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Has the President Become a Law Unto Himself? – Terror Tuesdays, Kill Lists & Drones
By John W. Whitehead
June 18, 2012
“What lies at the nexus of Obama’s targeted drone killings, his self-serving leaks, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers is a president who believes himself above the law, and seems convinced that he alone has a preternatural ability to determine right from wrong.”—Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department
Since the early days of our republic, we have operated under the principle that no one is above the law. As Thomas Paine observed in Common Sense, “in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” Several years later, John Adams, seeking to reinforce this important principle, declared in the Massachusetts Constitution that they were seeking to establish “a government of laws and not of men.”
The history of our nation over the past 200 years has been the history of a people engaged in a constant struggle to maintain that tenuous balance between the rule of law—in our case, the United States Constitution—and the government leaders entrusted with protecting it, upholding it and abiding by it. At various junctures, when that necessary balance has been thrown off by overreaching government bodies or overly ambitious individuals, we have found ourselves faced with a crisis of constitutional proportions. Each time, we have taken the painful steps needed to restore our constitutional equilibrium.
Now, once again, we find ourselves skating dangerously close to becoming a nation ruled not by laws but by men—and fallible, imperfect men, at that. Yet this latest crisis did not happen overnight. Its seeds were sown in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, when fear-addled Americans started selling their freedoms cheaply, bit by bit, for phantom promises of security. From torture at CIA black site prisons and Abu Ghraib abuses to extraordinary renditions, from TSA body scanners and warrantless wiretaps to the PATRIOT Act, Americans have failed to be outraged by the government’s repeated violations of the rule of law. In this way, as the “war on terror” has unfolded beyond our wildest imaginings—from the barbaric treatment of foreign detainees at American-run prisons to the technological arsenal being used by the U.S. government to monitor and control its citizens—our rights have taken a meteoric nosedive in inverse proportion to the government’s rapidly expanding powers.
The New York Times’ recent revelation that President Obama, operating off a government “kill list,” has been personally directing who should be targeted for death by military drones (unmanned aerial assault vehicles) merely pushes us that much closer to that precipitous drop-off to authoritarianism. Should we fail to recognize and rectify the danger in allowing a single individual to declare himself the exception to the rule of law and assume the role of judge, jury, and executioner, we will have no one else to blame when we plunge once and for all into the abyss that is tyranny.
continue at the Rutherford Institute:
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