The King has decreed: Assassinate the "guilty" peasant

And it is written: The king, our wise and fearless leader, has decreed ye a terrorist upon secret evidence only the king and his cohorts may view. The king, he of compassion and the Nobel Peace Prize, orders the extra-judicial execution of ye, an insubordinate subject, the mongrel the state knows as Anwar al-Awlaki.

NYT:

The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

Now read the brazen comments in the Washington Post made by an (anonymous) official on the assurance that assassinating an American under the guise of his alleged involvement in "terrorism" is justifiable and legal.

"He's recently become an operational figure for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," said a second U.S. official. "He's working actively to kill Americans, so it's both lawful and sensible to try to stop him." The official stressed that there are "careful procedures our government follows in these kinds of cases, but U.S. citizenship hardly gives you blanket protection overseas to plot the murder of your fellow citizens."

So how about the two incidents the U.S. points to as proof of Awlaki's involvement in attempting to kill his fellow Americans? They would be the Fort Hood shooting (Nidal Hasan) and the underwear bomber (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab). WaPo:

Aulaqi corresponded by e-mail with Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood, Tex., last year. Aulaqi is not believed to have helped plan the attack, although he praised Hasan in an online posting for carrying it out.

Concern grew about the cleric's role after he was linked to the Nigerian accused of attempting to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day by detonating an explosive device he had smuggled in his underwear. Aulaqi acknowledged teaching and corresponding with the Nigerian but denied ordering the attack.

That doesn't sound like solid proof of anything beyond incitement. But apparently our constitutional law professor-in-chief knows what we shouldn't mess our pretty little heads with.

Even the Bush administration's torture troll John Yoo didn't agree with these executive powers.

Spencer Ackerman contends:

There’s no doubt al-Awlaki is exploiting his citizenship, but there’s also a reason why the guarantees of citizenship can even be exploited, and to take those away in this case, based on secret evidence and asserted claims leads us down a very dark path.

Dark path indeed. Obama has continually emphasized a break from Bush-era excessive executive wartime powers. He promised to close Gitmo, he ended torture techniques and ordered closing of black site prisons. Admittedly, it was a low bar. But those differences the Obama administration claim to embrace are much less substantial when a record of Obama and Bush policy is examined.

Eli Lake:

But these differences in style mask a sameness in substance that should worry civil libertarians. When it comes to the legal framework for confronting terrorism, President Obama is acting in no meaningful sense any different than President Bush after 2006, when the Supreme Court overturned the view that the president’s war time powers were effectively unlimited. As the Obama administration itself is quick to point out, the Bush administration also tried terrorists apprehended on U.S. soil in criminal courts, most notably “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe bomber Richard Reid. More important, President Obama has embraced and at times defended the same expansive view of a global war against Al Qaeda as President Bush.

The U.S. still reserves the right to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without charge, try them via military tribunal, keep them imprisoned even if they are acquitted, and kill them in foreign countries with which America is not formally at war (including Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan). When Obama closed the secret CIA prisons known as “black sites,” he specifically allowed for temporary detention facilities where a suspect could be taken before being sent to a foreign or domestic prison, a practice known as “rendition.” And even where the Obama White House has made a show of how it has broken with the Bush administration, such as outlawing enhanced interrogation techniques, it has done so through executive order, which can be reversed at any time by the sitting president.

Our unending war on terror continues, and our reckless leaders have the power to do whatever they want, including the order to kill an American without explaining or proving why. That's our America in 2010.