“For the record, I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen — with a drone, or with a shotgun — without due process, nor should any President deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.”

In saying this during his speech yesterday at the National Defense University, Barack Obama was following the lead of his political mentor, George W Bush. Which is to say: in anticipation of the possibility that either president might at some point in the future face prosecution for crimes such as murder or torture, each has wanted to present himself as having acted in good faith while following the advice of their legal counselors.

Obama is treating “due process” as a term that can be applied in whatever novel way his administration determines it can be used. His idea of due process amounts to nothing more than a process of review, yet in the US legal system it has quite specific elements — none more important than the principle that someone accused of a crime is entitled to a defense.

Who served as Anwar Awlaki’s defense counsel before Obama decided to execute him? He had no defense. He had no due process.

In his speech, Obama made a string of accusations about Awlaki and presented them all as though they were indisputable facts. Where’s the evidence? And why should the evidence be regarded as credible if no one reviewed it other than Awlaki’s de facto prosecutors?

A New York Times editorial said: “The acknowledgment of the killing of Mr. Awlaki in 2011, and, more important, the supplying of compelling evidence that he was organizing terrorist attacks and not just preaching jihad on the Internet, was a much-needed step.”

Have the editorial writers seen this “compelling evidence” or are they, like many other journalists, making no distinction between references to evidence unseen, and the evidence itself. In other words, are they accepting the president’s word on blind faith?

Obama says he’s declassified this action, yet the documentation will most likely remain heavily redacted and the declassification thus amount to nothing more than a PR exercise.

[B]efore any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set.

Now, this last point is critical, because much of the criticism about drone strikes — both here at home and abroad — understandably centers on reports of civilian casualties. There’s a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties and nongovernmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in every war. And for the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred throughout conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In June 2011, when John Brennan — at that time Obama’s chief counter terrorism adviser — said that for ‘almost a year’ no civilian had been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan, he didn’t sound like a man haunted by civilian casualties; he sounded like a government official who believed he could lie with impunity. His ability to tell straight-faced lies is perhaps what made Obama think that Brennan was best qualified to become the head of the CIA.

An editorial in The Guardian says:

The speech is an attempt to invite the final curtain down on a calamitous and bloody decade-and-a-half of warfare. But the battles themselves will continue, and Mr Obama has not resiled from the past. He has largely tried to justify it.

Mr Obama’s second attempt to shut Guantánamo Bay is also studded with ifs and buts, particularly his call on Congress to allow the transfer of some of the detainees to a site in the US. Much though the words are welcome, this commander in chief’s actions will never match the expectations that he, as president, arouses in his speeches. He will restrict drones, but targeted killings are here to stay.

In the fifth year of his presidency, we should be well past the point where we naively entertain the hope that any speech Obama delivers might represent a “momentous turning point” (as the New York Times dubbed yesterday’s speech).

If Bush was the reckless “decider,” Obama can be seen as the dispassionate “observer” — the man whose speeches persist in sounding like a wishlist of the things he would do if he was president.

In South East London yesterday, when Ingrid Loyau-Kennett approached Michael Adebolajo who in his blood-drenched hands held a knife and a meat cleaver after having just murdered a British soldier, she displayed exceptional courage. But she also showed there is an alternative to trying to crush violence with greater violence: diffuse the violence by creating a space within which anger can be translated into words.

Behind most acts of political violence there are statements that the perpetrators imagine can be heard by no other means. Sometimes, all that de-escalation requires is simply to listen to whatever they have to say.

Politicians and some security experts often argue that to listen to terrorists is to capitulate to terrorism — that it is akin to being manipulated by a child’s tantrum and will “reward” terrorism.

The opposite — that refusing to listen, merely closes off alternatives to violence — can just as persuasively argued.

Indeed counter-terrorism seems as much as anything to be driven by its own counterproductive emotional logic. Terrorism emasculates the powers of the state. It makes those who struggle to prevent such violence appear impotent and thus provokes what in some ways are ritualistic displays of counter-violence.

In these displays, paradoxically, the power of the enemy has to be simultaneously inflated and thwarted. Events that are in many ways isolated and involve tiny numbers of people, get woven together into a global phenomenon: the multi-headed hydra of terrorism.

A small bomb goes off in Boston or a man is brutally cut down in London, and governments respond as though the first shot had been fired in the run up to an invasion. The more the threat is inflated, the easier it becomes to justify what objectively often constitutes a massive over-reaction.

Terrorism is political and psychological and requires a political and psychological response — a response that reflects a realistic assessment of the actual magnitude and diverse nature of the threat and a recognition that those who choose to speak with violence generally regard such violence as a means to an end.

Even if their methods have no moral justification, the issues that trigger acts of terrorism will retain the power to inspire further bloodshed for as long as governments insist that security alone must be their preeminent concern.

As Ingrid Loyau-Kennett demonstrated, there are times when it actually requires more courage to listen than it does to fight back.

Clyde Haberman, a columnist for the New York Times, seems to have more interest in telling readers what he ate for lunch, than in attempting to imagine or convey what it might be like to be force-fed — even when the ongoing hunger strike at Guantánamo features prominently in his most recent piece.

Maybe he felt like there was some delicious irony in having a conversation about America’s political prisoners — who having been offered no due process are now driven to the ultimate act of desperation — while enjoying a meal at a trendy Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village.

Haberman had invited Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s law school, for lunch at Morandi.

Ms. Greenberg, who said she was but an occasional visitor to the restaurant, selected the insalata di farro, or spelt salad. Her tablemate had cavatappi alla Norma, a corkscrew-shaped pasta with tomatoes, roasted eggplant and mozzarella. The main event lay ahead, though. “I only eat so that I can have dessert,” said Ms. Greenberg, a slender woman of 57. She chose the torta di ricotta with sliced strawberries, which she happily shared over coffees.

Are these the observations of a journalist who offers a richer view of the world by tossing in seemingly accidental details that add color to his reporting, or someone so steeped in the Times’ genteel culture that he hasn’t a clue when he’s portraying himself as an asshole? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

Turning to the topic at hand — the ability of America’s legal system to meet the challenge from terrorism — we learn:

Ms. Greenberg (who is not a lawyer) sides with President Obama and others who believe that by holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantánamo, this country has, as she put it, “turned its legal premises upside down.” To be practical about it, she notes that 509 terror-related cases have been settled in federal courts since Sept. 11, 2001, with a conviction rate of 89 percent, while military commissions have produced a mere seven convictions.

“Yes, I understand that self-defense is an extremely important issue,” she said. “But self-defense with a measure of wisdom would be a lot better than self-defense that screams fear and a lack of confidence in your ability to keep yourself safe.”

Her vexation extends to fearful politicians, the ones who recoiled at the Obama administration’s original plan to hold a trial in Lower Manhattan — in the shadow of the vanished towers, as it were — for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. They ignored how New York has had many terrorism trials, sometimes several at once. Throughout, the city barely blinked.

“We can take in an awful lot,” Ms. Greenberg said. “New Yorkers are tough. They’re savvy. And so are New York juries.”

There is a disquieting question that one always hesitates to ask. But it found its way unavoidably into the discussion: How is it that we have dodged suicide attacks on seemingly soft targets? A New York bus, for instance. Or, say, a supermarket, in another part of the country.

Vigilant law enforcement is a factor, Ms. Greenberg said, but something else is at work: Killing other people, not to mention oneself, is “hard to do, and hard to want to do, and hard to want to go through with it.” For the most part, she said, “human beings are constructed to stay on this side of civilized society.”

As for striking an out-of-the-way target, “it’s not really Al Qaeda’s message that you’re not safe anywhere,” she said. “Al Qaeda’s message is, ‘The United States needs to be taught a lesson.’ It’s very much focused on New York. Mayor Bloomberg’s right when he says every terrorist has a map of New York City in their pocket. It’s about the spectacle.”

In the counter-terrorism narrative with which Americans have been indoctrinated for over a decade, a massive security apparatus has been constructed which tirelessly thwarts threats, seemingly coming from every direction. The absence of another 9/11 scale attack has led many of America’s leaders to claim or accept credit for qualified success in “keeping America safe.”

Absent their efforts, had there been no war on terrorism, no massive expansion of intelligence agencies, and no hyper-focusing on asymmetric threats, could America have survived? Would its imperial power have suffered a fatal blow? I think not — and I’m reminded of a scene from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall:

Have you ever swerved out of the way as an oncoming driver who seemed intent on causing a suicidal head-on collision? No? Me neither. But it’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to imagine. And that’s what the imagination does: conjures up a million and one possibilities of events that rarely or never happen.

There are all sorts of things that are possible, but which we should never allow to govern our lives. More Americans get killed by lightening than killed by terrorism, yet that risk has not prompted an effort to protect this country with a lightening-proof dome.

So why has the terrorism threat been such an easy sell?

Rarely fatal lightening strikes, much more commonly deadly tornadoes, devastating hurricanes, and occasional earthquakes are all viewed as dangers that Americans will always face. But terrorism is the great other which taps into this nation’s pervasive xenophobia and fosters a sense of America’s inner light by placing darkness on the outside. Terrorism makes Americans feel good as they tell themselves the greatest forces of evil all emanate from elsewhere.

Keep fear on a slow simmer and then we can all be reassured that our money’s being well spent, keeping us safe.