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Title: Court: US Can’t Keep Secret Laws Governing When It Can Assassinate Citizens
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URL Source: http://antiwar.com/blog/2014/04/22/ ... n-it-can-assassinate-citizens/
Published: Apr 26, 2014
Author: John Glaser
Post Date: 2014-04-26 06:48:24 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 151
Comments: 6
“…it would be good to know under what circumstances the White House thinks it can kill Americans without a trial.” If Rip Van Winkle awoke just yesterday, he might be dumbfounded at the above sentence. To Americans in the Obama-era, it is an all too relatable assertion. The sentence comes from The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson and she is referring to the court decision this week that ordered the Obama administration to release the legal memo that authorized targeting an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, for assassination. In it’s decision, the court made clear that this does “not challenge the lawfulness of drone attacks or targeted killings.” Instead, as Davidson sardonically puts it, the decision establishes that, “We get to know what the law is.” The case is important, first, because it would be good to know under what circumstances the White House thinks it can kill Americans without a trial. More than that, the decision turns on what has become, especially after Edward Snowden’s leak of N.S.A. documents, the crucial point in the debate over civil liberties and security: the government gets to have secrets, but it doesn’t get to have secret laws. …More than a year after the Awlakis were killed—and after a lower-court judge upheld the government’s denial of the F.O.I.A. request for the memo—Michael Isikoff, of NBC, obtained a Department of Justice white paper on targeted killings. This was a sort of Cliff’s Notes for the secret O.L.C. memo, sixteen pages long and deeply unsatisfying. It used words like “imminent threat” in ways that were jarringly vague. On its own, the white paper suggested that the President could decide that an American living abroad was frightening, and that would be enough for a death sentence—it would count as due process if the President duly processed the question in his own mind, taking time to think it through. …We get to know what the law is. The most important single revelation in the Snowden papers has been that, too often, we did not. There were secret surveillance-court decisions that interpreted statutes in ways that defied the plain meaning of English words like “collected” and “targeted.” Targeted listening, targeted killing—we need to know, when the government talks and directs and justifies, just what it thinks it is saying. As I wrote in The American Conservative last year, the Obama administration has excelled in “vastly increasing the government’s use of secret laws and secret interpretations of known laws.” To the extent that this court decision puts a check on that dangerous expansion of power (the government may still appeal), this decision is a success. With any luck, the decision will put pressure on the administration to reign in its drone war in general. As Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center told Congress last year, “When a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 6.
#1. To: Ada, X-15, scrapper2, Lod, christine, X-15, Give Me Liberty, randge, noone222, James Deffenbach, Cynicom, Jethro Tull, Prefrontal Vortex (#0)
(Edited)
The problem rests with modern ethics-legal, medical, corporate ethics. Those in positions of responsibility were once held to a higher moral standard where wrongful acts applied to both adversaries, both political parties and both the prosecution and the defense in criminal trials for instance. Then came situational ethics, which offers a water slide escape for important save asses who have the power to rub out their tormentors. Simply stated, ethics is (are?) now PASS/FAIL. Politicians and lawyers (and lawyer politicians) who slip the noose (like Clinton) are not only "not guilty", but they're as innocent as newborn babes! (It's her word against his no matter how many hers there were) So, the absence of compelling evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt and a moral certainty" means that a failed impeachment and/or prosecution shouldn't ever be mentioned in polite company...or a political campaign again. And a president is presumed to be within the law since the Nixon Doctrine was heaved up. Specifically, if I can be certain that my successor will offer blanket immunity for any crimes that "may have taken place without my knowledge of course" then I can unknowingly preside over the deaths of anyone I damn well please and you rubes can't dew jack dooky about it! Is this a great country or, what? And, since there is no polite way to kill an "imminent threat", who's to say that a drone attack on a child's birthday party is worse than an icepick in the ear? (collateral damage of innocent kids and parents? Doesn't count. See Situational ethics 101) _________________________________________________________________________ The hunt for the ugliest and scariest terrorist embigguns even the littlest man. It's no different than catching the record Atlantic Halibut: "7 June 2006 The largest* Atlantic Halibut, Hippoglossus hippoglossus, ever recorded was caught and landed by professional net fisherman Rolf Larsen (62 years old), at Stamsund, Lofoten, Norway (within the Arctic Circle but with seas warmed by the Gulf Stream). This massive fish weighed 282 kg (621.7 lbs) and would have probably weighed 290 kg (639.3 lbs) when first caught. The difference was because of the loss of blood after capture. Its total length was 262 cm. The fish was sold for display." (And if the fish was blowed to pieces wif a drone then you can claim any weight or prior terrorist history you like!)
Ask the people of Dresden after July 1945 when the RAF and the USAAF delivered 3,900 tons of bombs to their address, including incendiaries, for being German. Babies. Mothers. Teens. Animals. Birds. You name it: they were on "the list" made up for no good reason, without review. And there were hundreds of other cases just as heinous and useless. "When a buffalo hunter snaps a cap..." --from a song about Ruby Ridge.
As you know some who worked feverishly to develop the bomb so it could be needlessly dropped on Aryans were vigorously opposed to needlessly dropping it on Japan which by then was effectively defeated by the naval blockade and control of the island stepping stones. No, The Manhattan Project was completed because of a "special hatred" of Germany, and there was no such thing as an innocent German non combatant. As it turned out, what conventional weapons failed to complete was systematically executed with bayonets, bullets, starvation and disease. (The post war genocide of German POWs, civilian and military alike isn't spoken of in polite company, or at cotillions or diplomatic barn dances. It's in the same closed folder as the attack on the USS Liberty)
The biggest irony in this "special German hatred?" European Americans and British were all so genetically similar to their "enemies" in Germany that there really wasn't a significant difference. This was a special trick to persuade Anglo-Saxon Americans that they weren't "Germanic." Gullible lunks.
There are no replies to Comment # 6. End Trace Mode for Comment # 6.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestAs Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center told Congress last year, “When a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”
#3. To: HOUNDDAWG, ada, lod (#1)
(Edited)
#5. To: Deasy (#3)
Ask the people of Dresden after July 1945 when the RAF and the USAAF delivered 3,900 tons of bombs to their address, including incendiaries, for being German. Babies. Mothers. Teens. Animals. Birds. You name it: they were on "the list" made up for no good reason, without review. And there were hundreds of other cases just as heinous and useless.
#6. To: HOUNDDAWG (#5)
Replies to Comment # 6.