Buried within Glen Greenwald's text below is an important question regarding civil liberties and the factors that lead them to become minimized:
What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from
objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to
assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally
without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will
celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President’s ability to eradicate
the life of Anwar al-Awlaki — including many who just so righteously
condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and
crass for cheering Governor Perry’s execution of scores of serial
murderers and rapists: criminals who were at least given a trial and
appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.
From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s
political culture. It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic
individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate
abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due
process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even
celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.
One might object and state that these limits are necessary in order to provide security, but that is probably his larger point - and one we have discussed as we have talked about the tendency of people to give up liberty in the pursuit of freedom. Its an old story.
