Democracy in Decline: Targeting Citizens and Silencing Dissent

Let's play a game: I'm thinking of a country. This is a country that curbs political dissent by banning opposition figures from speaking in public. A country that prevents healthy debate over its policies by expelling preeminent academics from teaching at its universities. A country that detains prisoners indefinitely, without ever having been convicted of a crime. And a country that gives its president the unchecked authority to authorize the assassination of its own citizens.

Any guesses? No, I'm not referring to one of the world's notoriously authoritarian regimes or military dictatorships — North Korea, Burma, or Sudan, just to name a few. A far cry from the streets of Tehran or Beijing, I'm talking about the United States of America, where the Obama administration has newly approved the targeted murder of Anwar al-Awlaki, the infamous American citizen who allegedly spurred on the Fort Hood massacre and attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack by preaching extremism in Yemen.

Let's rewind a bit. Last week, I had the fortunate opportunity to attend a monumental panel-discussion held at the Cooper Union in New York City featuring the distinguished Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan. For those of you not familiar with his remarkable story, Ramadan, an Oxford university professor and well-respected scholar on the topic of Islam and the West, had accepted a job to become a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame in 2004, but nine days before he was set to arrive, the Bush administration revoked his visa on the grounds that he had provided support to terrorist groups. Ramadan had, indeed, given money for several years to a Swiss-based charity that was later categorized by the Treasury Department as a terrorist organization, but the group had such tenuous ties to actual terrorist activity that most people recognized that Ramadan was really being excluded due to his critical views of American policy in the Middle East.

The ACLU, along with the American Association of University Professors, the American Academy of Religions and the PEN American Center, joined forces to challenge the exclusion in court, arguing that such a form of politically-motivated censorship was illegal under the U.S. Constitution. Six years and a painstaking lawsuit later, Ramadan finally reappeared in the country last week, for his first public appearance in America in six years.

That Ramadan was finally permitted to speak in America is a testament to how much has changed since the Obama administration took office in January 2009. Banning scholars from expressing their critical views in public directly undermines the nature and quality of American democracy, and the Bush administration too often — just see the example of another noted professor, South African scholar Adam Habib — used the justification of national security to squash opposition to its foreign policy. The decision to once again grant Ramadan a travel visa to return to the country was apparently made by Secretary Hilary Clinton herself, suggesting that we've come a long way from our darker past.

Or have we? Encouraging as Ramadan's case may be, as I sat in the audience listening to him recount his personal story and thank the Obama State Department for coming down on the side of justice, I couldn't help but note the glaring irony that just as the Obama administration had made the decision to allow Ramadan to once again enter the U.S., it also had announced its new policy legalizing the unchecked presidential assassination — that's right, assassination — of American citizens abroad. Or the that President Obama had just months before announced its intention to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely, without having been proven to commit a crime.

It's one thing to prevent critical ideas from being expressed in public. It's wholly another to either murder or imprison people without end for holding these ideas. Obama's policy of utilizing target killings to silence a vocal critic of America — not a proven terrorist, but an imam and a U.S. citizen, who has preached anti-American sentiment — is outright shocking, even more offensive than any of the gross violations of our constitutional freedoms from the Bush era. In an era of supposed openness and accountability, a time when rights and civil liberties are supposedly to be restored in the fight against terrorism, Obama's decision to grant himself the unchecked authority to place American citizens on a CIA hit-list for eventual assassination is extremely difficult to swallow.

To my dismay, liberals have been almost silent in their opposition, deferential to the president and unwilling to break rank to challenge this misuse of executive authority (with few rare exceptions). After eight years of vociferously opposing the Bush administration's policies of utilizing warrantless wiretapping and detaining American citizens without due process, liberals — as Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out — have now gone mum, despite the fact that Obama's initiative is even more extreme than any of Bush's positions.

That silence must be broken. Let Ramadan's example serve as a powerful reminder of the importance of challenging the government, looking beyond the rhetoric of terrorism and national security, and standing up for free speech and our constitutional rights. Democracy rests on the underlying principle that all citizens should have the right to express their opinions, regardless of whether or not they agree with the government. The idea that under the threat of violent extremism, we can imprison or kill our own citizens for what they are saying — and not for a crime they've actually committed — must be rejected outright.

The extent to which we tolerate critical dialogue over our policies and permit political dissent is an important measure of our character as a nation. Even if you did vote for him, don't let the Obama administration set a dangerous precedent that undermines our constitution in the face of terrorism and sets our democracy in a tailspin of decline.

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