When Can the President Assassinate Americans?

By Daniel McCarthy 
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January 03, 2011 "American Conservative" -- The New York Times puts this question to the GOP contenders. Sophistry ensues. “Under what circumstances, if any, would the Constitution permit the president to authorize the targeted killing of a United States citizen who has not been sentenced to death by a court,” the paper asks. Gingrich, Huntsman, Perry, and Romney take the same line: “Under wartime circumstances” says Newt; “If such an individual is engaged on a battlefield,” says Huntsman; “Due process permits the use of deadly force against all enemy combatants, including citizens,” Romney avers; and “The President would be so authorized … where a citizen has joined or is associated with a nation or group engaged in hostilities against the United States” according to Perry. Only Ron Paul describes the conditions in which extrajudicial targeted killing of Americans is permitted as “none.”

The others engage in Orwellian obfuscation, claiming that “battlefield” circumstances permit this — as if the situation the Times is asking about is one in which some American terrorist is shooting away at U.S. troops in combat or about to detonate a bomb on American soil. But that isn’t “targeted” killing. The practice Huntsman, Gingrich, Romney, and Perry — and President Obama — defend includes the assassination of Americans who are, in Perry’s words, only “associated with a nation or group engaged in hostilities.” In fact, the power claimed by these men goes far beyond that since, again, this is extrajudicial killing, in which there is no obligation for the executive to provide evidence to a judge or anyone else that the murdered man is guilty of what Uncle Sam accuses him of.

Stripped of the evasions, what they are saying is that you or anyone else can be killed if the president thinks — or claims to think — that you are “associated” with “a nation or group” that is engaged in hostilities with the United States. Janet Reno would approve. This doctrine would have saved her some crocodile tears over the slaughter of the Branch Davidians at Waco. Even the unarmed women and children there, after all, were “associated” with a group engaged in hostilities with the United States.

Needless to say, there are Americans who join extremist groups, but existing law-enforcement powers and military doctrines already permit killing them when they are actually engaged in acts of deadly violence. The Republicans’ invocations of a “battlefield” might sound reassuring, until you realize that the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act, according to two of its supporters, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), designates even the U.S. itself as a battlefield. The whole world is one.

I have trouble taking these claims to more-than-royal power seriously; more precisely, I have trouble ascribing good faith to the intellectuals who try to justify an omnipotent presidency. But it’s a nominally free country, so let them have their say, in elections as well as op-ed pages and the corridors of our think tanks and universities. It seems to me, though, that we ought to hear from those who believe in a limited and law-bound executive as well. Ron Paul shouldn’t be alone in this. The public needs to know what’s at stake here and just how few political leaders think there should be any restraints at all on the power of the president to kill.

Copyright © 2008 The American Conservative

What You Need to Know about the NDAA

‘Extraordinary Rendition’: Scott Horton | Common Dreams

Scott Horton, a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, explains a startling section within the National Defense Authorization Act. Although President Obama previously signed an executive order shutting down the Bush-era practice of “extraordinary rendition,” section 1031 of the NDAA – which already allows for permanent detention of American citizens — seems to provide Obama a loophole to revive the tactic.

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© 2011 Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Obama Signs NDAA Martial Law

While Americans shopped, the Constitution was shredded [Video Mirror] President Barack Obama faced a civil liberties backlash today after he signed a law that will allow terror suspects to be held indefinitely- even raising the prospects of U.S. citizens being sent to Guantanamo Bay.

The controversial move, revealed last night, effectively extends the laws of the battlefield to American soil.

The move shows a clear hardening of Mr Obama’s anti-terror policies, and a major shift from the liberal stance that helped him sweep into power three years ago.

After campaigning heavily on the need to close the controversial terrorist detention base at Guantanamo Bay, he failed to deliver when met with legal obstacles.

Now, showing that he has truly moved to the opposite end of the spectrum, he is endorsing the tools and civil powers that he once rallied against.

'It's something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,' said Human Rights Watch spokesman Tom Malinowski.

It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent,' Mr Malinowski continued.

Considering he is now in the midst of running for re-election, comparisons between Mr Obama and Mr Bush are certainly not something the President wants going into the 2012 race.

Civil rights groups are outraged after he dropped the threat of a veto Wednesday, meaning the bill will become a law and implement several controversial provisions, like the ability to keep all terror suspects imprisoned.

Read more here.

S 1867: Killing The Bill of Rights and Declaring War on Americans

S 1867: Killing The Bill of Rights and Declaring War on Americans - By Tim Gatto

[REPRINT]
03 December, 2011
Countercurrents.org

This is an article that I MUST write about. If I don't write this article than I have no right to ever write another. The reason is because the most despicable and damaging piece of legislation ever passed was passed in the Senate late last night without hardly a whimper in the morning from the American mainstream press. Under the cover of darkness, the United States Senate virtually declared war on the people of this nation by passing the darkest piece of legislation ever passed in America.

If the House of Representatives passes its version and the President then puts his signature on it and turning it into law, almost every right under the Bill of Rights will be stripped away from the people of the United States. This will be the final nail in the coffin of democracy in America. We will become a military police state and cease to be a democracy or a representative republic or whatever else it has been called. According to the definition under this amendment to the military appropriations bill, the nation will become a part of a world-wide “battle zone”.” If this is signed into law, it will shred the remaining tenants of the Bill of Rights and unleash upon America a total military dictatorship, complete with secret arrests, secret prisons, unlawful interrogations and indefinite detainment without people ever being charged with a crime. It will cause the torture of Americans and even the "legitimate assassination" of U.S. citizens overseas and also right here on American soil!

If you have not yet woken up to the reality of this looming police state we've been morphing into, the police state that so many have warning about, I sincerely hope that most of you realize that we are fast running out of time. Once this becomes law, you will be living in a different kind of America, one that no longer guarantees certain inalienable rights. Americans will have no rights whatsoever in America -- no due process, no First Amendment speech rights, no right to remain silent or to be tried by a jury of your peers. You will only have the right to a military tribunal with a military judge and a military lawyer. In other words, Americans will be afforded the same rights as an enemy combatant in the “battlefield” of America.

Some of you may be wondering why you haven't been told about this by the major news networks? That is a legitimate question. The information about this bill, S.1867, is conflicting. According to “Wired”:

“Here's the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year's defense bill: They don't force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is poised to pass its bill as early as tonight. There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects”.

The language of the bill is ambiguous. Also from “Wired” “ So despite the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it's pretty likely to pass.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus both say that they are opposed to the bill. Why then is it being written into the Defense Budget that is very likely to pass? Who is behind this most brazen attack on the rights of Americans in history? Senator Carl Levin is the architect of this bill but the two men that are really behind this savaging of American's basic rights are Senators John McCain and Senator Lindsay Graham along with Joe Liebermann according to InfoWar's Alex Jones. Levin defends the bill by claiming that “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.” Still, while the bill would not force the government to try American citizens by military tribunal, it nevertheless would allow them to do so.

Civil libertarians aren't so sure. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said it “denigrates the very foundations of this country.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added, “it puts every single American citizen at risk.”

timgatto@hotmail.com
Read Tim's novel "Kimchee Days" and his political Book "Complicity to Contempt" from Oliver Arts and Open Press.

[Video] Battlefield America

Battlefield America: US Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Senate Defense Bill



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