On March 31, 2008, speaking to supporters at a campaign stop, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama argued, “The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all … and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United State of America.”
Obama, like other liberal Democrats, was a vocal and outspoken critic of President Bush’s counterterrorism policies. From the detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on detainees to extract intelligence, Obama argued that these policies represented an executive power-grab by the Bush administration.
A Justice Department memo that NBC recently obtained and released indicates that President Obama does not live in the same hemisphere as Candidate Obama. The memo, also known as “the white paper,” lays out the Obama administration’s argument for its drone program — specifically, how the president decides when it has the ability to kill U.S. citizens.
A lethal drone strike against a U.S. citizen, the Justice Department argues, is legitimate and constitutional if an individual “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the U.S.” The imminence of such an attack is determined by “an informed, high-level official of the U.S.” without any review from the legislative or judicial branch of government.
And what evidence is needed to show that an “imminent threat” exists? The paper states that to prove a threat, the government does not need “to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
These drone strikes are not unconstitutional and award the target due process, according to the paper, because the U.S. government “may act in national self-defense to protect U.S. persons and interest who are under continual threat of violent attack by certain al-Qaida operative planning operations against them.” In other words, these targeted drone strikes of U.S. citizens are fine because they are acts of war.
The arguments outlined in this Justice Department memo should give every American pause — especially those who value civil liberties and due process of law. Furthermore, liberals who rightly decried Bush’s counterterrorism policies should be equally critical of this president.
A common counterargument made by conservatives when liberals criticized Bush was that we did not have all the information given to the president when he made those decisions. In response to criticism on Twitter, liberal commentator and MSNBC host Touré responded, “He’s the Commander in Chief.”
Well, that settles it.
Conservatives have pointed out the hypocrisy of liberals who now defend the seemingly endless unilateral authority of the president to kill U.S. citizens abroad. But that’s where their argument stops.
Some conservatives are actually quite pleased with the president’s policy of killing suspected terrorists in places like Pakistan and Yemen — countries on which we have not declared war. So, what if we kill U.S. citizens who might be aiding and abetting terrorists in the process?
It doesn’t matter if the targets of drone strikes are American citizens or not. If humans have natural rights, independent of nationality, religion, creed or citizenship, then everyone has a natural right to be given due process.
To put our faith in one man or one branch of government to unilaterally determine whether a person’s life should end simply because an informed, high-level official has reason to believe that this person might pose an imminent threat is not good enough.
Justin Hayes is pursuing a master’s degree in political communication. His column appears on Wednesdays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
