Following a conflict with the Treasury Department over whether they needed a license to represent extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in challenging the government's authority to kill him without charge or trial, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a lawsuit to that effect. The argument is that because al-Awlaki is not in an ongoing zone of military combat, it's illegal for the U.S. to kill him as though he were simply a combatant on the battlefield. This is the statement they released from ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero:
A program that authorizes killing U.S. citizens, without judicial oversight, due process or disclosed standards is unconstitutional, unlawful and un-American. We don't sentence people to prison on the basis of secret criteria, and we certainly shouldn't sentence them to death that way. It is not enough for the executive branch to say ‘trust us' – we have seen that backfire in the past and we should learn from those mistakes.
Romero is presumably alluding to the legal fight over granting habeas rights to suspected terror detainees at Gitmo. While the Bush administration characterized those detainees as "the worst of the worst," the government has lost around three-quarters of the habeas challenges filed since the 2008 Supreme Court decision that granted Gitmo detainees habeas rights. The lawsuit is being filed on behalf of Awlaki's father.
To a certain extent, civil libertarians may have predicted that some battles over detainee rights would continue into the Obama administration. But the targeted-killing program appears thus far to be an Obama-era controversy, which makes it somewhat unique. There's no way for the administration's defenders to simply argue that the administration "inherited" an intractable national-security apparatus that couldn't be dissuaded from entrenched practices, such as with warrantless surveillance, or a Congress that was unwilling to give the administration any slack, like with closing Gitmo. So far, this looks to be a matter entirely of the current administration's making.
