I am not bothered by this nearly as much as I thought I would have been.
Then you need to read a little bit more. This is the most serious issue of our time -- it is the a historical dividing line between an America with three competing branches, and an America with an imperial presidency with unlimited power to do anything at all.
Greenwald is not particularly easy to summarize, and you'd be better off to read his analysis and check his sources. It would really take all day. But as a weak attempt to summarize it, the article cited above is broken down into six parts, and maybe the headings with some excerpts will serve that purpose.
1. Equating government accusations with guilt
Those who justify all of this by arguing that Obama can and should kill al-Qaida leaders who are trying to kill Americans are engaged in supreme question-begging. Without any due process, transparency or oversight, there is no way to know who is a "senior al-Qaida leader" and who is posing an "imminent threat" to Americans. All that can be known is who Obama, in total secrecy, accuses of this.
2. Creating a ceiling, not a floor
The memo explicitly leaves open the possibility that presidential assassinations of US citizens may be permissible even when the target is not a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat and/or when capture is feasible.
3. Relies on the core Bush/Cheney theory of a global battlefield
The president, it claims, "retains authority to use force against al-Qaida and associated forces outside the area of active hostilities". In other words: there are, subject to the entirely optional "feasibility of capture" element, no geographic limits to the president's authority to kill anyone he wants. This power applies not only to war zones, but everywhere in the world that he claims a member of al-Qaida is found.
4. Expanding the concept of "imminence" beyond recognition
The only reason to add these limitations of "imminence" and "feasibility of capture" is, as Heller said, purely political: to make the theories more politically palatable. But the definitions for these terms are so vague and broad that they provide no real limits on the president's assassination power. As the ACLU's Jaffer says: "This is a chilling document" because "it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen" and the purported limits "are elastic and vaguely defined, and it's easy to see how they could be manipulated."
5. Converting Obama underlings into objective courts
A president can always find underlings and political appointees to endorse whatever he wants to do. That's all this memo is: the by-product of obsequious lawyers telling their Party's leader that he is (of course) free to do exactly that which he wants to do, in exactly the same way that Bush got John Yoo to tell him that torture was not torture, and that even it if were, it was legal.
That's why courts, not the president's partisan lawyers, should be making these determinations
6. Making a mockery of "due process"
...Holder actually said: "due process and judicial process are not one and the same." Colbert interpreted that claim as follows:
"Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do. The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them."
He was there because his family moved there. He was participating in a barbecue when he was murdered. He had been trying to find his dad for some time because he missed him.
News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki's son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: "anyone killed by the U.S."), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker's Amy Davidson wrote: "Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government's evidence -- or the honesty of its claims -- and about our own capacity for self-deception."
And of Al Awlaki himself? He was killed because of his youtube postings. Freedom of speech, so long as you don't say stuff the Feds hate. That list of things the Feds hate? Sure to grow.
The ACLU is an enemy of Obama, not a friend, and suggesting that its laudable attempts to shed light on the Can-Do-No-Wrong-Obama is some push back from Democrats, is to miss the point entirely. The Democrats are part of the disease that needs to be pushed back against, and the ACLU is doing that as much as it can. That is not however evidence that Democrats are pushing back against their own policies, which were the same policies (or even worse than) of GWB.
The whole falacy with your argument is that you probably think the word "imminent" means "about to take place" or something like that. Imminent is an excellent word for lawyers because it's so slippery and can mean just about anything. And that's exactly the case here.
The condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.
-- Largest prison system in the world (and "for profit" to boot). -- Legal authority to kill you without trial. -- Legal authority to detain you indefinitely without trial. -- Rampant domestic eavesdropping. -- Rampant military worship. -- Militarization of the police forces. -- Differential application of the law based on whether you are an elite. -- A government essentially owned by the mega-corps and which consistently and unfailingly kowtows to those interests.
This memo is saying that you do NOT have to be in a foreign country nor on a battlefield and that imminent does not mean that you are engaging in attack preparations. So just about every part of your basis is lacking.
Serriously, give a word like "imminent" to lawyers and they'll argue we're on the doorstep of cold fusion.
People do care. Remember the Torture Memos of Yoo? That really got people upset about lawyers. Other than Yoo. And no one in the administration. Really, anyone who would challenge our ability to torture. Well, anyway, people got upset about something.
The ENTIRETY of the Obama presidency has been a demonstration by Democrats that they didn't disagree with GWB's policies, they merely hated the man and used his policies as a foil. Obama's entire first term was marked by the egregious continuation of every civil rights violation GWB envisioned, but amplified, and Democrats said nothing, unless it was to label a person asking serious questions as "racist."
If the past four years is any indication, Obama has nothing to fear from "progressives" -- and I say that term with absolute disgust, because "progressive" is just code for Democrat right wing neocon bastard pretending to be a peacenik. Which in my world is worse than Republican right wing neocon bastard not pretending.
I can drink a red bull, a monster, a coke, tea, or anything but coffee and easily take a long nap afterwards. Something about the caffeine I get through coffee is different. It actually makes me feel alert and awake.
I used to drink tons of coffee and lattes -- it's a nice to thing to drink here in the Pacific NW because our weather and hot drinks go perfectly together. I drank it because I like the way it tastes, but it never woke me up in the morning or kept me awake at night. I'd make myself a latte just before bed sometimes. Hot milk is really soothing (don't go there, you know what I mean).
Then about four or five years ago I started to shake. It was embarrassing -- like I was jonesing for cocaine or meth or something. So now I drink decaff. It too neither wakes me up nor keeps me up.
Well you forgot: And at least 1 person will be frustrated that nobody is talking about overpopulation and how encouraging the importation of extra people from countries with a high birth rate will do nothing to stem the environmental degradation that comes from having too many people.
That's my thought. But I'm always way down in the minority.
This is really just about social security and money (or inflation) -- our system requires infinite growth/inflation or it implodes. Nobody thinks about sustainable anything till the well runs dry, and everyone tries to draw from it faster and faster as it nears bottom.
Here's another Taibbi explanation of why you should care:
Taibbi said in the "Democracy Now!" interview that ordinary Americans are victims of the Libor scandal because lower interest rates probably contributed to forcing state and local governments to slash spending.
"If you live in a town that had a budget crisis, that had to lay off firemen or teachers or policemen, or couldn't provide services or textbooks in their schools, you know, that might be due to this," Taibbi said. "Basically, every city and town in America, to say nothing of the rest of the world, has investments that are pegged to Libor."
Put it in the category of stuff that matters, even to Americans --- we just don't know it:
A sizable chunk of the world's adjustable-rate investment vehicles are pegged to Libor, and here we have evidence that banks were tweaking the rate downward to massage their own derivatives positions. The consequences for this boggle the mind. For instance, almost every city and town in America has investment holdings tied to Libor. If banks were artificially lowering the rates to beef up their trading profiles, that means communities all over the world were cheated out of ungodly amounts of money.
Matt Taibbi is doing some of the most in depth reporting on the recent financial crimes of any reporter anywhere. Don't be put off by the Rolling Stone source. Plus he's funny.
Ok, you mine an area. Slows down tanks, gets a few kills, cost effectively destroys some equipment. Congrats. Exactly how is that going to win a war though?
George Washington lost six of his nine major battles. Britain was a vastly superior foe. But then it got itself involved in wars all over the place simultaneously and we got some support from its foes and guess what -- might and vast wealth doesn't necessarily yield a win. Particularly if you have a tenacious group of combatants willing to be guerrillas for an extended period (we tend to think of the revolution as "1776" -- it actually quite some time and didn't end till 1883).
Good luck with that. You probably commit three federal crimes per day (as of 2009 -- they add more crimes every year) without even knowing it and your intent to be a good citizen is of no relevance.
This is about pure oppressive power. When the laws are so vague and vast that anyone can be imprisoned in the largest prison system in the world for virtually their entire life for totally random acts -- the government has absolute control over any forms of dissent.
No really, you need to fuck off. Where do you get off saying it's OK to charge a person with crimes that could bring 50 years for what Swartz did? Especially in the context where the same DOJ rewards people who helped drug kingpins and terrorists launder money for a decade. Where do you get any moral authority at all to say that the government should be able to absolutely crush ordinary citizens for barely recognizable crimes, all the while letting massive rampant Wall Street fraud that practically brought down the world economy go not just unpunished, but rewarded with the hard earned tax dollars of millions of Americans. Why is it OK for AT&T to help the Feds do illegal wiretapping and then be grantied retroactive immunity for that crime? Yet downloading some articles at a rate higher than allowed is supposed to warrant a possible life sentence, or at least almost all of a life on average?
So yeah -- in all seriousness -- fuck off. You are part of the problem. Being silent is bad enough, but offering excuses for the oppressors -- that's beyond the pale. You are an enabler of this kind of corruption and slime, and you don't even get it. Wise up or fuck off.
Are you joking? TOS violations are WAY worse than terrorism, at least to Holder, the DOJ, etc.
When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC's Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn't protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite. It terrifies investors and depositors everywhere, leaving them with the clear impression that even the most "reputable" banks may in fact be captured institutions whose senior executives are in the employ of (this can't be repeated often enough) murderers and terrorists. *** So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department's opening offer == asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?
Clearly humor but I will say that my first exposure to PC-BSD a few years back was NWLF -- they had a table in the main room so the harassment couldn't have been that bad. Socks and sandals though are very comfortable -- you can wear them all the time, not just at LFNW.
Anyway, I tried PC-BSD I think (can't actually remember but I know I did take cd) but never became a user for no particular reason other than I was already more familiar with linux. It had what seemed a user friendly notion: all of a the libraries needed for any particular application are bundled with that app. Takes more space of course, but then, hard drives have gotten pretty big in recent years and you don't have to worry about incompatible dependencies.
Maybe I'll give it another shot because I hate Ubuntu, Fedora is crashy on my system, so is Mint -- I was going to spend this evening desktopifying cento-os and seeing how that goes, but maybe it's time to try something totally new.
It does not matter if he did not agree with the laws, they were on the books and he broke them.
You're really out of touch. There are so many laws on the books covering so many esoteric areas, laws which have no "intent" requirement, that nobody even knows how many laws there are. Ignorance of the law is no excuse but it is humanly impossible to know all the laws (classic catch 22), and since there is strict liability in many situations, your good intentions don't matter. The ludicrous result is that what should have gotten Swartz a slap on the wrist, maybe a $100 fine, 30 days in jail, and a misdemeanor was charged as it was. This makes it financially and logically impossible to have a jury trial. But whatever, in your black and white world, he broke the law. Remember that the next time you roll through a stop sign. I know it isn't like raping your neighbor, but who knows, it could be punishable by a fine in your local government, and 10 years in Fed's system -- nobody can really tell you an answer to that one way or the other. Ultimately, this is about the Feds being able to take out any person they dislike. The charged crime need not be related to their hatred, but it will work just fine.
And the problem is that it's becoming nearly impossible to know what the law actually is. The U.S. Constitution outlines just three federal crimes -- treason, counterfeiting, and piracy. Various projects have tried to count the number of federal criminal laws passed since, and many have simply given up. But by most estimates, there are at least 4,000 separate criminal laws at the federal level, with another 10,000 to 300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally.
In his most recent book, the civil libertarian and defense attorney Harvey Silverglate argues that most Americans now unknowingly commit about three felonies per day.
As an afterthought, it occurs to me that you'll be sharing jail time with:
-- The guy who got caught smoking a joint in a national forest. -- The guy who raped his sister, gouged her eyes out with a spoon, fed them to his dog, and then bludgeoned her to death.
You won't be spending any jail time with the guys who laundered money for Al Queda for a decade. Their punishment is that they will have to defer collecting a portion of their annual bonus for five years. I'll bet the deferred part doesn't even earn interest. The horror! (*)
Anyway, of the following groups: phone unlockers, pot heads, murders, terrorist's financial planners -- 100% of those who should not be imprisoned will be, and only 50% of those that ought to be will be.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you need to read a little bit more. This is the most serious issue of our time -- it is the a historical dividing line between an America with three competing branches, and an America with an imperial presidency with unlimited power to do anything at all.
Here is Glen Greenwald's take on it:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/05/obama-kill-list-doj-memo
Greenwald is not particularly easy to summarize, and you'd be better off to read his analysis and check his sources. It would really take all day. But as a weak attempt to summarize it, the article cited above is broken down into six parts, and maybe the headings with some excerpts will serve that purpose.
1. Equating government accusations with guilt
2. Creating a ceiling, not a floor
3. Relies on the core Bush/Cheney theory of a global battlefield
4. Expanding the concept of "imminence" beyond recognition
5. Converting Obama underlings into objective courts
6. Making a mockery of "due process"
He was there because his family moved there. He was participating in a barbecue when he was murdered. He had been trying to find his dad for some time because he missed him.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2097899,00.html
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/20/the_killing_of_awlakis_16_year_old_son/
And of Al Awlaki himself? He was killed because of his youtube postings. Freedom of speech, so long as you don't say stuff the Feds hate. That list of things the Feds hate? Sure to grow.
Hey -- I like the ACLU. Lots. But the ACLU is not a "progressive" (tm) organization. For example:
ACLU chief 'disgusted' with Obama
http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0610/ACLU_chief_disgusted_with_Obama.html
ACLU ad showing Obama morphing into Bush:
http://www.aclu.org/aclu-ad-what-will-it-be-mr-president
ACLU: Obama Has Quadrupled Warrantless Wiretaps
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/09/28/ACLU-Obama-Has-Quadrupled-Warrantless-Wiretaps
ACLU condemns court for keeping details of Obama's assassination program secret ... this could go on for pages and pages.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/02/aclu-condemns-court-for-keeping-details-of-obamas-assassination-program-secret/
The ACLU is an enemy of Obama, not a friend, and suggesting that its laudable attempts to shed light on the Can-Do-No-Wrong-Obama is some push back from Democrats, is to miss the point entirely. The Democrats are part of the disease that needs to be pushed back against, and the ACLU is doing that as much as it can. That is not however evidence that Democrats are pushing back against their own policies, which were the same policies (or even worse than) of GWB.
Shoot -- should have made it clear. That's a quote from the memo, not a pundit.
The whole falacy with your argument is that you probably think the word "imminent" means "about to take place" or something like that. Imminent is an excellent word for lawyers because it's so slippery and can mean just about anything. And that's exactly the case here.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/leaked-memo-drone-strikes-us-citizens.html
Maybe. This is what disturbs me:
-- Largest prison system in the world (and "for profit" to boot).
-- Legal authority to kill you without trial.
-- Legal authority to detain you indefinitely without trial.
-- Rampant domestic eavesdropping.
-- Rampant military worship.
-- Militarization of the police forces.
-- Differential application of the law based on whether you are an elite.
-- A government essentially owned by the mega-corps and which consistently and unfailingly kowtows to those interests.
Things look seriously bad.
This memo is saying that you do NOT have to be in a foreign country nor on a battlefield and that imminent does not mean that you are engaging in attack preparations. So just about every part of your basis is lacking.
Serriously, give a word like "imminent" to lawyers and they'll argue we're on the doorstep of cold fusion.
The ENTIRETY of the Obama presidency has been a demonstration by Democrats that they didn't disagree with GWB's policies, they merely hated the man and used his policies as a foil. Obama's entire first term was marked by the egregious continuation of every civil rights violation GWB envisioned, but amplified, and Democrats said nothing, unless it was to label a person asking serious questions as "racist."
If the past four years is any indication, Obama has nothing to fear from "progressives" -- and I say that term with absolute disgust, because "progressive" is just code for Democrat right wing neocon bastard pretending to be a peacenik. Which in my world is worse than Republican right wing neocon bastard not pretending.
I used to drink tons of coffee and lattes -- it's a nice to thing to drink here in the Pacific NW because our weather and hot drinks go perfectly together. I drank it because I like the way it tastes, but it never woke me up in the morning or kept me awake at night. I'd make myself a latte just before bed sometimes. Hot milk is really soothing (don't go there, you know what I mean).
Then about four or five years ago I started to shake. It was embarrassing -- like I was jonesing for cocaine or meth or something. So now I drink decaff. It too neither wakes me up nor keeps me up.
Well you forgot:
And at least 1 person will be frustrated that nobody is talking about overpopulation and how encouraging the importation of extra people from countries with a high birth rate will do nothing to stem the environmental degradation that comes from having too many people.
That's my thought. But I'm always way down in the minority.
This is really just about social security and money (or inflation) -- our system requires infinite growth/inflation or it implodes. Nobody thinks about sustainable anything till the well runs dry, and everyone tries to draw from it faster and faster as it nears bottom.
I week ago I saw a great one: CPTWTF
Here's another Taibbi explanation of why you should care:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/matt-taibbi-libor-cnbc-larry-kudlow_n_1688797.html
Put it in the category of stuff that matters, even to Americans --- we just don't know it:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-huge-break-in-the-libor-banking-investigation-20120628#ixzz2JQ77kD9d
Matt Taibbi is doing some of the most in depth reporting on the recent financial crimes of any reporter anywhere. Don't be put off by the Rolling Stone source. Plus he's funny.
George Washington lost six of his nine major battles. Britain was a vastly superior foe. But then it got itself involved in wars all over the place simultaneously and we got some support from its foes and guess what -- might and vast wealth doesn't necessarily yield a win. Particularly if you have a tenacious group of combatants willing to be guerrillas for an extended period (we tend to think of the revolution as "1776" -- it actually quite some time and didn't end till 1883).
Good luck with that. You probably commit three federal crimes per day (as of 2009 -- they add more crimes every year) without even knowing it and your intent to be a good citizen is of no relevance.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842.html
This is about pure oppressive power. When the laws are so vague and vast that anyone can be imprisoned in the largest prison system in the world for virtually their entire life for totally random acts -- the government has absolute control over any forms of dissent.
No really, you need to fuck off. Where do you get off saying it's OK to charge a person with crimes that could bring 50 years for what Swartz did? Especially in the context where the same DOJ rewards people who helped drug kingpins and terrorists launder money for a decade. Where do you get any moral authority at all to say that the government should be able to absolutely crush ordinary citizens for barely recognizable crimes, all the while letting massive rampant Wall Street fraud that practically brought down the world economy go not just unpunished, but rewarded with the hard earned tax dollars of millions of Americans. Why is it OK for AT&T to help the Feds do illegal wiretapping and then be grantied retroactive immunity for that crime? Yet downloading some articles at a rate higher than allowed is supposed to warrant a possible life sentence, or at least almost all of a life on average?
So yeah -- in all seriousness -- fuck off. You are part of the problem. Being silent is bad enough, but offering excuses for the oppressors -- that's beyond the pale. You are an enabler of this kind of corruption and slime, and you don't even get it. Wise up or fuck off.
Are you joking? TOS violations are WAY worse than terrorism, at least to Holder, the DOJ, etc.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213
Well the only downside with socks and sandals is stubbing your toe. In that sense, I totally feel your pain!
Clearly humor but I will say that my first exposure to PC-BSD a few years back was NWLF -- they had a table in the main room so the harassment couldn't have been that bad. Socks and sandals though are very comfortable -- you can wear them all the time, not just at LFNW.
Anyway, I tried PC-BSD I think (can't actually remember but I know I did take cd) but never became a user for no particular reason other than I was already more familiar with linux. It had what seemed a user friendly notion: all of a the libraries needed for any particular application are bundled with that app. Takes more space of course, but then, hard drives have gotten pretty big in recent years and you don't have to worry about incompatible dependencies.
Maybe I'll give it another shot because I hate Ubuntu, Fedora is crashy on my system, so is Mint -- I was going to spend this evening desktopifying cento-os and seeing how that goes, but maybe it's time to try something totally new.
Drat -- it's back up. Where is that much vaunted slashdot effect?
And two-clicks is actually more user friendly because then you don't have to go through a dozen clicks to cancel the order you accidentally placed.
I think I'll use this as an excuse to buy something I don't need, but would like to have.
You're really out of touch. There are so many laws on the books covering so many esoteric areas, laws which have no "intent" requirement, that nobody even knows how many laws there are. Ignorance of the law is no excuse but it is humanly impossible to know all the laws (classic catch 22), and since there is strict liability in many situations, your good intentions don't matter. The ludicrous result is that what should have gotten Swartz a slap on the wrist, maybe a $100 fine, 30 days in jail, and a misdemeanor was charged as it was. This makes it financially and logically impossible to have a jury trial. But whatever, in your black and white world, he broke the law. Remember that the next time you roll through a stop sign. I know it isn't like raping your neighbor, but who knows, it could be punishable by a fine in your local government, and 10 years in Fed's system -- nobody can really tell you an answer to that one way or the other. Ultimately, this is about the Feds being able to take out any person they dislike. The charged crime need not be related to their hatred, but it will work just fine.
https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/20/myths-of-the-criminal-justice-system_n_879768.html
As an afterthought, it occurs to me that you'll be sharing jail time with:
-- The guy who got caught smoking a joint in a national forest.
-- The guy who raped his sister, gouged her eyes out with a spoon, fed them to his dog, and then bludgeoned her to death.
You won't be spending any jail time with the guys who laundered money for Al Queda for a decade. Their punishment is that they will have to defer collecting a portion of their annual bonus for five years. I'll bet the deferred part doesn't even earn interest. The horror! (*)
Anyway, of the following groups: phone unlockers, pot heads, murders, terrorist's financial planners -- 100% of those who should not be imprisoned will be, and only 50% of those that ought to be will be.
(*) http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213
Don't get caught. $500,000 penalty and 5 years in the pokey. I imagine that is per offense.