Andrew Sullivan has words with me:
That's a ridiculous distortion of my position. I don;'t know whether Awlaki is a terrible human being. I do know he has targeted for death writers and cartoonists and has been deeply enmeshed with recent attempts to kill many Americans in what he believes is a war. Moreover, Yemen surely is a "declared battlefield" - at least as far as al Qaeda is concerned. Awlaki is currently issuing death threats against Americans who have had to go into hiding and is connected with several recent terror attacks.
I feel fairly comfortable saying al-Awlaki is a terrible human being based on his public statements and calls for Muslims to kill Americans. What I cannot know based on the available evidence, is that he plays an "operational role" in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and therefore is a valid target for killing based on his membership in an enemy force. "Enmeshed" blurs the distinction between merely giving a potential crime his rhetorical sanction and actually being involved in the implementation of a specific plot. That's why the government keeps saying he plays an "operational role" in AQAP without actually describing one, because his words alone aren't enough to justify the government targeting him for elimination.
In any case, Sullivan has very clearly called for the government to state its rationale for targeting al-Awlaki publicly, and in that sense can't be said to support keeping the rationale for targeting him secret even if he thinks they're ultimately justified in targeting him, so I was in error in suggesting otherwise. My point was just that there are principled people on both sides of this issue, which I believe to be far more complex than whether or not the United States should be borrowing the torture techniques deployed by the Chinese military to elicit false confessions during the Korean War.
