Judge, jury & executioner?

Could he [Mr. Obama] order the targeted killing of an American citizen [cleric Anwar al-Awlaki], in a country with which the United States was not at war [Yemen], in secret and without the benefit of a trial?

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.

Mr. Obama gave his approvalSecret Kill List’ Tests Obama’s Principles – NYTimes.com

Yep, judge, jury and executioner.

That used to un-American, not to mention illegal — AND a really bad idea. What happened?

15 thoughts on “Judge, jury & executioner?”

  1. What happened? When the American people are more interested in who's dancing with the stars or whether the refs blew that call in the endzone, the Archons knew they could do what they wanted with relative impunity – and it is getting more and more blatantly in-your-face…slippery-slope stuff. Except when the Archons relieve the people of their rights and freedom, they're not going to willingly give them back. So, here we are.

    1. curmudgeonvt, You are exactly right. Ask the public to name the countries we are currently bombing and the don't even know what you are talking about, but ask them who will win American Idol and they sound like scholars.

  2. http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2012/09/truth-behind-

    Killing individuals (and whoever is near them) has become the primary substitute in U.S. public policy for capture/imprisonment/torture. Torturing someone to death is not what former CIA General Counsel John Rizzo calls “clean.” Blowing them and anyone near them into little bits is “clean.” As Medea Benjamin documents, the United States has avoided detaining people, only to murder them with a drone days later. And, as with other innovations in lawlessness, it didn’t take long for this one to come back and bite U.S. citizens. Obama has now used drones to kill Americans in Yemen, including a drone strike on Anwar al-Awlaki, and a later strike that killed his teenage son. Neither of them was ever charged with a crime, and neither was holding a weapon on a battlefield. Yet, somehow, as Eric Holder explained at Northwestern University Law School this month, through an alchemical combination of law enforcement and war it is perfectly OK for a president to kill anyone anywhere. And drones allow a president to do this without any supposed risk to what U.S. newspapers treat as constituting the complete category of human beings, namely members of the U.S. military. Benjamin’s book establishes that drones do not live up to their advertising.

  3. Not much to comment about, really. It's just "MURDER By COWARD". This category includes
    our military, the president and his "regime".

  4. It still is “un-American, … illegal – AND a really bad idea.” The president cannot make it legal, moral, or practical by declaring it so after doing it. How many Americans know or care? Probably not a majority. If the gov’t knew they could get away with just about anything, it would be even more totalitarian. Even Hitler at his worst was concerned about public opinion. That governmental fear of the public is all that is standing between us and total dictatorship.

  5. One "accomplishment" of the fanatic neo-cons that many miss is that they have made the criminal actions of Obama — war threats, brutal sanctions, and mass assasination by drones — seem "moderate" by comparison.

  6. What do you consider the TELEVISION show The Walking Dead? I have actually been viewing it now for 3 years and I think it simply keeps getting better. I adore viewing the tv program weekly just to find out if my favored charcters have actually been eaten by zombies! Great website by the way, I have invested at least an hour reviewing your short articles.

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