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Extrajudicial Killing of American Citizens: What Are the Limits?

By Jonathan Simor

The Obama administration's desire to suspend Miranda warnings for terrorism suspects seems pretty minor today, as the administration has now announced that it is willing to order extrajudicial killings of American citizens. (This is somewhat old news, but it's difficult to keep up with all of these presidential innovations.) Anwar Al-Awlaki is an American citizen living in Yemen (and American-born as well, which matters politically, though it shouldn't).The argument for this decision basically comes down to: ?American citizenship doesn?t give you carte blanche to wage war against your own country. If you cast your lot with its enemies, you may well share their fate.?The problem, again, is that apparently the executive also gets to decide what counts as "waging war" and what does not, without much input from the other two branches (which, in days of yore, were also considered to have a role in the wartime decision-making apparatus)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on May 17, 2010 (boomark / email).