Can Obama Assassinate Americans? By Nat Hentoff

[Demeter]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24888.htm

March 01, 2010 "cato.org" -- On September 14 in Somalia, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a long-sought link between al-Qaida and its East African allies, was in a vehicle bombed by a helicopter flying from an American ship off the Somali coast. As Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick reported in a front-page Washington Post story -- "Under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts" (Feb. 13) -- another U.S. helicopter "set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of (Nabhan's) remains for DNA verification."

That news story offered a telling consequence: "the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever." And a senior military officer, careful not to give his name, lamented: "We wanted to take a prisoner. It was not a decision that we made."

That decision came from Obama, our commander in chief, who, as I've previously reported, has authorized in his first year more such assassinations than Bush and Cheney in their last years. The result, as the Washington Post noted, "has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions."

After all, there can be no fierce arguments about whether a charred corpse should be tried in a federal civilian court or by a military commission. Some American citizens, believed to be highly connected to al-Qaida or its affiliates, are also on these "hit" lists. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, pilotless U.S. drone planes have perpetrated these assassinations.

Thanks to the First Amendment, an increasing number of these summary executions have been revealed in the Washington Post and on the Internet. The executive branch alone decides who shall die instantly. And there are no defense attorneys to raise objections, even when an American citizen is marked for oblivion....Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer turned news analyst, avoids euphemisms. "Special permissions" without judicial authorization, says Greenwald, amounts to "basically giving the president the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial" (Salon.com, Feb. 4)...Focusing on American targets, Ben Wizner, a staff attorney of the ACLU National Security Project, in a Feb. 4 press release emphasizes: "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.'"

I would add that if the threat has indeed been specified, the deceased target will have had no chance to test its accuracy. Is this America?

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Nat Hentoff is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.

This article appeared on cato.org on February 25, 2010.

[tekisui]

1. The assassination campaign is sick.

Obama certainly thinks he has the right to assassinate, and no one seems to challenge it.

[DrDan]

2. what have we become . . . our misguided direction over the past few years is just sick

[azul]

3. The rule of law

is perverted and mocked when we give up our freedoms for security fears.

The rule of law is gone when the military kills its citizens without trial.