Tough Cases

I'm rather uncomfortable with giving the President the power to extrajudicially execute American citizens, but people like American-born Yemeni Islamic radical Anwar Al-Awlaki, who has taken to advocating the murder of American civilians on the internet, make it clear that preventing him from doing so creates strategic difficulties, and also makes it difficult to object persuasively to the practice purely on the basis of constitutional rights.

What we need is a legal mechanism by which people like Al-Awlaki, who have left the U.S. with the clear intent never to return and declared themselves mortal enemies of the country and its people, can be stripped of their citizenship, and their right to trial-by-jury. Trials for treason in absentia, perhaps. This would make them fair game to be blown to pieces without creating a troubling legal precedent as to the war powers of the President.

The Persistent Specter Of Terrorism

This is obviously good news, but the fact that cases of attempted terrorism of this sort are becoming bi-annual feature in the news media is frightening. My stepmother works in the security industry, and she says that for every failed plot that's reported in the news, there are a dozen more that don't get reported, and given that, I suspect it's only a matter of time until there's another successful attack on American soil. We can be thankful that terrorists as a group seem to lack imagination - as many people as it might kill in Times Square during a busy time of day, a van full of explosives could do a lot more damage if it blew up next to a chemical plant - but there are clearly enough people with both motivation and means that eventually one of these attempts is bound to succeed. Given the dire state of the economy that's the last thing we need.