Where is the line that separates a society that respects laws from a lawless society?

[Stinky The Clown]

Think about it. Our government, in our name, maintains a list of human beings it wishes to have killed. There were no trials. Just intelligence reports and names placed on a list.

To be sure, none of the people on that list are nice. They wish us all dead. They wish us wiped from the face of the earth.

And so, instead of civil law, we sound as if we're invoking some fundamentalist religious law, not unlike those who are bent on our destruction.

To make it a more pressing issue, today we learn that a US citizen has been placed on this list. As above, and again to be sure, this man is no sweetheart. He is clearly an enemy of our society.

But hit lists?

That seems to me a very slippery slope. In how many years will we be so numb to it that more ordinary citizens get on the list? Oh sure. Today such a concept seems very tinhatty. It seems to me that protecting our citizens from our government has no room for error. No wiggle room. Similarly, there is little wiggle room in human decency. We either are a state that sponsors murder in lieu of the mechanisms of justice or we're not.

The story that provides the inspiration for this post is this:

Muslim cleric Aulaqi is 1st U.S. citizen on list of those CIA is allowed to kill

A Muslim cleric tied to the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner has become the first U.S. citizen added to a list of suspected terrorists the CIA is authorized to kill, a U.S. official said Tuesday.

Anwar al-Aulaqi, who resides in Yemen, was previously placed on a target list maintained by the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command and has survived at least one strike carried out by Yemeni forces with U.S. assistance against a gathering of suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

Because he is a U.S. citizen, adding Aulaqi to the CIA list required special approval from the White House, officials said. The move means that Aulaqi would be considered a legitimate target not only for a military strike carried out by U.S. and Yemeni forces, but also for lethal CIA operations.

"He's in everybody's sights," said the U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the topic's sensitivity.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said: "This agency conducts its counterterrorism operations in strict accord with the law."

>snip<

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040604121.html