beth Williamson
It's likely I don't like this guy, but you don't kill an American without due process, and what the Obama administration hints as as "proper secret process" just logically sucks. We're on a downward slope.
September 30, 2011 "WSJ" - -GOFFSTOWN, N.H.–Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul condemned the U.S.-backed killing of al Qaeda figure and U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.
“Nobody knows if he ever killed anybody,” Mr. Paul said after a breakfast at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics. “If the American people accept this blindly and casually…I think that’s sad.”
Mr. Awlaki, accused by the U.S. of planning al Qaeda attacks on U.S. citizens and recruiting terrorists, has been a longtime target of the U.S.
The libertarian Mr. Paul, a strong opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, said his disagreement is based in large part on the fact that Mr. Awlaki is an American citizen, and U.S. authorities “have never been specific about the crime.”
In May, the Texas congressman supported the killing of Osama bin Laden by a team of Navy SEALs in Pakistan, writing at the time: “Osama bin Laden applauded the 9/11 attacks. Such deliberate killing of innocent lives deserved retaliation. It is good that bin Laden is dead and justice is served.” He also said bin Laden’s death was one more reason the U.S. should withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.
Mr. Paul has taken a clear,if controversial, stance against aspects of the U.S. war on terrorism, which in his view represents an encroachment by government on individual freedoms. In his latest book, “Liberty Defined,” Mr. Paul writes that the targeting of Mr. Awlaki represents a move “much further along in the disintegration of American jurisprudence.”
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