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| Targeted Killing of American Citizens? |
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Thursday, February 04 2010 @ 09:54 PM GMT+5
Contributed by: spoon
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 The following excerpt speaks too loudly for itself. It describes an existing situation that is very very frightening. One wonders if it is much different, or substantially different, from Germany in 1936 or any other totalitarian regime for that matter. Am I going to be killed by my own government for even repeating what was stated by a member of the ACLU? No less frightening is the possibility that the White House and Congress DO reflect the will of the people. Can any government reflecting these policies be a legitimate government?
http://washingtonindependent.com/75836/aclu-not-exactly-cool-with-obama-administration-assassinating-americans
Apropos of intelligence chief Dennis Blair’s remarkable disclosure, the following statement comes from the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ben Wizner:
It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified “threat.” This is the most recent consequence of a troublingly overbroad interpretation of Congress’s 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. This sweeping interpretation envisions a war that knows no borders or definable time limits and targets an enemy that the government has refused to define in public. This policy is particularly troubling since it targets U.S. citizens, who retain their constitutional right to due process even when abroad.
His colleague Jonathan Manes wants to know more:
The American people have a right to know more about a policy that grants the president the unilateral authority to approve the killing of U.S. citizens. It is essential that more information be made available about who can be targeted for killing, who makes these decisions and on the basis of how much evidence, and whether lethal force can be used if arrest or capture are possible or have not been attempted. While there is little doubt that a U.S. citizen fighting for an enemy army could lawfully be killed on the battlefield in the course of fighting, this policy goes far beyond the ordinary parameters of battlefield combat. It appears to allow for the deliberate targeted killing of American citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is.
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| Contact Your Representatives |
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Not much snow this January. I'm guessing February will end up
70 votes | 1 comments
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I was under the impression that assassinations were against the law, regardless of citizenship.
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"Economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings." -- FDR