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Leaked: Obama's Rules For Assassinating American Citizens
cathyreisenwitz writes "For over a year now journalists, civil liberties advocates, and members of Congress have been asking the Obama administration to release internal memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel justifying Obama's targeted killing program. While the White House continues to deny that such memos exist, NBC is reporting that it has acquired the next best thing: A secretish 16-page white paper from the Department of Justice that was provided to select members of the Senate last June." Spencer Ackerman at Wired says the leaked rules "[trump] traditional Constitutional protections American citizens enjoy from being killed by their government without due process" by redefining the concept of "imminence."
I care. It's why, among so many other reasons, I voted for Johnson. Obama and Bush have both committed impeachable offenses that absolutely dwarf Clinton's perjury. Throw in the stupidity of the Reagan/Bush years, and you've got to go back to Carter to find an honest president. And he was incompetent. It's a tough job to do with integrity and principle. And honestly, I would never ever want to be president.
We are all ignorant, that's for sure. Perhaps if the US government had given US citizens due process, as required by the Constitution, then we would know what Abdulrahman was doing over there, and whether he was an enemy combatant.
And, even if Abdulrahman were taking up arms against the US [citation needed], and even if he weren't a US citizen, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, article 37, limits the punishment of anyone under the age of 18, specifically excluding capital punishment of the type that was meted out to Abdulrahman.
Due process is an amazing thing. You see, the government isn't always right. Sometimes they accuse the wrong person. Certainly the man who launched the "Amerithrax" attack on America is an evil terrorist who deserves no rights, correct? Lucky for Dr. Steven Hatfill, we still had due process back then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill
Or how about the guy who bombed some trains in Madrid in 2004? They found his fingerprints on the bag containing the bombs. Open and shut case, right? Well, lucky for Mr. Brandon Mayfield, we still had due process back then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield
And those are just US citizens! If we expand the scope of government fuckups to include foreign nationals, the list gets much bigger, much faster. Off the top of my head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakhdar_Boumediene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murat_Kurnaz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Anvar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Tourson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Helil_Mamut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huzaifa_Parhat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emam_Abdulahat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalal_Jalaladin
All were alleged terrorists. They weren't delivering pizza (Boumediene in particular was a member of the Red Crescent, which is a lot like our Red Cross), but all were eventually proven innocent of being terrorists.
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