In the US, Killing Is Legal

During a terrifying speech given at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago, Attorney General Eric Holder publicly enunciated the “legal” principles that the president of the United States relies on to secretly order the murder of alleged terrorists, including American citizens, everywhere in the world. Holder’s speech established the practical suppression of any form of control over the executive power, resulting in a dangerous assault on the democratic rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

The expected official discourse from the first African-American attorney general in American history was given in response to various parties’ demands for clarification of the legal basis that led to last year’s killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico and who is an American citizen. On the same day, a bomb was dropped from a drone, which also killed another American citizen, Samir Khan, the editor of Inspire, an English version of al-Qaida’s online magazine. Two weeks later, Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, who had just turned seventeen, suffered the same fate as his father.

Anwar al-Awlaki ended up on the White House’s blacklist in April 2010 without any official evidence of potential charges or a normal legal process. The list of suspected terrorists to “capture or kill” is drawn up in secrecy by a restricted group of presidential advisers, and the U.S. government acts as their sole judge, independently executing their sentences.

Holder placed his speech in the context of the war on terror, echoing, in a disturbing manner, the rhetoric of the Bush administration that aimed to cause fear among American citizens. For Eric Holder, if it is not possible to capture individuals who are suspected to be connected to al-Qaida and who represent an imminent threat to national security, and if the country in which they are present cannot eliminate that threat or has granted the U.S. permission to catch them, then “[the] government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.” Holder added that “United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted.”

In order to legally justify the targeted killings, Holder mentioned the Authorization for Use of Military Force, a measure approved by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, and signed into law by President Bush four days later, in response to the attack on the World Trade Center. This measure was originally intended to help catch the members of al-Qaida and the Taliban held responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. It was eventually used to launch a war against Afghanistan and, from then on, it was constantly violated in order to legitimate the murders of suspected terrorists, but also in order to put in place a whole series of abusive practices that characterized a decade of war on terror, such as torture, “rendition,” indefinite detention, military courts, the invasion of citizen’s privacy and the creation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

According to Holder, now that the United States is fighting a war on terror that is taking on an increasingly unclear form, the legal authority attributed to the White House for conducting operations of this type “is not limited to the battlefield of Afghanistan.” Yet the application of the presidential order issued by Gerald Ford in 1975 forbidding extrajudicial killings by the government and its agencies has been completely ignored.

The part of Holder’s speech that probably has the most serious consequences is the one in which he explains that the American Constitution guarantees “due process, not judicial process,” which consists of the set of rules and regulations laid down by normal and legal proceedings in a courtroom.

The validity of a series of fundamental democratic principles contained in the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights, as approved in 1791 – including habeas corpus (a writ ordering that a person in custody must be brought before a court), the right to a public process of a reasonable duration, the right to an impartial jury and the right to legal assistance – is similarly interpreted as being subject to the discretion of the executive power. Those seem to be the requirements necessary for the security of a country involved in a war on terror, which is, of course, more than legitimate.

Indeed, that conflict, unique in its characteristics, is actually an excuse to justify the continuous expansion of American militarism and imperialism, which has been represented in a series of wars of unprovoked aggression on the democratic rights of the population.

The fact that the actions of the Bush administration were executed and overpowered by the current occupant of the White House embodies the dangerous ambitions of the whole American ruling class. It is not by chance that Holder’s legal sanction to the secret targeting of criminals happened a little over two months after Obama ratified the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists by the military, including U.S. citizens arrested on Union territory.

Holder’s speech triggered strong reactions among civil rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the government for refusing to disclose confidential documents related to the assassination of Awlaki in Yemen. According to the New York-based organization, “few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact.”