The Rude Pundit - In Brief: When Can We Call These "Patriots" By Their Real Name: "Traitors"?

[ancianita]

24. These vigilantes, going down a dark path, are drawing you down there with them. Jeremy Scahill

has explained the unconstitutionality of Obama's direct killing of four US citizens: Anwar Al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, Samir Khan, and Jude Mohammed, without benefit of due process of law. The death warrants against these individuals were effectively signed in secret, in a committee overseen directly by the president. This president has codified all the counter-terrorism activities that the Bush-Cheney Murder, Inc. put into place.

That there is an important context for concern over how and who we label traitors, and how we treat them. How easily our government moved from telling us the above Americans were traitors to then calling them terrorists. It doesn't matter that there was no official conspiracy revealed. It doesn't matter that we hate Coloradoan Al-Awlaki or what he preached.

What matters is that we executed citizens' civil liberties abroad. We must be careful not to do that at home. A precedence has been set, and calling these people traitors will invite others to call them domestic terrorists. I don't have a crystal ball, but most people here know how events can get out of hand.

The seriousness of creeping extrajudicial killings is a bad road that will erode civil control of an already out-of-control counter-terrorist industrial complex. Calling our citizens with guns "traitors" is how we take that first step.

Now that Congress has declared the US a "battleground" -- for at least five years now -- you are inviting the mass acceptance of US citizens -- however irritatingly, stupid, misguided and violent these vigilantes are -- to get be categorized along with foreign terrorists -- when all they really want is control of their land base and sovereignty under some view they connect with US founders -- this label that you advocate can take us down that path. Where will legal representatives draw the line? How will we control an already unconstitutional activity from being used against the rest of us? How will courts protect you or anyone else now that these killings are legal precedence under the laws governing "battlegrounds"?

When we go down the path of calling people traitors, we must, must take the civilian law enforcement road. This "traitor" business opens us up to crossing the line toward calling them domestic terrorists, and if we engage in any counter-terrorism against our fellow citizens -- and nationwide surveillance is battleground activity that justifies that very thing -- we lose all semblance of being civilized.

Calling them the name traitor calls for our getting lawyers, arrests, indictments and convictions. It's a slippery slope toward calling them terrorists when we call them traitors. We know this from Obama's drone strike record. You just can't ignore that context.

I don't want to have fellow citizens declared traitors until all the evidence is in. I'd rather they be apprehended, given their day in court, and have their say as defenders of what they say is wrong, and what they're defending.