).

Reagan tried pulverizing Gadhafi by aerial bombing; Bush did everything possible to end bin Laden. And surely all U.S. presidents, in one way or another, have seen themselves in extreme situations in which they have had to evaluate such actions with regret when they have not acted in firmness. It could have saved 60 million lives if, during Roosevelt’s era, an American skilled marksman would have shot Adolf Hitler in the forehead before the invasion of the Nazis in Poland in 1939. Today, however, this is dangerous, not only because of principle — it’s disturbing that a person can decide on his own whether to kill an enemy of the state — but because President Obama himself is at risk in the future.

What could happen? At the time he leaves office, a foreign prosecutor abroad could possibly dare to ask for his indictment for murder, as it happened a few years ago when Pinochet visited Britain.

It is unlikely that this would happen, but not impossible. Today, for example, there are several American soldiers who participated in the Iraq War to whom it has been recommended not to leave the United States (as had been suggested by former President George W. Bush on occasion), as a foreign prosecutor could jail them for war crimes. In the era of internationalization of justice, no one is completely safe from unexpected prosecution.

Most likely, the way America can avoid the difficulties of former presidents is to create, by statute, a court ruling to which Americans can submit certain extreme cases that would allow such perpetrators to be tried and sentenced to death in absentia, without the executive being able to be convicted of acting outside of the principles and norms of the republic.

If there is a right to kill, it should be regulated.