In the his piece today at TomDispatch, Peter Van Buren explores the puerile logic behind the Justice Department’s finally released white paper on the drone-killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen and considers, among other things, the nature of the job that lawyers do for the modern increasingly king-like office of the president: “As medieval kings invoked church sanction to justify evil deeds, so in our modern world lawyers are mobilized to transform government actions that spit in the face of substantive due process -- torture, indefinite detention without charge, murder -- into something ‘legal.’ Torture morphs into acceptable enhanced interrogation techniques, indefinite detention acquires a quasi-legal stance with the faux-justice of military tribunals, and the convenient murder of a citizen is turned into an act of ‘self-defense.’ However unpalatable Anwar al-Awlakis words passed on via the Internet may have been, they would be unlikely to constitute a capital crime in a U.S. court. His killing violated the Fifth Amendment both procedurally and substantively.”
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 20:00:00 +0000
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