Manufacturing Terrorism & Obama’s Dangerous Precedent

Manufacturing Terrorism

The U.S. government has both hyped the threat of terrorism and helped create it, according to Ivan Eland, senior fellow at the Independent Institute and director of its Center on Peace & Liberty. It was not for reasons of national security that the White House authorized the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, Eland argues in his latest op-ed. Although the American citizen preached jihad against the United States, he was what one expert called a “dime-a-dozen cleric.” His assassination was an act of political theater, meant to show that President Obama was “tough on terrorism.”

Another recent case of “anti-terrorist” showmanship is even more transparent. Last month authorities charged Rezwan Ferdaus of Ashland, Massachusetts, with intent to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Ferdaus planned to carry out his attack with a remote-controlled aircraft armed with explosives. The source of the foiled terrorist’s operational funds and equipment? The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although she was careful not to call it entrapment, U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz admitted, “The public was never in danger from the explosive devices.”

“This is not an isolated case,” Eland writes. “In similar cases, the FBI has provided the means to carry out the terrorist attacks but then arrested the alleged plotter. Such entrapment provides opportunities for people to do what they otherwise would not or could not do.... Such government hyping of the terrorist threat, or actual creation of it, to justify greater federal coercive action makes one wonder whether to fear more the low probability of a successful terrorist attack or the massive, expensive, and intrusive government efforts to combat it.”

The Government’s Illusory Terrorist Threat, by Ivan Eland (10/5/11)

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Obama’s Dangerous Precedent

The assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki is monumental, hence the focus given to it in The Lighthouse. In his latest piece for the Huffington Post, Independent Institute Research Editor Anthony Gregory argues that the Awlaki assassination sets a dangerous precedent that jeopardizes Americans’constitutionally protected rights. It is, to use a word that has been invoked far too often on other occasions, unprecedented.

The U.S. Constitution, Gregory notes, guarantees legal due process to suspected traitors. Indeed, it “requires that ‘no person...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,’” Gregory writes.

Though unprecedented, the assassination was not a total break from the past; arguably, it takes the policies of President George W. Bush just one step further. Unfortunately, the push for change” that swept Obama into the Oval Office seems devoid of consistency. “If Bush’s detentions without trial were objectionable to liberals, and Obama’s domestic ambitions offend conservatives, why should this not be a universal outrage?” Gregory writes. “What greater tyranny could there be than a president’s power to order a citizen executed without consulting Congress or the courts? This action has indeed crossed a line, descending further toward the very lawlessness the United States claims to stand against.”

Obama, the Ground-Breaking President?, by Anthony Gregory (The Huffington Post, 10/7/11)