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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."
Governments involved in clandestine assassinations. Who would have thought? And of course, it only happens in other countries, to Al Qaeda and the like. Surely. Oh, and if you believe this, I have a bridge or two I can sell you....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I'd like to think that this is going to change or this leak will help but I've pretty much given up on that.
Most people don't care and even if they did, they couldn't do anything. AND if they got to a position to do something I think they would become an imminent threat.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This calls for Impeachment and trial of everyone involved. It will not happen of course, because murder is not as big a deal as getting a blowjob from an intern.
Then they have declared they can do whatever they want. If the standard is they just "determine" who is a member of al queda and whether there is some vague emminant danger, the big question is, who, either before or after the fact, has standing to question these determinations?
If there is nobody who can bring this to court, and no way to have oversight, then this is nothing more than a declaration that Due Process is optional in their eyes and they can suspend it whenever they determine they have the need.... because assasination is de facto denial of due process.
These standards should be considered criminally negligent.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Which party exactly is the party of limited government and civil liberties? It sure isn't the Democrats or the Republicans, and it sure isn't the Libertarians either as they are now thoroughly politicized.
There's one-party rule in the United States, and it comes in two subtly different flavors. No matter who you vote for, you're ultimately voting for the Banks, the Healthcare industry, the Military Industrial Complex and a few unions thrown in to make it all look fair.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
1. The person who leaked this memo.
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Have gnu, will travel.
1. When someone makes a comment supporting MicroSoft.
2. When someone makes a comment bashing Apple.
3. When someone responds to their own post.
4. When someone screws up tags>br.
5. When someone suggests Cowboy Neal as an option in Slashdot polls.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
This doesn't surprise me considering how far removed the US government is from understanding her primary function - to protect her own citizens. What's to stop them from declaring a leader of a political movement as dangerous, having “recently” been involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack - for example, declaring that the government has no right to interfere with private enterprises, or even supporting 2nd amendment rights?
US citizens relinquished citizenship and due process if they joined an enemy army of the US, whether it was the Redcoats, Germans, or Al Cada.
Its important to set clear boundaries. Joining the US Communist party or neo-nazis should not have had the same consquences because it never declared war on the US.
Plus I am concerned about growing use of domestic drone technology like for the in the Alabama kidnapping this week. Only a short step to arm them.
This is the country that sings "Land of the free and home of the brave". Talk about second amendment and the right/duty of the citizens to guard against tyranny. Then we go to our airports to be gate raped by TSA agents. The lunacy of the procedure is beyond comprehension. There was a picture of a returning war veteran removing his belt and boots to place on the conveyor belt, while a friendly smiling helpful TSA agent was holding his service rifle for him. The stupidity of the situation seemed to escaped both of them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My experience has been that whenever this comes up in conversation with actual adults who, while not brilliant, are not stupid either ... they get this dismissive look on their face. It is obvious they are thinking "oh, you are one of those conspiracy nuts, there is no way this could be real".
Most people don't believe this has actually happened.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
The Bush policy was extraordinary rendition and a stay at Guantanamo until guilt or innocence could be determined -- and that was for non-citizens!
When they take two parking spaces so that their expensive car doesn't get a scratch. Double parking too.
When they refuse to tip the waitress AND leave a smug, self righteous remark.
When they commit a violent crime with a weapon
When they have committed up to 9 violent crimes without a weapon
When they engage in malfeasance with investor funds in any bank or financial institution
When they engage in bribery of ANY public official (federal, state and local) anywhere at any time (Both the public official and the bribee). Campaign funds should explicitly be considered bribes.
That'll do for a start.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
And you're just a waste of oxygen if the best response you can come up with is "It's unlikely that you and your guns can stop tyranny, so you shouldn't have your guns."
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
for much of the rest of world to think that US is going even more nuts:
a - murdering with drones, collateral murders don't matter, no court system/laws involved, no war declared (endless war), getting more pissed off, keep the mill going
b - TSA shows at airports
c - 2-class humans - NON-Americans, Americans perceived as arrogant/bullies,
(leaving the Israel/nuclear/Iran next theater show out)
obey the government, and work within the system to gain power. Don't bother trying to overthrow the Matrix.
The US Government, like all governments, has the exact same power structure as any other government, and that is: the strong get to rule over the weak.
You freedom-loving libertarians need to understand this concept. It really is a flaw among you libertarians to think that you somehow live in a "free" country. No, you do NOT live in a free country. You never have. Try breaking a law, and see how much freedom you have.
You're better off accepting that you have no power, rather than thinking you have any sort of power under a democracy. The key is, if you accepted how powerless you were, you would form different methods of gaining power, instead of through silly methods such as through the 2nd amendment, which was designed to help government control you...
Nobody at this point actually thinks their pathetic handgun is going to protect them against tyranny by a government armed with SWAT teams, drones, and nuclear missiles, do they? And their power was actually demonstrated via a civil war where Gen. Sherman burnt down half the south to clear out the rebellious traitors..
It really is shameful that Americans are taught that they have any sort of power, and it's sad seeing them come to the conclusion that they actually don't. The "freedom"-loving libertarian's ego is apparently the hardest thing to destroy, but it must be destroyed for them to actually gain real freedom and power.
Again, we have to make sure people understand that American do NOT have freedom, and that any attempt to make it look that way is the powerful attempting to control the weak by giving the weak an illusion of power.
In summation:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I don't think you'll find many libertarians who believe they live in a free country.
You can probably find many who believe this was originally intended to be a free country, and that it could become one by following the original design.
This is all nonsense. By most people's reckoning and the US Government's own declaration, every Confederate killed at Antietem or Gettysburg was a US Citizen. By what legal authority did the Federal Government kill them? Shall the ACLU and their decendents sue the Government for killing them without due process?
Oh wait.. they were in open rebellion and waging war against the Republic. Citizens who join Al-Qeda are in open rebellion and are waging war against the Republic. The simple fact is, when you join the enemy and wage war, you can be killed. War is War. No convoluted legal reasoning is needed to kill the enemy in war. If you think otherwise, your mind is clouded with nonsense and you are lost in non-reality.
Bullshit. The 5th Amendment protects US citizens, PERIOD. You really have no fucking clue, do you?
It's just a piece of paper that people lie in their oaths about protecting.
More Twoson than Cupertino
"Nobody at this point actually thinks their pathetic handgun is going to protect them against tyranny by a government armed with SWAT teams, drones, and nuclear missiles, do they?"
Yes. Actually taking out an entire army strike team is pretty easy with the right stuff. Full armor, It's not hard at all to injure the lot of them and then use them as bait to get more. Drones are zero effort to take down. 30-06 hunting rifle will down one in seconds. Or are you brain dead and think the US army drones are like what you see when you play Black Ops II.. Sorry kid. But a lot of hunters have guns that make the army's M16 a girly gun. I hunt bear and use a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.700_Nitro_Express 700 Nitro Round in my rifle. That round will kill someone in armor because it will be the same as a sledgehammer to the chest. Buddy of mine has a Barret 50. That will take out most helicopters and hit a target behind a brick wall by shooting through it.
I suggest you look at how the Taliban has pretty much spanked the US army really hard in Afghanistan with only rocks and mules. In the USA there area LOT more resources for an uprising to decimate the Military and police. Plus you have the problem that it's hard to make a soldier kill his own family and friends, so the US army sent in against the American citizenry will end with a lot of officers accidently killed by grenades. In viet-nam officers were fragged by the troops quite a bit.
So the fools like you that have zero education in history and negative education in combat or even firearm use have no clue at all.
No they wouldn't, they'd put you in a certain prison camp in Cuba.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So, do Democrats consider this a corroboration of the Bush policy (which means they'll have to admit they were wrong about Bush), or a corruption of their leader (which means they'll have to admit they were wrong about Obama)?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Which is the crux of the matter. These people have NOT been stripped of their citizenship (which is a judicial process) but deemed unlawful combatants by (secret) executive decision. No due process, no "cease and desist" letter, your first hint "you're on the list" is a smoke trail moving rapidly towards your window. What is fine for a guy building bombs, but becomes very weak for someone making speeches on the internet.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
I honestly believe that the exact same thing would have happened with McCain or Romney as president. I also think Bush would probably have done the same thing if he'd had the drones available at the time. I can't prove it of course, but i do feel the fact that a bipartisan group of Senators were asking for the criteria used to kill Americans rather than demanding that it not happen at all kind of supports the idea. For the same reason i don't think Obama will be impeached or even seriously criticized by Congress over this. (If all the Republicans get together and try to pass a law that would effectively stop things like this i would get behind them on this one issue. But it ain't gonna happen.)
I voted for Obama in both of the previous elections. I didn't vote for him because i honsetly thought he would Change anything. One can always hope, but i didn't believe it would really happen, so i wasn't that disappointed when it didn't. I voted for him because i believed he wouldn't do _most_ of the things the Republicans said they wanted to do, and _maybe_ he'd actually manage to do one of two good things. And that's pretty much what happened. He's managed to do a couple things i view as good, and _mostly_ hasn't done the things the Republicans said they wanted.
I would rather have had a president who didn't do _any_ of the crappy things i believe the Republicans would do, but realistically there was no way to achieve that. In game theory terms i got the best outcome (from my perspective) that was possible under the current system. Under any kind of instant run-off system Obama would not have been my first choice. He might not even have been my second or third choice.
And both the Republicans and the Democrats know they can get away with a lot of crap exactly because of the two party system. "What are you going to do, vote for the Greens or Libertarians instead? Ha ha, go ahead, see how well that works out for you."
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I don't think you'll find many libertarians who believe they live in a free country.
Define "Freedom".
Some folks think freedom is just riding a motorcycle or owning some mass produced, stamped steel piece of shit assault rifle.
Others believe it is to do what the fuck they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
And there are others who think they can do whatever they want on their own land - even if that means down the road it hurts others. - like dumping toxic waste on their land that eventually poisons the water table.
Where Libertarianism fails: the commons. (See the sea)
I say that YOU are a senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or an associated force (like WikiLeaks, Anonymous, OWS or some other evil group plotting against Western economic interests).
Want to see the evidence against you? Sorry
Want your lawyer? Sorry
Want a trial before a jury of your peers? Sorry
BOOM!
In our Constitutional Republic it is illegal for the government to murder people simply because of the command of some bureaucrat. What the government "believes" about an accused "terrorist" could easily be based on false or fabricated evidence. That's why the government brings their evidence before a grand jury and IF an indictment is issued, the accused has a right to confront the evidence against them in a court of law.
If the government thinks they have enough evidence to KILL someone, surely they could get a damned indictment!
This is an impeachable offense. Too bad that there isn't a shred of integrity left in Washington DC.
The "original design" did not depend on the labor of certain "3/5 people". It's easy to document that most founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery. The situation they were in was that the Constitution needed to be ratified by all the colonies so that the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts. So, while they wrote the Constitution with certain compromises so that they could get citizens to ratify it, they incorporated sunset clauses to certain parts of slavery.
You need to do some deeper research rather than make broad assumptions based on certain, pragmatic, compromises.
Jefferson opposed slavery so deeply that he remained a slave-owner (and slave-raper) for his whole life, while hammering out compromises to make sure others could do the same (including "sunset clauses to certain parts of slavery", aside from the "total ownership of another human being" parts). Obviously a fundamental commitment to the core of human freedom!
No, it's worse than that. It's "OMG WE LIVE IN A TYRANNICAL SOCIETY AND IT WILL ALWAYS BE THUS! DESPAIR, SHEEPLE! DESPAIR!!!!"
AC evidently sees the world in black and white, free or oppressed. "Try breaking a law, and see how much freedom you have," is particularly precious.
The original design was sovereign States who delegated a small, well-defined subset of their powers to a common body
That common body was structured so as to make it somewhat self-limiting, somewhat difficult to expand its reach..
It was also structured with layers of increasing responsibility that theoretically would help elevate the finest people to higher offices, even as it filtered out to a degree some of the more extremist voices.
Nobody at this point actually thinks their pathetic handgun is going to protect them against tyranny by a government armed with SWAT teams, drones, and nuclear missiles, do they?
You completely miss the point with this statement! Tyranny never starts with the government using the military to impose its will on the people (though it sometimes reaches maturity that way). Tyranny starts with "brownshirts".
The tool of the tyrant who is not yet firmly in control is unofficial (but government sponsored) armed gangs of thugs. They rely on terror and inability to resist to project power, but there are few people in modern culture willing to act that way. With an unarmed populace, 1-2% willing and eager to use violence to suppress dissent will win. But it only takes a similar number to be willing to fight back, to put themselves at risk when the browshirts come for their neighbors, and shoot the fuckers dead. Since most of us are not as brave as we'd like to be, that means you need ~20% of the population to be armed and have a strong moral compass, so that the bravest 5-10% of them actually act.
That is possible. That works.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yea because this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) clearly never happened and didn't work according to your logic.
Orwell was an optimist.