So now we're killing U.S. citizens for saying unpopular things. Inspiring strangers with your YouTube videos makes you "linked" (in words of the New York Times) to their terrorist plots and actions. By this logic, the Beatles should have been assassinated for inspiring Charles Manson to commit terroristic murder after hearing their lyrics on "The White Album."
But wait, wasn't Anwar al-Awlaki also involved in operational planning for Al Qaeda, as statements from the Obama administration have taken pains to point out? Wasn't he directly involved in plots to kill Americans, as suggested by his email exchanges with Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood?
Possibly. We will never know for sure, because Awlaki will never be brought to trial. Neither he nor the rest of us will ever hear all of the evidence against him, nor will he have a chance to defend himself. All that has been preempted by a drone strike. We simply have to take Obama's word for it.
So this action is troubling on two levels. For one thing, we have handed out a death sentence to a U.S. citizen without any due process. All we know for sure is that he said things—on YouTube, in e-mails. That's not supposed to be a capital crime. The other problem is the media's normalizing the idea that unpopular speech can be tantamount to criminality, as in the Time's statement that "... his online lectures and sermons were linked to more than a dozen terrorist investigations." Linked how? In nearly all cases, this appears to refer to people who heard his words and did bad things.
It's not freedoms that get chipped away—it's the standards, definitions and limited exceptions applied to those freedoms which can be gradually undermined. This is the dark side of the War on Terror.
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