Obama's lethal presidency

Chances are you can remember the details of the controversy surrounding the presidentially-mandated assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. You definitely remember the death of bin Laden, so it's only natural that you should remember the demise of the other great perceived threat to the safety and security of American life: an American. One death of which you're probably completely clueless, though, is that of a young boy. An American boy, as it happens, despite the fact that he had lived in Yemen since he was seven. You would think that this simple, but crucial, fact would have made it more difficult for Obama's administration to kill him. You would think that his age — he was just sixteen at the time of his death — would have at least been sufficient cause for an explanation from the military. Some sort of apology, even. He was killed, and there was certainly no apology. Not even an explanation.

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed by a drone strike in Yemen two weeks after his father, a notorious traitor to his country and an architect of murder, was killed in a similar, well-documented and much-discussed strike. Tom Junod has written a short piece about the boy's death for Esquire's political blog. In it, he makes this salient point:

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list. Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone "operational," as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests.

Allow me to make a couple of important points here. Firstly, that the prospect of an administration compiling a so-called kill list designed to exact the death of Americans without due process is nothing short of alarming in the first place. But, secondly, that anyone who wishes — as many did at the time — to quarrel with the Obama administration's decision on the subject must ask themselves the loathsome and dreadfully challenging question of what, exactly, they would have done instead.

This is a punishing situation in which we find ourselves, and in which the military and its Commander-in-Chief found themselves in the days preceding al-Awlaki's death. His execution raises a myriad of questions about the role of government, extending the part philosophical, part scarily real debate about how far any president can go in the ongoing quest of trying to protect his or her fellow Americans. And, it must be said, how many fellow Americans can be killed in the process. These are the questions for which we desperately need answers, and for which no answers have been forthcoming.

In the case of a terrorist's offspring, what are we to make of his death? Wasn't it simply an inevitability that he was to be killed along with his father? That, in Junod's words,

the death of the son of an avowed enemy of America — the death of another al-Awlaki — is more an inevitability than a tragedy, and perhaps even a boon: a case of a son reaping what his father sowed. There will be some who will shrug and say that we're at war with Al Qaeda and bad things happen in wars, and there will be some who will believe Nasser al-Awlaki — father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman — when he says that "We can prove that Abdulrahman was not collateral damage at all, that he was intended to be killed."

Don't count me among them.

What's astounding to me is that there was so little information about this. Where was the outrage? It's true: Junod is right to be concerned about this, Obama's 'lethal presidency'. In any case, here it is: his full piece for the magazine. Read it carefully.