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	Workers Vanguard No. 988	14 October 2011

White House Trumpets Killing of U.S. Citizen

Al-Awlaki Assassination: U.S. State Terror

On September 30 in remote northern Yemen, four men, two of whom were U.S. citizens, were killed by a missile fired from a U.S. pilotless drone. This was no “friendly fire” attack but an assassination carefully planned and organized at the highest levels of the U.S. military and the CIA on orders from the White House. The Obama administration immediately congratulated itself for the murder of Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was dubiously labeled “the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” The other U.S. citizen killed, Samir Khan, was involved in producing Al Qaeda’s online magazine Inspire. From the point of view of the blood-lusting imperialists, this activity qualified him as an enemy “belligerent” whose killing could be dismissed as a casualty of the “global war on terror.”

The murder of al-Awlaki sets a significant, ominous precedent. As a U.S. citizen, he was supposed to have some rights to confront and answer the allegations against him. But for the rulers of U.S. imperialism, such rights are forfeited by those deemed “terrorists” or even “terror suspects.” The assassination mission was planned for over a year, and every potential legal obstacle was reviewed—and dismissed—by lawyers from the Pentagon, State Department, National Security Council and intelligence agencies, culminating in a secret memorandum by the Justice Department authorizing the killing. It has been reported that the government’s “kill list” includes three other U.S. citizens, who have not been publicly identified.

Washington’s targeted killing of the New Mexico-born al-Alwaki on foreign soil marks an escalation of the imperialists’ “war on terror,” which was launched after the September 11 attacks with wholehearted bipartisan support. Defined as a war without end against no readily definable enemy, the “war on terror” has served as the pretext for the murderous occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the imprisonment of “terror suspects” at Guantánamo Bay and other torture centers and the increased shredding of civil liberties of the U.S. population. People have been targeted for “terrorism” investigations for their political views, and the government has enormously expanded domestic wiretapping and other surveillance operations.

Barack Obama, who came into office with avid support from the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy and among the reformist left, pledged to carry out the “global war on terror” with greater effectiveness than the widely reviled Republican Bush administration. While drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq, Obama has escalated the occupation of Afghanistan and massively expanded drone attacks, slaughtering villagers from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. The assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEAL commandos in Pakistan in May was an act of imperialist arrogance typical of the U.S. “cops of the world.” Now, by assassinating al-Awlaki, the Obama administration has declared in effect that a U.S. citizen designated a terrorist can be summarily executed: no legal charges, no trial.

The decision by the White House to place al-Awlaki on a kill list was made in the aftermath of the failed plot to blow up a jet over Detroit in December 2009. The alleged bomber, whose burning underwear was extinguished by fellow passengers on board the flight, seems to have found al-Awlaki inspirational. The New York Times (8 October) noted that the secret Justice Department memo justified the plot against al-Awlaki “despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war.” In fact, the U.S. rulers had already dispensed with such legal formalities in pursuing the “war on terror.”

A case in point is the persecution of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in May 2002. Declared an “unlawful enemy combatant” accused of planning to set off a “radioactive bomb,” Padilla was eventually disappeared into a Navy brig in South Carolina, where he rotted for over three years without any charges filed against him. Padilla was tortured with sensory deprivation, hooded and forced to stand in stress positions for long periods of time and threatened with imminent execution. He was also forbidden to meet with attorneys or family. In 2005, the government finally filed ludicrous “conspiracy” charges against him. After a show trial, Padilla was sentenced in 2007 to more than 17 years in prison.

In 2002 and 2003, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee submitted “friends of the court” briefs on behalf of Padilla, warning that his case posed “the evisceration of the rights and privileges of citizenship embodied in the first ten Amendments to the Constitution and secured on the battlefield of the Civil War and in class and social struggle over the past hundred and more years” (printed in Class-Struggle Defense Notes No. 31, Summer 2003). Explaining the ramifications of the government’s phony construct of an open-ended “war” on terrorism, the brief stated:

“Taking the Executive’s position to its conclusion, the assertion of its right to apply martial law means not only that the imperial President can detain enemy captives until the war ends, i.e., indefinitely; but also he has the prerogative to shoot enemy combatants engaged in active hostilities. In the ‘war against terrorism’ that translates to the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere in the world alleged to be a terrorist, not just on foreign soil (as the U.S. has already claimed the right to do), but within the United States.”

The killing of al-Awlaki came shortly after a federal appeals court in Atlanta ruled that the sentencing of Jose Padilla was too lenient. We demand: Free Jose Padilla now!

Al-Awlaki’s father, together with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights, had brought a lawsuit raising a constitutional challenge against the Obama administration for designating his son for assassination. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) froze al-Awlaki’s assets and made it illegal for any attorney to provide him legal services without first obtaining a license from OFAC itself. The ACLU requested such a license, but OFAC did not even respond. This left al-Awlaki with zero rights, zero representation, no access to his own funds—obliterating any chance of legally challenging his impending assassination. Meanwhile, the alleged evidence of his terrorist activities remains secret.

In December 2010, a judge threw out the lawsuit on the grounds that the issue of targeting for assassination was a “political question” to be taken up by the executive branch—i.e., the White House has carte blanche to decide whom it targets for death. Furthermore, the judge stated that “no U.S. citizen may simultaneously avail himself of the U.S. judicial system and evade U.S. law enforcement authorities,” effectively declaring that al-Awlaki had sacrificed his rights by hiding from the government that was intending to kill him! The judge’s deference to Executive Office removed any remaining legal obstacle for the White House to authorize its murder mission.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, we warned that the laws and measures initially targeting immigrants from overwhelmingly Muslim countries would also be used to eviscerate the rights of the population as a whole, especially endangering the oppressed black population and targeting the labor movement as well. We stressed as well that what the government is actually able to get away with will ultimately be determined by the level of social struggle. As Obama has broken new ground in the assault on constitutional rights, it is important to understand that none of the rights and gains that working people hold dear will be secure as long as the capitalists hold power.

As communists, we have no sympathy for retrograde Islamic fundamentalists and the Al Qaeda terrorists. But we recognize that the greatest terror threat comes from the imperialist rulers. It is in the class interests of the proletariat to oppose the imperialist wars and occupations and the assaults on democratic rights carried out by the capitalist rulers. Our aim is to build a revolutionary workers party that will mobilize the social power of the proletariat, at the head of all the exploited and oppressed, to sweep away this capitalist system of repression and war. Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin, which led the working class of Russia to power in the October Revolution of 1917. As Lenin described in What Is To Be Done? (1902), a revolutionary party must act as the tribune of the people, “able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; ...able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation,” and setting forth socialist convictions and democratic demands “in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.