Prolonged, preventative detention sounds good.
:(
http://www.salon.com/2010/04/07/assassinations_2/singleton/"In late January, I wrote about the Obama administration’s “presidential assassination program,” whereby American citizens are targeted for killings far away from any battlefield, based exclusively on unchecked accusations by the Executive Branch that they’re involved in Terrorism. At the time, The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest had noted deep in a long article that Obama had continued Bush’s policy (which Bush never actually implemented) of having the Joint Chiefs of Staff compile “hit lists” of Americans, and Priest suggested that the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was on that list. The following week, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations..."
The Awlaki memo and Marty Lederman
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/09/the_awlaki_memo_and_marty_lederman/singleton/"Several months after President Obama ordered Anwar Awlaki killed by the CIA, the Obama DOJ — specifically lawyers within its Office of Legal Counsel — produced a memorandum legally authorizing this action. Despite multiple requests, the Obama administration refuses to release that memo to the public. Several DOJ officials, hiding behind anonymity, have apparently refused to leak the memo, but have now selectively described parts of it to The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage – presumably the parts they wanted him to know about — and he then reported on what they said (offering some important counter-points along the way). As Savage put it:
The secret document provided the justification for acting
despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.
I’ve already addressed, repeatedly and at length, the substance of the claim that the President has the power to secretly order American citizens killed by the CIA far from any battlefield and without a whiff of due process, and won’t repeat those arguments now. I will, however, note that the Bush administration’s refusal to release OLC memos which provided the legal justifications for the President’s most controversial War on Terror actions prompted extreme criticisms from Democratic legal scholars.
As but one example, Obama’s original choice to head the OLC, Dawn Johnsen, repeatedly railed against this Bush practice of concealing OLC memos as “secret law,” writing that “the Bush Administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.” In her April, 2008 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was nothing short of scathing on the practice of concealing OLC memos (note that the Bush DOJ, even when withholding OLC memos, at least would sometimes publicly present its legal reasoning in a far more formal and comprehensive way than anonymous leaks of purported summaries of parts of these memos to the NYT)..."
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
