Letter: Citizen targets

To the editor:

When Barack Obama places his hand on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible during his second inauguration, an executive will be sworn in as president of the United States who openly claims the codified right to target a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil for assassination by the U.S. government.

Will U.S. citizens be subjected, as have Pakistanis and other nationals, to Joint Special Operations Command “snatch/grab/assassinate” programs collaborating with corporate contractors Blackwater/Xe/Academi or outsourced groups such as Israeli Mossad? Or will armed versions, such as CIA Predators or drones already roaming the skies above the surveilled homeland, preside over targets found guilty through a trial of Hellfire missiles or other such peers.

Well beyond hypotheticals, the president has already overseen orders that blew up a 16-year-old U.S. citizen named Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi while he ate dinner with a friend in an open-air restaurant in his family’s homeland of Yemen. Obama’s well-wrought, post-Newtown tear for the “safety of our children” notwithstanding, Abdulrahman’s grandfather has credibly accused the Nobel Peace laureate of acting as “nothing more than a child killer.” Left unmentioned are the unknown names, at least to the American people, of the multitude of individual children of other national origins whose breaths Mr. Obama is liable for snuffing.

King prophetically asserted: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Has it been long enough for us to find our will to bind, arrest and correct the increasingly codified, spiritual wickedness hurtling down from “we the people’s” house?