Without a shred of due process, far from any battlefield, President Obama succeeds in killing Anwar al-Awlaki
Source: The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality – Salon.com
The thing that bothers me about it is that, well, how do I know he was bad? The media? We know that governments have historically been able to bend/manipulate media reporting. I feel that is why we have a judicial system; my fellow citizens are only bad if they have charges brought against them and those charges are upheld in court, which frees me to assume that the average American I encounter on the street is a good person that I can trust more than distrust (e.g. for directions to a parking structure or major thoroughfare). That is, of course, idyllic and we live in an imperfect world where this is not always the case, but that doesn’t mean we should discard or overrule the system even when we think it is good to do so, because eventually it won’t always be the case that we were right to demonize and extra-judicially hunt down a fellow citizen. I’m not even sure that we as a nation can afford much more distrust of each other given that there are good statistics correlating honesty, trustworthiness, and trust with productivity, happiness, and safety, and I for one believe that there is almost certainly a directional causality from the former to the latter.