Killing enemies is what you do at war. I have no problem with the drone policy when we kill enemies with them. But is that what we are doing? (tip to Instapundit) (link fixed)
Are U.S. enemies entitled to due process? Well, no -- not if they are arrayed against the country on the battlefield. In war, you don’t try the enemy. You kill him, preferably before he kills you. And if some of the Japanese troops at Guadalcanal had held U.S. citizenship, it wouldn’t have suddenly given them due process rights. If Awlaki was an enemy fighting on the battlefield, he wouldn’t have deserved due process while the fight was on. Off it, he should legally be like any other U.S. citizen, innocent until proven guilty. ...
Yet, despite claiming that the Awlaki killing was justified because he was an operational leader of al-Qaeda, and thus in some sense an enemy on the battlefield, the white paper still assumes that due process applies to U.S. citizens abroad who adhere to the enemy. On the surface, this sounds plausible and even generous: Why not consider the possibility that a U.S. citizen abroad has some rights against being killed out of the blue?
In fact, though, applying due process analysis to Awlaki produces a legal disaster. The problem is, once you consider due process, you have to give it some meaning -- and the meaning you choose will cast a long shadow over what the term means everywhere else.
The Obama administration is going to cheapen what due process means to us at home in clear law enforcement circumstances in order to justify an approach to waging war that relies on a law enforcement approach--when that approach is unneeded given the precedent we have for how we may wage war.
The precision weapons on those drones fired at terrorists thousands of miles away have a blast radius that strikes every point in America.
The left used to say that the ultimate tragedy post-9/11 would be if in fighting terrorists we lost our freedom anyway. I figured we had some room to maneuver to defend ourselves before we had to worry about that. But I did always say that the best way to avoid loss of civil liberties is to actually get on with winning the war. If we don't, loss of freedoms would ratchet up over time as the enemy attacked us in new ways and we reacted to stop the new method.
Now the left, as embodied by the president they adore, seems determined to grease the tracks on the descent into a civil liberties nightmare where due process is needlessly cheapened to justify waging a
