Best of the American columnists

Is political assassination ever justified?
President Obama has just ordered the assassination of an American citizen, said Scott Shane in The New York Times. The target of this extraordinary presidential directive is Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico and spent years preaching at a mosque outside Washington.
He's now hiding in Yemen, where he allegedly served as an al-Qa'eda contact for Nidal I lasan, the US Army major who gunned down 13 people at Fort Flood army base in Texas last year. Al-Awlaki is also believed to have met the Nigerian "underwear Ixmiber" charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on
Christmas Day. We all know that the US government keeps a list of terrorists whose killing has been authorised, but "it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented" for an American citizen to be on it.
the fact that al-Awlaki is a US citizen is irrelevant, said David B. Kivkin Jr. on TheDailyBeast.com. As a member of al-Qa'eda, he has joined in "armed hostilities" against the US. That makes him a soldier, not a "criminal suspect". As such, he's "subject to attack, capture and detention pursuant to the law of armed conflict". It's time for Obama's supporters to acknowledge the reality he accepted





when he moved into the White House: we are at war.
Surely that doesn't make it legitimate to abandon all legal niceties, said Dale McFca iters on ScrippsNews.com.

The Constitution states that "no American shall be deprived of life without due process of law". Arc we to believe that "secret deliberations" by the National Security Council, which authorised al-Awlaki's killing, meet that standard? Even as a conservative, I find this order worrisome, said Kevin D. Williamson in National Review Online.
Al-Awlaki may be a bad man, but "this seems to me to be setting a reckless precedent". If a US citizen can be arbitrarily killed in the name of national security, can the President now bump off any journalist who illegally handles
classified information? This is a slippery slope, agreed Glenn Grecnwald on Sjlon.com. It wasn't so long ago that liberals were condemning the Bush admins Ration for imprisoning US citizen Jose Padilla - a suspected terrorist - without trial. "If that's a vicious, tyrannical abuse of the Constitution - and it was - what should they be saying about the Nobel Prize winner's assassination of American citizens without any due process?"