Glenn Greenwald wrote this about radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki on Monday:
Speaking of American justice, ondelette, over at FDL, raises an interesting point: for those who believe that leading right-wing figures are inspiring violence (whether of the kind that just occurred in Arizona, things like this, or even calls for Assange’s murder), shouldn’t they be treated the same way American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki is: i.e., targeted by the U.S. Government with due-process-free assassination for inciting violence? Doesn’t the mentality justifying Obama’s assassination program necessarily extend to other Americans accused of “inciting” violence with their political speech? While it’s true that American officials — once the assassination efforts were leaked — began passing claims to journalists that Awlaki had an “operational role” in Terrorist plots, there has been no evidence presented of that, and the concern overwhelmingly with Awlaki is that he inspires violence with his political speech. If presidentially-decreed assassination is justified against him, why not other American leaders accused of inciting violence? Shouldn’t the President order them taken out, too?
I’ve actually been mulling this myself, but I haven’t posted because my thoughts aren’t exactly coherent. This is what I wrote on Monday but didn’t post:
The President of the United States has asserted the right to kill an American citizen abroad because of alleged crimes the evidence for which, based on public knowledge, consists almost entirely of speech. Violent, hateful speech, exhortations to violence even, but speech nonetheless. The argument for doing so is premised at least in part on the idea that someone may act on his rhetoric even if he does not personally direct them to do so, that even if he isn’t personally involved in the logistical planning of terrorist attacks, his ability to speak the language of the West in his defenses of terrorism represents such a dire threat to national security that he must be killed.
The short answer is that it’s much easier to trade away someone else’s freedom, and most of us can’t imagine ourselves needing to be protected for saying the kind of things al-Awlaki says. I think someone might also argue that there’s also some forms of constitutionally protected speech that might nonetheless identify oneself as a legitimate target, as in proclaiming one’s membership in a terrorist group in a context where that claim could be accurately verified, although I’m not sure al-Awlaki has done anything that fits that description. That said, there’s much more evidence of a direct connection between the rhetoric of al-Awlaki and terrorism and American partisan bickering and violence. Terrorist attacks are pretty rare, but these days Americans killing each other over partisan disagreements is much rarer.
Also, as Josh Gerstein points out, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project the conservative wing of the Supreme Court abandoned the broad interpretation of the First Amendment it employed in Citizens United, criminalizing “advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization,” because “providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization — even seemingly benign support — bolsters the terrorist activities of that organization.”
Of course prosecution of such advocacy depends on the group’s political connections. Point is, our views of what constitutes protected speech and what doesn’t seems to very very wildly depending on the speaker, less so on the content of the speech.
