For obvious reasons, it is generally considered a crime for any government to engage in extra-judicial killings, in effect executing people without giving them the benefit of a trial. The governments that are infamous for operating such death squads are looked upon as rogue regimes. There are some occasions where the killing may be justified, such as on a battlefield or someone who is violently resisting arrest. If such restrictions are removed, governments could (and would) send people around the world to kill anyone they perceive as an enemy. This is why the Obama administration created those lies in the immediate aftermath of the bin Laden killing, that he was armed and resisted arrest and that he died in a firefight.

But in the euphoria that followed the bin Laden killing, the country seems to want to ignore the potential illegality of the act and the Attorney General has even promulgated the extraordinary doctrine that his killing was an “act of national self defense”, presumably to pre-empt any talk of illegality. In the Great and Glorious War on Terror, we have now given the US government the unilateral power to kill anyone it pleases and simply make up reasons why it is allowed to do so.

Those who raise concerns about such behavior are dismissed because it seems self-evident to many people that bin Laden deserved to die and they don’t care how he died. But, as Noam Chomsky points out, there is a real danger in giving the government this kind of freedom to kill people with impunity because governments never have enough power and will use any event to further chip away at all the restraints on them. The Obama administration was quick to take advantage of this freedom. Just a few days later there are reports that the government tried to kill the Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen with a targeted missile strike that missed him but killed two other people.

It is important to realize why this is so serious and has to be vigorously protested. al-Awlaki is a US-born citizen who is not a soldier and was not even on a battlefield when the attempt to kill him was made, since the US is not at war with Yemen, at least not yet though with the number of wars expanding this may just be a matter of time. Furthermore, he has not been accused of committing any actual crime. What he is accused of is inciting other people to attack US government targets, which by itself is not a crime. If it were, any number of militia movements in the US would have all their members in jail. Furthermore, these are just accusations and have only been made by the government to the media. As far as I know, there have been no formal grand jury indictments against him.

So what we have now is a situation in which the government has simply asserted the right to declare a US citizen guilty by press release, and then kill him anywhere in the world even if he is not on a battlefield. It so happens that al-Awlaki was in Yemen when the attempt to murder him occurred but this is a technicality. If the government is allowed this extraordinary leeway, what is to prevent it killing US citizens even in the US? If this power is left unchecked, it means that no one is safe from summary execution by the agents of the US government.

There is no question that the Obama administration will use the support generated by its killing of bin Laden to expand its power even further and there is no telling where this process will end up. This is why Democratic administrations are so dangerous to basic liberties. So many of the people who would have vociferously protested this assault on the basic rule of law if Bush or any other Republican were in office are now nowhere to be found or are making excuses for these actions or even glorying in showing that Democratic presidents can also be ‘tough’.

It is of course true that the US government has over its history ordered the killing of many people it considered inconvenient. The CIA has long been in the political assassination business. But the government knew that such actions were illegal and thus they were done covertly and officially denied. And there was always the remote possibility that someone could be held accountable for doing something illegal and this served as a check on more rampant abuses.

But that slim restraint been removed altogether and now government officials proudly announce their illegal attacks. Are we really willing to officially create rogue governments by giving them the right to murder you or me simply on the say so of some official in the government? The acid test is how we would react if a foreign government sent out death squads to the US to kill US citizens that it deemed as ‘enemy combatants’. As Chomsky says, “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

Glenn Greenwald has more on the al-Awlaki killing attempt.