Two
weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone
strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same
to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s
life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people.
News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that
Awlaki’s son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (obviously:
Terrorist often means: “anyone killed by the U.S.”), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote:
“Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions
say either about the the quality of the government’s evidence — or the
honesty of its claims — and about our own capacity for self-deception.”
The boy’s grandfather said that he and his cousin were at a barbecue and
preparing to eat when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their
lives. There are two points worth making about this:
(1) It
is unknown whether the U.S. targeted the teenager or whether he was
merely “collateral damage.” The reason that’s unknown is because the
Obama administration refuses to tell us. Said the Post: “The
officials would not discuss the attack in any detail, including who the
target was.” So here we have yet again one of the most consequential
acts a government can take — killing one of its own citizens, in this
case a teenage boy — and the government refuses even to talk about what
it did, why it did it, what its justification is, what evidence it
possesses, or what principles it has embraced in general for such
actions. Indeed, it refuses even to admit it did this, since it refuses even to admit that it has a drone program at all and that it is engaged in military action in Yemen. It’s just all shrouded in secrecy.
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