Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in response to Awlaki's assassination: "The targeted assassination program that started under President Bush and expanded under the Obama administration essentially grants the executive the power to kill any US citizen deemed a threat, without any judicial oversight, or any of the rights afforded by our Constitution. If we allow such gross overreaches of power to continue, we are setting the stage for increasing erosions of civil liberties and the rule of law."
Calling the death of Awlaki "another significant milestone" in the campaign to eliminate Al Qaeda, Obama declared in his speech Friday, "Furthermore, the success is a tribute to our intelligence community and to the efforts of Yemen and its security forces, who have worked closely with the United States over the course of several years."
Obama further praised "the government and the people of Yemen" for having "joined the international community in a common effort against Al Qaeda."
These statements were echoed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. The Pentagon's press agency quoted Panetta as saying that the murder of Awlaki was a "testament to the close cooperation between the United States and Yemen."
On the same day that the Yemeni regime and the Obama administration announced the killing of Awlaki, over 100,000 demonstrators were in the streets of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, calling for the downfall of the country's US-backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. Hundreds if not thousands of Yemenis have died over the last eight months, fighting for the ouster of the three-decade old regime.
President Saleh returned to Yemen just a week before the killing of Awlaki, after spending three months in Saudi Arabia recovering from wounds suffered in a rocket attack on his presidential palace.
There is mounting speculation in Yemen that the link between his return and Awlaki's death was more than coincidental; that the regime provided assistance in the killing of the US-born cleric in return for Washington's aid in suppressing the mass popular upheavals that have shaken the country. Last year, the Obama administration doubled US military aid to the Saleh regime.
Many in Yemen dismissed the significance of the killing. "It will not be a blow to Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula from any perspective," Hakim al Masmari, editor in chief of the Yemeni Post told the Al Jazeera network. "We don't feel they will suffer, because [Awlaki] did not have any real role in [AQAP]."
The assassination of Awlaki in Yemen, together with the celebratory reaction of the American political establishment and the media, demonstrate once again that there exists no constituency within the American ruling elite and two major parties for the defense of the most basic democratic and constitutional rights, including the Fifth Amendment's protection against being "deprived of life " without due process of law."
The Bush administration held that such rights could be suspended in the name of a "global war on terrorism," and now the Obama administration has taken the crimes of its predecessor a significant step further with the extra-judicial murder of a US citizen.
Having crossed this line, the precedent has been set for the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA using military violence and assassination not only as instruments of US imperialist policy abroad, but as the means of dealing with those deemed "enemies of the state" at home.
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