Star Chamber?

A few days ago I was chatting with a friend who remarked that the ACLU was suing the government to prevent it from killing a terrorist – and she obviously wasn’t very pleased with the ACLU!

This shocked me quite a bit. To me, the fact that a U.S. citizen is being forced to sue in federal court - in abstentia, for fear of being killed - to prevent the executive branch of the U.S. government from summarily killing him without due process is really quite amazing. There are so many radical and un American premises buried in this practice, including:

(1) That the executive should be vested with unreviewable power to summarily execute U.S. citizens - provided that he first determine that they are terrorists;

(2) That the entire world is a battlefield on which the American executive can exercise unreviewable war power against individuals, including U.S. Citizens, who are not actively bearing arms;

(3) That anyone who the executive branch says is a terrorist is, in fact, a terrorist, and there is no need for an independent branch of our government, one with different constitutional responsibilities, to conduct a fact finding proceeding in which the accused is afforded the opportunity to confront witnesses and offer evidence in his defense;

(4) That our government can establish a criterion for putting citizens on a “kill list” and then keep that criterion secret – meaning that U.S. citizens are now subject to summary execution by their own government without having any notice as to what specific conduct will subject them to this punishment;

I hardly knew where to begin. My friend assumed that the real culprit was the ACLU for opposing the kill list policy. Granted, my friend is not a constitutional scholar, and she didn't know all the facts. But she did know that the government had declared the guy a terrorist - and that was good enough for her. She also knew that he was a U.S. citizen. That didn't matter.

Wow!

About a year and a half ago, I developed the following “reductio ad absurdum” argument:

"[] I'm pretty tired of protesting that this kind of stuff is un-American. I'm tired of hearing government officials arguing that we should set up different levels of process, the obvious purpose of which is to insure (in advance) that the government will prevail and that the executive will be allowed to detain and imprison anyone it wants, on its say so alone.

To hell with it. Forget half measures. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to our constitution supposedly protect all persons falling under American jurisdiction from deprivation of "life, liberty, and property" without "due process." If we're going to ignore (or manipulate) the "due process" requirement in so far as it protects liberty, why not ignore the due process requirement in so far as it protects against deprivations of life?

Shoot the bastards and be done with it!"

I meant this argument to be illustrative. Surely no one would even consider implementing an official U.S. policy ignoring the constitutional provisions related to depriving individuals of their lives without due process. I thought that realizing how radical that suggestion was might force people to reexamine the constitutional compromises (indefinite detentions, Court systems rigged to ensure the government always prevails) then being contemplated

Boy did the Authoritarians call my bluff!

In any event, this Piece by Glen Greenwald on the topic is worth while. By the way, doesn't the death list review process Greenwald describes sound an awful lot like the Star Chamber?

Joe H.