The legality of execution by executive decree without due process

glenn...

The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights this morning filed a lawsuit in federal court against several Obama officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus. The suit is brought on behalf of the survivors of three American citizens killed in Yemen by the U.S. Government — killed specifically by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command — with no due process and far from any battlefield: Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan (killed together in a drone strike) and Awlaki’s teenaged son Abdulrahman (killed two weeks later).

The suit alleges that the killing of these Americans violates their Constitutional rights (including their Fifth Amendment right to due process) because “the United States was not engaged in an armed conflict with or within Yemen” and “these killings rely on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts.”

by all means, go read the rest...

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Jeremy Scahill on drone strikes: The most dangerous thing that the U.S. is doing is giving people in Yemen or Somalia, or Pakistan, a non ideological reason to hate the United States

from raw story...

Upset over President Barack Obama’s “kill list” and continued usage of drone striking throughout his administration, The Nation‘s national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill called the commander-in-chief’s actions “murderous.”

Appearing on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, Scahill argued for the justification of labeling President Obama’s decisions to authorize the strikes as “murder,” specifically the drone attack on al-Qaeda America figure Anwar Al-Awlaki’s son in Yemen in 2011 recently covered by PBS’ Frontline.

“If someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people, and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they’ve murdered those people,” Scahill said.

[...]

"When you say, ‘We’re going to bomb this area because we believe a terrorist is there,’ and you know that women and children are there, [then] the United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe women and children are there. That’s murder.”

Scahill added: “The most dangerous thing that the U.S. is doing, besides murdering innocent people in many cases, is giving people in Yemen or Somalia, or Pakistan, a non ideological reason to hate the United States, to fight the United States. Non-ideological reasons, meaning personal vendetta, is much more powerful than, ‘We hate your freedom, we hate your McDonalds, we hate your Christianity, that’s real to them.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

imagine living day-to-day never knowing when death would rain out of the sky on you or your neighbors... imagine how you'd feel if someone from your neighborhood, a friend, a colleague, a casual acquaintance or, god forbid, a member of your family was killed by a drone strike... imagine how you'd feel if you knew that person to be completely innocent, someone just like yourself going about their daily business of working, providing for his or her family, living his or her life... then imagine that happening without any recourse, without any accountability... well, i certainly can't...

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Constantly celebrating the people we kill

glenn comments on the celebratory atmosphere surrounding gadhafi's killing (and bin laden and al awlaki and al awlaki's son and al qaeda leaders and countless victims of drone attacks)...

Constantly celebrating the people we kill — dancing over their corpses — is now one of the most significant and common American rituals shaping our political culture. One of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that this mentality has become fully bipartisan. And it’s hard to see how this will change any time soon: once one goes down that road, it’s very difficult to turn around and go back. That’s true both individually and of a nation.

personally, i'd like to be celebrating a revival of a national devotion to the common good of all as so clearly described in the declaration of independence and the preamble to the constitution...

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Killing al Awlaki "legal" only if it wasn't possible to take him alive

charlie savage in the nyt...

The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.

[...]

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans deemed to pose a terrorist threat.

The Obama administration has refused to acknowledge or discuss its role in the drone strike that killed Mr. Awlaki last month and that technically remains a covert operation. The government has also resisted growing calls that it provide a detailed public explanation of why officials deemed it lawful to kill an American citizen, setting a precedent that scholars, rights activists and others say has raised concerns about the rule of law and civil liberties.

But the document that laid out the administration’s justification — a roughly 50-page memorandum by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, completed around June 2010 — was described on the condition of anonymity by people who have read it.

The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him.

The memorandum, which was written more than a year before Mr. Awlaki was killed, does not independently analyze the quality of the evidence against him.

The administration did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

of course, they don't want to comment... they'd be commenting on a crime...

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Celebrating the extrajudicial assassination of an American citizen

what's wrong with my country...?

Obama Hails Awlaki Killing

President Obama called the killing of Anwar al Awlaki “another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda.” The killing of the American-born cleric by CIA drones this morning deals a “major blow” to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, said Obama at the retirement ceremony for Navy Adm. Mike Mullen. Republicans praised the president and the killing of Awlaki, with Texas Gov. Rick Perry calling it “an important victory.” The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, condemned the killing as an illegal assassination of a U.S. citizen.

there's no doubt in my mind that if i started showing support for what al qaeda and other groups advocate in their forms of islamic terrorist extremism, i could just as easily become a target for death-by-drone as al awlaki, no matter that i'm an american citizen... i also have no doubt that if i began spouting rhetoric that called for the execution of all doctors who offered abortions, while i might subject myself to an indictment for hate speech and advocacy of violence, i would not be hunted down and killed by my own government without any benefit of due process...

how is it possible that we've run so far off the rails...?

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An American citizen is assassinated and the U.S. has now officially screwed the pooch

as soon as i saw the "breaking news" headline in my inbox, my first thought was, well, my country has now gone and screwed the pooch... i also knew that glenn would be all over it and i was right...

It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki. No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was "considering" indicting him). Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki's father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were "state secrets" and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts. He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner. When Awlaki's inclusion on President Obama's hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that "it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing."

After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.). It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its. The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world. The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.

What's most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law"), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture. It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

while i was pretty certain this was going to happen, i still never thought i'd see the day when my country could stoop to such lawlessness and outright criminality and, worse yet, to trumpet it all over the news media as something we should support our leaders for doing in our names... what a truly abominable deed...

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Due-process-free: to a collapsing Empire, security is the ONLY cognizable value

glenn...

It will never cease to amaze me how acquiescent the country is to the seizure by this President of the extremist and warped power to target American citizens, far from any battlefield, for killing, all without a shred of due process. It's not just a profound assault on due process rights but also free speech rights.

Submission to this power is, I believe, based on three factors: (1) blind faith in political leaders of the type that led Americans to accept the due-process-free punishment at Guantánamo ("my President accuses this person of being a Terrorist and therefore it's true; I don't need a trial to know it's true"); (2) acceptance of anything done to a fellow citizen as long as he has a foreign-sounding, Muslim-ish name like "Anwar al-Awlaki," who dresses in white cleric robes and is in Yemen and is thus probably guilty of something or other; and (3) the automatic and enthusiastic embrace by America's Foreign Policy Community of the use of force in response to any problem...

[...]

The government "needs to do all it can" in the name of Terrorism: even targeting its own citizens with assassination without a trial based on the mere suspicion that he's doing something criminal -- or invading other countries that haven't attacked us -- or dropping a continuous stream of missiles on people's homes who are purely innocent -- or locking people up for life without a trial. This is the sociopathic mindset of the security fetishist that dominates our political discourse -- Terrorism: the meaningless though all-justifying slogan -- and, more than anything else, this is what explains why something as radical and dangerous as the President's due-process-free assassination program aimed at American citizens triggers so little objection. "Washington needs to do all it can" -- no matter how violent and lawless -- "to reduce the risk of another attack." To a militarized, authoritarian, collapsing Empire in a posture of Endless War, security is the only cognizable value.

it's amazing to me that the house of cards is still standing...

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Odds & ends, Thursday, 6 January [UPDATE]

in the "something a tad bit different" post from a couple of days ago, i opted to begin serving up occasional interesting stuff that i run across in the course of any given day that doesn't necessarily merit a full-fledged, dedicated post... i've decided that "odds & ends" is as good a title as any for such miscellaneous links...

without further ado...

sustainability = frugality = sustainability

glenn greenwald: a u.s. citizen arrested without charge, tortured and then put on the no-fly list while traveling outside the country "underscores the rapidly expanding powers the U.S. Government and law enforcement agents within the country are seizing without a shred of due process"...

if i run across more odds and ends later, i'll update...

[UPDATE]

yesterday's post about what a truly representative deficit commission might look like is echoed by laura flanders who points out that those most affected by the issues of the day mysteriously never get to join the debate...

meanwhile, obama continues to show his true colors...

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Meanwhile, extrajudicial assassination remains OK because our leaders SAY it's OK

sad...

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit aimed at preventing the United States from targeting U.S.-born anti-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki for death.

U.S. District Judge John Bates said in a written opinion Tuesday that al-Awlaki's father does not have the authority to sue on his son's behalf. But he says the case raises serious issues about whether the United States can plan to kill one of its own citizens.

Al-Awlaki has urged Muslims to kill Americans and has been linked to several terrorist attacks, including last year's shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. He's believed to be hiding in Yemen.

Administration officials have confirmed to The Associated Press that al-Awlaki is on a capture or kill list.

but, wait...! LOOK OVER THERE...! isn't that JULIAN ASSANGE arriving at magistrate court in london...?


Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Associated Press
The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was driven into Westminster
Magistrates Court in London on Tuesday.

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Greenwald on al-Awlaki: U.S. citizens must have government permission before engaging an attorney

an appalling and blatantly unconstitutional effort by the obama administration to prevent an injunction barring the extrajudicial killing of a u.s. citizen, anwar al-awlaki...

read glenn here... it's hair-raising...

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