Jeff Goldberg Agrees with… Glenn Greenwald? About Anwar al-Awlaki?

Anwar al-Awlaki | <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anwar_al-Awlaki_sitting_on_couch,_lightened.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


When Jeffrey Goldberg, who calls himself a “warmongering neocon hawk,” told me that he was “sympathetic to the purity of [Glenn] Greenwald’s position” on Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen and Al Qaeda propagandist whom the Obama administration has decided to kill, I thought an intriguing convergence had been revealed.

I had called Goldberg, the prolific Atlantic reporter and blogger, on Tuesday afternoon to talk about airport security (his recent piece on the subject is a hilarious must-read). But somewhere along the way, we got side-tracked into a broader discussion about civil liberties. During our chat, Goldberg seemed to agree with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and die-hard civil libertarian/Salon blogger/relentless Goldberg critic Glenn Greenwald: the US government ought not to kill al-Awlaki without due process. 

Goldberg launched the discussion of al-Awlaki’s fate by telling me he was surprised there wasn’t more public debate over the Obama administration’s stance. “It’s amazing to me,” he said. “You’re telling me that the President can decide to go kill an American without judicial or congressional oversight?” There’s a “continuum,” Goldberg said, between the al-Awlaki case and another pet peeve—that the “government has decided it’s going to grope the genitals of American citizens.” Here are my edited notes on the rest of Goldberg’s comments on the subject:

This is tremendous power. This is the government accruing more and more and more power. I just think you’re dealing with a principle that’s completely divorced from grossness of who Anwar al-Awlaki is [how reprehensible and unsympathetic he is, etc], which is that he has American citizenship and the President has decided to kill an American. I would like an open discussion [about that.] That is an incredible power grab. Put aside who [al-Awlaki] is and where he lives: the man is an American citizen and [the President] has taken upon himself to say I’m going to go and [kill] an American citizen. It’s certainly heavier than “I’m going to allow the government to grope the genitals of American citizens”…. 

I don’t think enough proof has been presented that [al-Awlaki] is an actual operator of terrorist cells, that he’s actually directing the actual murder of others. I think he’s fundamentally functioning as a propagandist….

The Israelis have never conducted an assassination against an Israeli citizen…. It would be interesting to look at what the Israel Supreme Court might say about the Prime Minister-directed killing of someone considered to be a terrorist, an Israeli citizen. I have a feeling, maybe i’m crazy, that there might be a more active judicial debate and Knesset debate on that than we have here.

Once you cross this bridge…. no matter who he is or what he’s said you have a situation where the American government is pursuing the assassination of American citizen.

I’m sympathetic to the purity of [Glenn] Greenwald’s position on this. How is it the government can make a decision without oversight that it’s going to seek the drone assassination of an American citizen…..

As hawkish as i am I’m just not comfortable [with this]. I don’t want to be represented by a government that without judicial and congressional oversight and the benefit of courts decides to assassinate an american citizen. What I’m saying is I’d like to see more evidence…. I do see it as a continuum…. get the government out of my pants, keep the government from killing American citizens without judicial proceedings.

Goldberg has yet to write about this subject on his blog. But interestingly, his position seems to clash with that of Andrew Sullivan, his fellow blogger and Atlantic colleague. Sullivan doesn’t seem to have many serious qualms about the government killing al-Awlaki. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate