Debating assassinations on "Real Time"

Should a President have the power to secretly target citizens for execution without charges?

Published March 24, 2012 2:25PM (EDT)

I was on Real Time with Bill Maher last night and the most contentious debate occurred over the claimed power of the Obama administration to target American citizens for assassination without due process, as it did with Anwar Awlaki. Below is the clip of that discussion. One irony is that it was preceded by a discussion of hate crimes prosecutions (in the context of the Trayvon Martin and Tyler Clementi cases) in which both Maher and Andrew Sullivan insisted that Americans have the inviolable right to express even the most hateful and repellent opinions without being punished for it by the state, yet were both supportive of the Awlaki killing, an act grounded overwhelmingly if not exclusively in the U.S. government's hatred and fear of his political speech. The discussion also included Brown University's Wendy Schiller:

[The video can be seen here, at the bottom of the page]


By Glenn Greenwald

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