washingtonsblog.com / February 6, 2013
Bush and Obama Have Set Us Back 800 Years
NBC News reports:
Legal experts expressed grave reservations Tuesday about an Obama administration memo concluding that the United States can order the killing of American citizens believed to be affiliated with al-Qaida — with one saying the White House was acting as “judge, jury and executioner.”
“Anyone should be concerned when the president and his lawyers make up their own interpretation of the law or their own rules,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and an authority on international law and the use of force.
“This is a very, very dangerous thing that the president has done,” she added.
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Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer who writes about security and liberty for the British newspaper The Guardian, described the memo as “fundamentally misleading,” with a clinical tone that disguises “the radical and dangerous power it purports to authorize.”
“If you believe the president has the power to order U.S. citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable,” he wrote.
Senator Wyden said:
Every American has the right to know when their government believes that it is allowed to kill them.
Top constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley notes:
In plain language, [the Obama administration memo] means that [any Americans can be assassinated if] the President considers the citizens to be a threat in the future. Moreover, the memo allows killings when an attempt to capture the person would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel. That undue risk is left undefined.
I think I’ve seen that movie before …
Given that drones are being deployed in the American homeland, some fear that the war is coming home.
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