Anwar al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi) was never charged with a crime. Despite the lack of charges and trials, the US government executed the American-born citizen in a targeted drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011. The same drone strike killed fellow American Samir Khan.  Al-Awlaki’s 16 year-old son Adulrahman was killed in another strike a few weeks later, making three American murdered by their own government without any pretense of trial or due process.

The assassination became a public controversy during John Brennan‘s nomination to the head of the Central Intelligence Agency after his time as President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser. The New York Times ran a story based on interviews with various anonymous administration officials on Sunday, March 9, prompting accusations of serving as a mouthpiece for government propaganda.

The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights issued a joint statement blasting the Times’ article as “the latest in a series of one-sided, selective disclosures that prevent meaningful public debate and legal or even political accountability for the government’s killing program.”

Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, the Times reporters who wrote the article, uncritically describe Al-Awlaki using the government’s words. They call him “a senior operative in Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen” and a terrorist leader,” yet Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting noted both accusations remain unproven and dubious. The ACLU’s statement goes on to correctly point out:

Government officials have made serious allegations against Anwar al-Aulaqi, but allegations are not evidence, and the whole point of the Constitution’s due process clause is that a court must distinguish between the two. If the government has evidence that Al-Aulaqi posed an imminent threat at the time it killed him, it should present that evidence to a court….

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Lending another layer to the shroud over state surveillance, the Supreme Court recently refused to hear a critical case concerning Americans’ privacy rights.  Another crucial case, however, will appear before the Court for oral argument next week.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) initiated suit against AT&T in 2006, challenging its alleged participation in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) system of programmatic domestic spying.  Mark Klein, plaintiff and former AT&T technician, furnished evidence that AT&T routed personal customer information, such as phone and web history, to a NSA data room in San Francisco.

Despite the telecommunication industry’s corporate complicity in casting the government dragnet, the FISA Amendment Act of 2008 (FAA) essentially insulated the program by retroactively granting the industry legal immunity.  EFF subsequently challenged the FAA as violating separation of powers in Hepting v. AT&T, but the Court refused to hear this case.

Just as the Court’s rejection of Hepting may inhibit defenses against warrantless wiretapping,  Jewel v. NSA will also influence the state of privacy rights in post-9/11 America.  EFF helms Jewel on behalf of AT&T customers seeking relief from government surveillance authorized under the FAA.  The formal complaint asserts that the FAA unconstitutionally imposes chilling effects on free speech and violates the Fourth Amendment.  Ultimately, Jewel signifies the rights of ordinary people to remain free from secret surveillance by their government.  In conjunction with the denial of Hepting, a disfavorable determination in Jewel could decimate Americans’  access to legal redress for illegal surveillance.

Though the Supreme Court declined to hear Hepting, the Justices have another opportunity just next week to balance Americans’ privacy and national security.

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• 10/28, Ethan Bronner, New York Times, Citizen Held After 9/11 Wins Right to Be Tried
• 10/1, Naureen Shah, USA Today, Column: President Obama’s dangerous drone legacy
• 10/1, Staff, The Sun, Drones should be ‘like any other piece of cops’ kit’
• 10/1, Eric Limer, Gizmodo, The Head of Homeland Security Stays Secure by Not Using Email, At All
• 10/1, Josh Peterson, The Daily Caller, DOJ domestic phone, email, Internet surveillance of Americans skyrocketed under Obama
• 10/1, Jeffrey Rosen and Jillian Weinberger, The Take Away with John Hockenberry, Affirmative Action to Warrantless Wiretapping: The Upcoming Supreme Court Term

• 8/29, Editorial, Seattle Times, ACLU lawsuit against Border Patrol moving forward
• 8/29, Aliya Sternstein, NextGov, Compliance with wiretap law is transparent, NSA says
• 8/28, Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times, Police panel OKs guidelines on reporting possible terrorism
• 8/28, Ivan Moreno, Huffington Post, Scott Gessler, Colorado Secretary Of State, Has Questioned At Least 25 Legal Voters, ACLU Says
• 8/28, Kim Chandler, All Alabama, Report details complaints of profiling in wake of new Alabama immigration law
• 8/27, Peter Scheer, Huffington Post, Most Wanted Secret Doc: Justice Dept Memo Analyzing Drone Strikes Against Suspected Terrorists

8/27, Press TV, Ex-FBI agent: US government targets Americans for political views

8/27, NPR Staff, NPR, Obama’s Warfare: ‘From Power To A Policy’

8/26, Ben Wolfgang, Washington Times, Drone U. rides flight boom

8/25, Agence France-Presse, Raw Story, Guantanamo 9/11 hearings delayed to mid-October

8/25, Chris Lisee, Huffington Post, Religious And Civil Rights Groups Call For Hate Crime Hearings

On Tuesday, August 14, a federal judge issued a disturbing ruling allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to evade public accountability for infiltrating faith institutions, monitoring law-abiding people, recording sexual encounters, and then lying about all of it. Carney’s decision erodes democracy in two dimensions at once, enabling ongoing constitutional violations by the executive branch while, at the same time, eroding judicial independence.

The ruling is especially surprising given the judge’s previous criticism of the FBI for lying to him in court.

Fazaga v. FBI addressed claims by a series of southern Californians challenging a long running secret infiltration of their faith institutions by an ex-convict and undercover FBI informant named Craig Monteilh. After being promised a six figure payment to infiltrate mosques across southern California—and even to record sexual encounters with women in those communities to enable subsequent blackmail—Monteilh blew a whistle and joined a case brought by the Council on American-Islamic Relations; Hadsell, Stormer, Richardson & Renick LLP; and the ACLU of Southern California.

US District Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Southern District of California dismissed much of the case this week (leaving intact claims against individual FBI officers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), holding that the state secrets privilege and sovereign immunity essentially preclude the suit from moving forward against the government.

News outlets such as The Los Angeles Times have featured analysis from ACLU attorney Ahilan Arulanantham, who correctly noted that Judge Carney’s ruling is “contrary to the basic notion that the judiciary determines what the law is and holds the government to it,” and that the ruling essentially “exempt[s] huge swaths of government activity [from] judicial oversight.”

Missing from most reports, however, are a recognition of the multiple ways in which Carney’s decision erodes democracy.

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• 8/13, Katie Johnston, Boston.com, Rep. William Keating calls for Congressional hearing on alleged racial profiling by TSA at Logan airport
• 8/13, Murray Weiss, Huffington Post, Stop-And-Frisks Aren’t Pulling More Guns Off NYC Streets, NYPD Data Shows
• 8/13, Chris Hedges, TruthOut, After Latest NDAA Challenge Hearing, Thoughts on the Criminalization of Dissent
• 8/13, Adam Cohen, Time Magazine, Is Your Car Being Tracked by a License Plate Scanner?
• 8/13, Joseph Singh, Time Magazine, Betting Against a Drone Arms Race
• 8/13, Joe Palazzolo, Wall Street Journal, House Committee Sues Attorney General in Gunwalking Probe
• 8/12, Daily Mail (UK), Bugs in the sky: Boeing showcases hard-to-detect drones that behave like a ‘swarm of insects’
• 8/10, Samuel G. Freedman, New York Times, If the Sikh Temple Had Been a Mosque

• 7/2, Tazeen Ahmad, NBC News, How I see America, from a former Gitmo prisoner
• 7/2, Howard Fischer, Arizona Daily Star, SB 1070 foes weigh need for injunction
• 7/2, Andy Greenberg, Forbes, As Reports Of Wiretaps Drop, The Government’s Real Surveillance Goes Unaccounted
• 7/2, David Dayen, Fire Dog Lake, US House Plans to Sue Administration Over Executive Privilege in Fast and Furious Case
• 7/2, Glenn Greenwald, Common Dreams, Dianne Feinstein Targets Press Freedom
• 7/2, Ben Wolfgang, Washington Times, Drone industry releases ethics code

While we celebrate the Fourth of July this year, we might also – if we care about justice – mark the entire month of July as the 70th anniversary of the shameful trial of the German saboteurs during World War II.

The trial and subsequent execution of six of the eight saboteurs involved abuse of president power, judicial bias, a disregard for legal authorities, and a rush to judgment to secure a predetermined death sentence. The capitulation to wartime hysteria that pervaded the entire episode set a dangerous precedent for the war on terrorism decades later.

The story began on nights of June 12 and 16, 1942 when eight German saboteurs landed in the U.S., one group on Long Island and another in Florida. One member quickly turned himself in to the FBI and the rest were soon captured.

President Roosevelt immediately decided to execute them, and set out to ensure that result. He firmly told Attorney General Francis Biddle that should courts intervene “I won’t give them up,” and would not “hand them over to any United States Marshall armed with a writ of habeas corpus.” Biddle got the message (just as four months earlier he had capitulated to the evacuation and internment of the Japanese Americans, despite his deep reservations).

Roosevelt also let the Supreme Court know that he would execute the saboteurs no matter what they might decide. He had considerable help on this point, as Justice Felix Frankfurter, in a serious breach of judicial ethics, worked closely with him in drafting a military commissions order the Court would approve. Frankfurter was equally determined to have the saboteurs executed, telling his fellow Justices that they have “no procedural rights.”

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As we reported previously, Attorney General Holder Eric Holder gave a speech last March in which he attempted to provide justification for the “targeted killings” of US citizens located abroad and suspected of terrorism. Essentially, Holder claimed that the decision to end the life of a US citizen can rest entirely with the executive branch of our government, with no judicial review whatsoever, if it involved “an operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization.”

This, he said, did not violate the right of US citizens to due process, a right that is enshrined in our Constitution.

In an interview with The Real News, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army soldier and former chief of staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell, stated that Holder’s shoddy argument could be extended to justify the killing of US citizens on US soil.

On Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s contention that the US administration does not really need congressional approval to go to war, Wilkerson remarked that it was another example of the consolidation of power in the Executive, a phenomenon that threatens our republican form of government.

To Wilkerson, the argument that the administration needed these sweeping powers to protect Americans is unconvincing because too often it has been used to justify abuse. He explained,

That’s the argument of king, queen, and president in every era of human history where power has been accumulated and abused …. National security is the ultimate argument that overwhelms courts, overwhelms the people, overwhelms the people’s representatives, and ultimately brings tyranny.