Subverting due process of law

UNITED States Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, last week put to rest any doubt over whether President Barack Obama had embraced his predecessor George W Bush's policy of authorising the killing of US citizens involved in terrorist activities abroad.

Testifying before the House of Representative Intelligence Committee, his admission that deliberately targeting and killing American citizens suspected of involvement in terrorism activities was definitely on the cards sent shock waves through the intelligence community.

It will be recalled that after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, not only did Bush permit indefinite detention, he also authorised CIA and the military to kill US citizens abroad if intelligence turned up evidence of their involvement in terrorist activities against the US or US interests. This extrajudicial killing of human beings, which clearly violates international human rights law, is reminiscent of Latin American dictatorships just a couple of decades ago.

It is common knowledge that Israel, through its intelligence service Mossad, routinely carries out such assassinations, as seen in the murder in a Dubai hotel last month of top Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh. However, it comes as quite a shock to learn that right-leaning Obama has been entertaining such thoughts.

Constitutional scholar Professor Francis A Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School is on record as saying that the US government has established a "Death List" of persons earmarked for assassination. A recent Washington Post story on such extrajudicious killings by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest went further, saying that the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command have three US citizens on their list of people targeted for killing. The worried parents of one of the men on the list, New Mexico-born Anwar Aulaqi, had just stepped forward to plead for the life of their son, vouching for his innocence.

Human rights advocates have stated unequivocally that under international law only combatants directly participating in hostilities can be targeted for a hit while killing any civilian, irrespective of citizenship, makes it a war crime under the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Not only are the extrajudicial killings a grave violation of international human rights law, for US citizens it is also a violation of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution which declares that no person "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".

It is frightening to think that one human being can be placed above the rule of law and be in a position to subvert due process as he legally orders the assassination of another human being without the need for a formal charge to be filed, investigations carried out and a judge or jury to pronounce judgement. No court, no jury. Just on information provided by intelligence agencies that have often times been proven to be flawed, an executive now has the power over life and death.

It would appear that the Obama administration has now clearly defined and enshrined the power to assassinate Americans by executive fiat.

This is a power which will from now on pass down to every man elected as the president of the US. Claiming this power would now complete the rout of the Sixth Amendment of the Bill of Rights which began on November 5, 2002, when Bush authorised the attack and killing of American citizen Kamal Derwish by Predator drone, as he travelled in a vehicle with six alleged al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

In future, it may not be easy for the US, which is often looked up to by most countries as the world's policeman, to flex its moral muscles and hammer away on human rights, especially to the many third world countries that are brazenly dictatorial and continuously flout human rights with impunity.