(Image: Lauren Walker / Truthout; Adapted: Charles Tilford)
Of all the people the United States government killed in the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency, one of the most controversial targets was Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen and imam who at the time of his death had become the face of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The US killed Awlaki in a drone strike in late September of 2011 — despite having never charged him with a crime or presented evidence of his guilt in court — marking what The New York Times described as the “first time since the Civil War [that] the United States government had carried out the deliberate killing of an American citizen as a wartime enemy and without a trial.”
Now, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office after a campaign in which he promised to carry out war crimes, such as killing the families of suspected terrorists and reviving the torture program, Awlaki’s death is getting renewed attention. If Awlaki, a US citizen, could be deprived of life without judicial oversight, what limits will there be on Trump’s authority to carry out similar strikes against citizens and non-citizens alike?
Jameel Jaffer, author of the new book The Drone Memos and director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, explained to me that at its core, the Awlaki case was about centralized power in the executive branch.
“My concern is, the Obama administration claimed the authority to kill people far away from conventional battlefields without ever having to account for its action to any court,” Jaffer told me in a phone interview. “And the al-Awlaki case was really about that question: Should the government be able to kill its own citizens without explaining to a court why it’s doing it? The Obama administration was very successful in persuading the courts to defer to the executive branch. The result is that this awesome power is not subject now to any meaningful oversight by the judiciary. And that power will now be…