“The death penalty is grotesque and immoral and
should be repealed.” So says a New York Times editorial opposing capital punishment
in the wake of Troy Davis’ execution in Georgia late last month. Those are
strong words from the Grey Lady, and I couldn’t agree more. Many have
demonstrated convincingly that Troy Davis’ trial and prosecution were riddled
with racism, error and possibly even prosecutorial misconduct. The American
justice system failed Mr. Davis with tragic, irreparable results - and the
Supreme Court wouldn’t step in to remedy the injustice, in part because he had
been granted full due process under the law. In the eyes of at least two
justices, that’s all he or anyone else is guaranteed - not necessarily justice,
just due process.
The US government recently executed another American,
however, without any due process whatsoever. Both the Bush and Obama
administrations accused him of terrorism, but no evidence to support those
claims has ever been produced for the public. He was not tried; in fact, he was
denied a trial. He was not offered an opportunity to
present a defense. A defense would be hard to muster, indeed, for, unlike
Davis, he wasn’t ever formally charged with a crime.
So far, more than five days later, the Times has not
written an editorial condemning the killing of this other American, Anwar
al-Awlaki. The last time the Times editorial board addressed the issue was a
full year ago, in October 2010, when it wrote: “Assassination should in every
case be a last resort.” Not exactly the stirring rhetoric invoked to oppose the
Davis execution and capital punishment.
The Times’ silence, however, may be better than what
The Boston Globe’s editors offered readers in the wake of the extrajudicial killing. The Globe parroted the evidence-less
“proof” offered by the Obama administration, and, in true stenographic form,
the paper asserts as fact a number of accusations Bush and then Obama made
about al-Awlaki’s role in planning attacks on Americans. Has the Globe seen
some evidence it is hiding from the public? After declaring the assassination “right
and lawful,” the Globe writes that assassination of American citizens away from
the battlefield “is an act that must - and will - remain exceptionally rare.”
But how does The Boston Globe know that this act will
remain exceptionally rare? How can the paper, or anyone, justify this most
extreme form of government lawlessness and executive power overreach? The Globe
itself denounced far lesser crimes - warrantless wiretapping, torture,
indefinite detention sans due process.
A Democratic president has opened a Pandora’s box
that no future executive will likely close. It is a sign of the declining value
of democratic ideals in our society that a historically liberal newspaper like
the Globe would defend the ultimate assertion of executive power, simply
because they trust the executive presently holding it.
Much more than warrantless spying or torture, murder
without due process is the government act that fundamentally separates free
societies from authoritarian regimes. Like capital punishment, it has no place
in a free society.
Thankfully, the editorial board at The Los Angeles
Times knows that the “war on terror is not a free-for-all in which the United
States may behave as it wishes without accountability or adherence to principle.” We can
only hope that the other major bearers of public information and shapers of
public opinion like the Times, the Post and the Globe come around to this realization before
it is too late.
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