Obama continues to allow the Bush policy of extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens [UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald]

it's a disgrace, not to mention a clear violation of any notion of human rights, legal process and the united states constitution that this is happening without challenge...

marcy wheeler comments on dana priest's washington post article from yesterday...

[S]omewhere there’s a list of Americans who, the President has determined, can be killed with no due process.

she's referring to this from dana priest's article...

As part of the operations [in Yemen], Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said.

[...]

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,” said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.

marcy tracks this stuff diligently and we're all indebted to her for her tireless work... for her part, dana priest has been on the investigative and reportorial forefront of much of this ugly scene, from cia black sites to extraordinary rendition... it's all unconscionable and illegal but the thought that our government can decide on its own to issue orders to kill american citizens simply confirms that the u.s. is galloping rapidly down the trail to the kinds of tactics favored by dictators from stalin to pinochet...

[UPDATE]

glenn, as usual, shares his most articulate outrage...

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That's just the essence of war. That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we're talking about here. The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death. What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist. Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against them, and thus ordered them released. That includes scores of detainees held while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained at the camp.

[...]

[W]hat legal basis exists for the President to unilaterally compile hit lists of American citizens he wants to be killed?

there is only one answer to that question - none...

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School of the Americas

i'm just tossing out this video clip as a reminder of my country's sordid history in fomenting torture, violence, death and destruction... i've had a number of posts (see here) on the horrors this kind of influence from the u.s. unleashed in latin america via operation condor, argentina's guerra sucia (dirty war), in chile via pinochet, and much more...

youtube via information clearing house...

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A lesson from Chile on how democracy, accountability and the rule of law is DONE

nothing like being severely shown up by a latin american country that the bush administration barely acknowledges exists...

Early on the morning of Thursday 4 October 2007, Chileans awoke to the stunning news that the investigative judge Carlos Cerda had delivered a damning resolution on the case of the embezzlement of public funds by the late dictator Augusto Pinochet and his cohorts. A week after the Chilean supreme court had authorised the reopening of Cerda's enquiry, he issued twenty-four arrest warrants for members of Pinochet's immediate family and associates.

Cerda's investigation has built on the United States Senate enquiry of 2004 that unearthed multi-million-dollar accounts in Pinochet's name in the Riggs bank in Miami. The final report shows how, over thirty-one years, Pinochet and his henchmen systematically siphoned off millions from Chilean army reserve funds; used false passports to open foreign bank accounts; earned huge kickbacks in international arms deals; set up ghost companies and purchased a string of luxury properties. It concluded that after the family fortune was totalled up, there was $20,199,753.03 that couldn't be "reasonably accounted for".

By mid-afternoon, the entire Pinochet family, six retired generals, two serving colonels, the ex-dictator's lawyer and eight other members of his inner circle were in police custody. Predictably, the general's 83-year-old widow, Lucia Hiriart, had an attack of hypertension and was whisked to the secretive military hospital where her late husband so often took sanctuary.

Then came the indignation. "This is indescribable political persecution", Pinochet's daughter-in-law, Maria Soledad Olave, screamed at reporters. "Don Augusto is dead; let's leave the hate and vengeance behind." Meanwhile Lucia Hiriart's lawyer denounced "an illegal abusive resolution that violates the most essential of a person's fundamental rights".

But unlike political detainees during Pinochet's 1973-90 reign of terror, those accused of crime in Chile today do have rights; within twenty-four hours Judge Cerda had unexpectedly granted bail to all his prisoners. "Everyone has a right to liberty during their trail", he explained, adding that no reason existed to keep them in preventative custody and as "I shall shortly be leaving the country, I have decided to give them their liberty myself".

folks, THIS is how a REAL democracy operates, with REAL accountability, REAL justice, REAL rights for the accused, and REAL compassion...

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