Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was 16 on the day he was killed. "I tried every legal means to stop the targeted killing of my son," says his grandfather Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki. ”But Eric Holder and Barack Obama are giving us a new definition of the due process of the law. How can they kill him without due process?" Photographs courtesy of the ACLU
Obama's Administration Killed A 16-Year-Old American And Didn't Say Anything About It. This Is Justice? -- Esquire
In the August issue, Tom Junod examines an entirely new application of power on the part of the president — the targeted killing of individuals deemed to be threats to the country. So far, thousands have been killed, most prominent among them Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki. The decisions to target are made and the lethal missions are carried out without any public accountability, even when those targeted are Americans and even when, on one occasion, one of those Americans was a teenager. Over the course of this week, Junod considers five of the larger implications of his story on The Politics Blog. —Eds.
He was just a boy.
Let's start there. He was an American boy, born in America. Though he'd lived in Yemen since he was about seven, he was still an American citizen, which should have made it harder for the United States to kill him.
It didn't.
It should at the very least have made it necessary for the United States to say why it killed him.
It didn't.
His name was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and he was 16 years old when he died — when he was killed by a drone strike in Yemen, by the light of the moon. He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan.
Read more ....
My Comment: If this was done under President Bush's watch .... the outrage and condemnation that would follow would dwarf today's protests by far.
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