By Paul Craig Roberts
November 30, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Why does the FBI orchestrate fake terror plots?
The latest one snared Osman Mohamud, a Somali-American teenager in Portland, Oregon. The Associated Press report by William Mall and Nedra Pickler (11-27-10) is headlined in Yahoo News: “Somali-born teen plotted car-bombing in Oregon.”
This is a misleading headline as the report makes it clear that it was a plot orchestrated by federal agents. Two sentences into the news report we have this: “The bomb was an elaborate fake supplied by the [FBI] agents and the public was never in danger, authorities said.”
The teenager was supplied with a fake bomb and a fake detonator.
Three sentences later the reporters contradict the quoted authorities with a quote from Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon: “The threat was very real.”
The reporters then contradict Balizan: “White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said Saturday that president Barack Obama was aware of the FBI operation before Friday’s arrest. Shapiro said Obama was assured that the FBI was in full control of the operation and that the public was not in danger.”
Then Shapiro contradicts himself by declaring: “The events of the past 24 hours underscore the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism here and abroad.”
The story arrives at its Kafka highpoint when President Obama thanks the FBI for its diligence in saving us from the fake plot the FBI had fabricated.
After vacillating between whether they are reporting a real plot or a orchestrated one, the reporters finally come down on the side of orchestration. Documents released by US Attorney Dwight Holton “show the sting operation began in June.” Obviously, the targeted Portland teenager was not hot to trot. The FBI had to work on him for six months. The reporters compare “the Portland sting” to the recent arrest in Virginia of Faroque Ahmed who was ensnared in a “bombing plot that was a ruse conducted over the past six months by federal officials.”
Think about this. The FBI did a year’s work in order to convince two people to participate in fake plots.
If you are not too bright and some tough looking guys accost you and tell you that they are Al Qaeda and expect your help in a terrorist operation, you might be afraid to say no, or you might be thrilled to be part of a blowback against an American population that is indifferent to their government’s slaughter of people of your ethnicity in your country of origin. Whichever way it falls, it is unlikely the ensnared person would ever have done anything beyond talk had the FBI not organized them into action. In other cases the FBI entices people with money to participate in its fake plots.
Since 9/11, the only domestic “terrorist plot” that I recall that was not obviously organized by the FBI is the “Times Square plot” to which Faisal Shahzad pleaded guilty to trying to set off a car bomb in Manhattan. This plot, too, is suspicious. One would think that a real terrorist would have a real bomb, not a smoke bomb.
In his May 19, 2009 article (reprinted Nov. 27, 2010), Joe Quinn collects some of the fake plots, some of which were validated by torture confessions and others by ignorant and fearful juries. The US government comes up with a plot, an accused, and tortures him until he confesses, or the government fabricates a case and takes it to jurors who know that they cannot face their neighbors if they let off a media-declared “terrorist.”
Perhaps the most obvious of these cases is “the Miami seven,” a hapless group of Christian-Zionist-Muslims that called themselves the “Sea of David” and were quietly living in a Florida warehouse awaiting biblical end times. Along came the FBI posing as Al Qaeda and offered them $50,000 and an Al Qaeda swearing-in ceremony.
The FBI told them that they needed to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and various government buildings. An honest reporter at Knight Ridder revealed: “The Justice (sic) Department unveiled the arrests with an orchestrated series of news conferences in two cities, but the severity of the charges compared with the seemingly amateurish nature of the group raised concerns among civil libertarians,” who noted that the group had “no weapons, no explosives.”
The Justice (sic) Department and tamed media made a big show out of the “militaristic boots” worn by the hapless “plotters,” but the FBI had bought the boots for them.
The biggest piece of evidence against the hapless group was that they had taken photos of “targets” in Florida, but the US government had equipped them with cameras.
The US government even rented cars for its dupes to drive to take the pictures.
It turns out that the group only wanted the $50,000, but an American jury convicted them anyhow.
When the US government has to go to such lengths to create “terrorists” out of hapless people, an undeclared agenda is being served. What could this agenda be?
The answer is many agendas. One agenda is to justify wars of aggression that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard created by the US government itself. One way to avoid war crimes charges is to create acts of terrorism that justify the naked aggressions against “terrorist countries.”
Another agenda is to create a police state. A police state can control people who object to their impoverishment for the benefit of the superrich much more easily than can a democracy endowed with constitutional civil liberties.
Another agenda is to get rich. Terror plots, whether real or orchestrated, have created a market for security. Dual Israeli citizen Michael Chertoff, former head of US Homeland Security, is the lobbyist who represents Rapiscan, the company that manufactures the full body porno-scanners that, following the “underwear bomber” event, are now filling up US airports. Homeland Security has announced that they are going to purchase the porno-scanners for trains, buses, subways, court houses, and sports events. How can shopping malls and roads escape? Recently on Interstate 20 west of Atlanta, trucks had to drive through a similar device. Everyone has forgotten that the underwear bomber lacked required documents and was escorted aboard the airliner by an official.
The “war on terror” provides an opportunity for a few well-connected people to become very rich. If they leave Americans with a third world police state, they will be living it up in Gstaad.
This despite the fact that everyone on the planet knows that it is not lactating mothers, children, elderly people in walkers and wheelchairs, members of Congress, members of the military, nuns, and so on, who are members of Al Qaeda plotting to bring aboard a bomb in their underwear, their shoes, their shampoo and face creams.
Indeed, bombs aboard airliners are a rare event.
What is it really all about? Could it be that the US government needs terrorist events in order to completely destroy the US Constitution? On November 24, National Public Radio broadcast a report by Dina Temple-Raston: “Administration officials are looking at the possibility of codifying detention without trial and are awaiting legislation that is supposed to come out of Congress early next year.” Of course, the legislation will not come out of Congress. It will be written by Homeland Security and the Justice (sic) Department. The impotent Congress will merely rubber-stamp it.
The obliteration of habeas corpus, the most necessary and important protection of liberty ever institutionalized in law and governing constitution, has become necessary for the US government, because a jury might acquit an alleged or mock “terrorist” or framed person whom the US government has declared prior to the trial will be held forever in indefinite detention even if acquitted in a US court of law. The attorney general of the United States has declared that any “terrorist” that he puts on trial who is acquitted by a jury will remain in detention regardless of the verdict. Such an event would reveal the total lawlessness of American “justice.”
The United States of America, “the city upon the hill,” “the light unto the world,” has become Nazi Germany. It was the practice of the Gestapo to ignore court verdicts and to execute or hold indefinitely the cleared defendant in the camps. The Obama regime is in the process of completing Dick Cheney’s dream by legislating the legality of indefinite detention. American law has collapsed to the dungeons of the Dark Ages. This Nazi Gestapo policy is now the declared policy of the US Department of Justice (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)(sic).
Anyone who thinks the United States is a free society where people have liberty, “freedom and democracy” is uninformed.
Showing posts with label Nazi Tactics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazi Tactics. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Saturday, September 25, 2010
The Collapse of Western Morality
By Paul Craig Roberts Global Research HERE...
September 23, 2010
Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse.
In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel’s genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.
I don’t mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.
And we have what appears to be a new thrill: American soldiers using the cover of war to murder civilians. Recently American troops were arrested for murdering Afghan civilians for fun and collecting trophies such as fingers and skulls.
This revelation came on the heels of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s alleged leak of a US Army video of US soldiers in helicopters and their controllers thousands of miles away having fun with joy sticks murdering members of the press and Afghan civilians. Manning is cursed with a moral conscience that has been discarded by his government and his military, and Manning has been arrested for obeying the law and reporting a war crime to the American people.
US Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, has called for Manning’s execution. According to US Rep. Rogers it is an act of treason to report an American war crime.
In other words, to obey the law constitutes “treason to America.”
US Rep. Rogers said that America’s wars are being undermined by “a culture of disclosure” and that this “serious and growing problem” could only be stopped by the execution of Manning. If Rep. Rogers is representative of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don’t need.
The US government, a font of imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it commits, no matter how vile, can possibly be a war crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country, and four million displaced Iraqis are all justified, because the “threatened” US Superpower had to protect itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that the US government knew for a fact were not in Iraq and could not have been a threat to the US if they were in Iraq.
When other countries attempt to enforce the international laws that the Americans established in order to execute Germans defeated in World War II, the US government goes to work and blocks the attempt. A year ago on October 8, the Spanish Senate, obeying its American master, limited Spain’s laws of universal jurisdiction in order to sink a legitimate war crimes case brought against George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Tony Blair,and Gordon Brown.
The West includes Israel, and there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover, if you mention any of them you are declared to be an anti-semite. I only mention them in order to prove that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and anti-NATO, but am simply against war crimes. It was the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Goldstone, who produced the UN report indicating that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For his efforts, Israel declared the Zionist Goldstone to be “a self-hating Jew,” and the US Congress, on instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard the Goldstone Report to the UN.
As the Israeli official said, we are only doing to the Palestinians what the Americans did to the American Indians.
The Israeli army uses female soldiers to sit before video screens and to fire by remote control machine guns from towers to murder Palestinians who come to tend their fields within 1500 meters of the inclosed perimeter of Ghetto Gaza. There is no indication that these Israeli women are bothered by gunning down young children and old people who come to tend to their fields.
If the crimes were limited to war and the theft of lands, perhaps we could say it is a case of jingoism sidetracking traditional morality, otherwise still in effect.
Alas, the collapse of morality is too widespread. Some sports teams now have a win-at-all-cost attitude that involves plans to injure the star players of the opposing teams. To avoid all these controversies, let’s go to Formula One racing where 200 mph speeds are routine.
Prior to 1988, 22 years ago, track deaths were due to driver error, car failure, and poorly designed tracks compromised with safety hazards. World Champion Jackie Stewart did much to improve the safety of tracks, both for drivers and spectators. But in 1988 everything changed. Top driver Ayrton Senna nudged another top driver Alain Prost toward a pit wall at 190 mph. According to AutoWeek (August 30, 2010), nothing like this had been seen before. “Officials did not punish Senna’s move that day in Portugal, and so a significant shift in racing began.” What the great racing driver Stirling Moss called “dirty driving” became the norm.
Nigel Roebuck in AutoWeek reports that in 1996 World Champion Damon Hill said that Senna’s win-at-all-cost tactic “was responsible for fundamental change in the ethics of the sport.” Drivers began using “terrorist tactics on the track.” Damon Hill said that “the views that I’d gleaned from being around my dad [twice world champion Graham Hill] and people like him, I soon had to abandon,” because you realized that no penalty was forthcoming against the guy who tried to kill you in order that he could win.
When asked about the ethics of modern Formula One racing, American World Champion Phil Hill said: “Doing that sort of stuff in my day was just unthinkable. For one thing, we believed certain tactics were unacceptable.”
In today’s Western moral climate, driving another talented driver into the wall at 200 mph is just part of winning. Michael Schumacher, born in January 1969, is a seven times World Champion, an unequaled record. On August 1 at the Hungarian Grand Prix, AutoWeek Reports that Schumacher tried to drive his former Ferrari teammate, Rubens Barrichello, into the wall at 200 mph speeds.
Confronted with his attempted act of murder, Schumacher said: “This is Formula One. Everyone knows I don’t give presents.”
Neither does the US government, nor state and local governments, nor the UK government, nor the EU.
The deformation of the police, which many Americans, in their untutored existence as naive believers in “law and order,” still think are “on their side,” has taken on new dimensions with the police militarized to fight “terrorists” and “domestic extremists.” (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
The police have been off the leash since the civilian police boards were nixed by the conservatives. Kids as young as 6 years old have been handcuffed and carted off to jail for school infractions that may or may not have occurred. So have moms with a car full of children see, for example, THIS...
Anyone who googles videos of US police gratuitous brutality will call up tens of thousands of examples, and this is after laws that make filming police brutality a felony. A year or two ago such a search would call up hundreds of thousands of videos.
In one of the most recent of the numerous daily acts of gratuitous police abuse of citizens, an 84-year-old man had his neck broken because he objected to a night time towing of his car. The goon cop body-slammed the 84-year old and broke his neck. The Orlando, Florida, police department says that the old man was a “threat” to the well-armed much younger police goon, because the old man clenched his fist.
Americans will be the first people sent straight to Hell while thinking that they are the salt of the earth. The Americans have even devised a title for themselves to rival that of the Israelis’ self-designation as “God’s Chosen People.” The Americans call themselves “the indispensable people.”
September 23, 2010
Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse.
In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel’s genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.
I don’t mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.
And we have what appears to be a new thrill: American soldiers using the cover of war to murder civilians. Recently American troops were arrested for murdering Afghan civilians for fun and collecting trophies such as fingers and skulls.
This revelation came on the heels of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s alleged leak of a US Army video of US soldiers in helicopters and their controllers thousands of miles away having fun with joy sticks murdering members of the press and Afghan civilians. Manning is cursed with a moral conscience that has been discarded by his government and his military, and Manning has been arrested for obeying the law and reporting a war crime to the American people.
US Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, has called for Manning’s execution. According to US Rep. Rogers it is an act of treason to report an American war crime.
In other words, to obey the law constitutes “treason to America.”
US Rep. Rogers said that America’s wars are being undermined by “a culture of disclosure” and that this “serious and growing problem” could only be stopped by the execution of Manning. If Rep. Rogers is representative of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don’t need.
The US government, a font of imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it commits, no matter how vile, can possibly be a war crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country, and four million displaced Iraqis are all justified, because the “threatened” US Superpower had to protect itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that the US government knew for a fact were not in Iraq and could not have been a threat to the US if they were in Iraq.
When other countries attempt to enforce the international laws that the Americans established in order to execute Germans defeated in World War II, the US government goes to work and blocks the attempt. A year ago on October 8, the Spanish Senate, obeying its American master, limited Spain’s laws of universal jurisdiction in order to sink a legitimate war crimes case brought against George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Tony Blair,and Gordon Brown.
The West includes Israel, and there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover, if you mention any of them you are declared to be an anti-semite. I only mention them in order to prove that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and anti-NATO, but am simply against war crimes. It was the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Goldstone, who produced the UN report indicating that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For his efforts, Israel declared the Zionist Goldstone to be “a self-hating Jew,” and the US Congress, on instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard the Goldstone Report to the UN.
As the Israeli official said, we are only doing to the Palestinians what the Americans did to the American Indians.
The Israeli army uses female soldiers to sit before video screens and to fire by remote control machine guns from towers to murder Palestinians who come to tend their fields within 1500 meters of the inclosed perimeter of Ghetto Gaza. There is no indication that these Israeli women are bothered by gunning down young children and old people who come to tend to their fields.
If the crimes were limited to war and the theft of lands, perhaps we could say it is a case of jingoism sidetracking traditional morality, otherwise still in effect.
Alas, the collapse of morality is too widespread. Some sports teams now have a win-at-all-cost attitude that involves plans to injure the star players of the opposing teams. To avoid all these controversies, let’s go to Formula One racing where 200 mph speeds are routine.
Prior to 1988, 22 years ago, track deaths were due to driver error, car failure, and poorly designed tracks compromised with safety hazards. World Champion Jackie Stewart did much to improve the safety of tracks, both for drivers and spectators. But in 1988 everything changed. Top driver Ayrton Senna nudged another top driver Alain Prost toward a pit wall at 190 mph. According to AutoWeek (August 30, 2010), nothing like this had been seen before. “Officials did not punish Senna’s move that day in Portugal, and so a significant shift in racing began.” What the great racing driver Stirling Moss called “dirty driving” became the norm.
Nigel Roebuck in AutoWeek reports that in 1996 World Champion Damon Hill said that Senna’s win-at-all-cost tactic “was responsible for fundamental change in the ethics of the sport.” Drivers began using “terrorist tactics on the track.” Damon Hill said that “the views that I’d gleaned from being around my dad [twice world champion Graham Hill] and people like him, I soon had to abandon,” because you realized that no penalty was forthcoming against the guy who tried to kill you in order that he could win.
When asked about the ethics of modern Formula One racing, American World Champion Phil Hill said: “Doing that sort of stuff in my day was just unthinkable. For one thing, we believed certain tactics were unacceptable.”
In today’s Western moral climate, driving another talented driver into the wall at 200 mph is just part of winning. Michael Schumacher, born in January 1969, is a seven times World Champion, an unequaled record. On August 1 at the Hungarian Grand Prix, AutoWeek Reports that Schumacher tried to drive his former Ferrari teammate, Rubens Barrichello, into the wall at 200 mph speeds.
Confronted with his attempted act of murder, Schumacher said: “This is Formula One. Everyone knows I don’t give presents.”
Neither does the US government, nor state and local governments, nor the UK government, nor the EU.
The deformation of the police, which many Americans, in their untutored existence as naive believers in “law and order,” still think are “on their side,” has taken on new dimensions with the police militarized to fight “terrorists” and “domestic extremists.” (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
The police have been off the leash since the civilian police boards were nixed by the conservatives. Kids as young as 6 years old have been handcuffed and carted off to jail for school infractions that may or may not have occurred. So have moms with a car full of children see, for example, THIS...
Anyone who googles videos of US police gratuitous brutality will call up tens of thousands of examples, and this is after laws that make filming police brutality a felony. A year or two ago such a search would call up hundreds of thousands of videos.
In one of the most recent of the numerous daily acts of gratuitous police abuse of citizens, an 84-year-old man had his neck broken because he objected to a night time towing of his car. The goon cop body-slammed the 84-year old and broke his neck. The Orlando, Florida, police department says that the old man was a “threat” to the well-armed much younger police goon, because the old man clenched his fist.
Americans will be the first people sent straight to Hell while thinking that they are the salt of the earth. The Americans have even devised a title for themselves to rival that of the Israelis’ self-designation as “God’s Chosen People.” The Americans call themselves “the indispensable people.”
Thursday, August 26, 2010
The Growing U.S. Police State: Leading Democrats and Republicans Involved
The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS
By: Adam Cohen
Time
Thu Aug 26, 3:45 am ET
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.
After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)
In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.
The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.
Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."
The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state - with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.
Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's - including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.
In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous - decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."
Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.
____________
Confirmed: Obama Authorizes Assassination of U.S. Citizen
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com original HERE...
Wednesday, Apr 7, 2010 07:08 ET
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.
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield. I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they're sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind. I won't repeat those arguments, but I do want to highlight how unbelievably Orwellian and tyrannical this is in light of these new articles today.
Just consider how the NYT reports on Obama's assassination order and how it is justified:
The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday. . . .
American counterterrorism officials say Mr. Awlaki is an operative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate of the terror network in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They say they believe that he has become a recruiter for the terrorist network, feeding prospects into plots aimed at the United States and at Americans abroad, the officials said.
It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president. . . .
"The danger Awlaki poses to this country is no longer confined to words," said an American official, who like other current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke of the classified counterterrorism measures on the condition of anonymity. "He’s gotten involved in plots."
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.
Instead, in Barack Obama's America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens -- and a death penalty imposed -- is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone's guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America's newspapers -- cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they're granted -- to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist. It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist "involved in plots." These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth. And the punishment is thus decreed: this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done. What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?
Just to get a sense for how extreme this behavior is, consider -- as the NYT reported -- that not even George Bush targeted American citizens for this type of extra-judicial killing (though a 2002 drone attack in Yemen did result in the death of an American citizen). Even more strikingly, Antonin Scalia, in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, wrote an Opinion (joined by Justice Stevens) arguing that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. Government merely to imprison (let alone kill) American citizens as "enemy combatants"; instead, they argued, the Constitution required that Americans be charged with crimes (such as treason) and be given a trial before being punished. The full Hamdi Court held that at least some due process was required before Americans could be imprisoned as "enemy combatants." Yet now, Barack Obama is claiming the right not merely to imprison, but to assassinate far from any battlefield, American citizens with no due process of any kind. Even GOP Congressman Pete Hoekstra, when questioning Adm. Blair, recognized the severe dangers raised by this asserted power.
And what about all the progressives who screamed for years about the Bush administration's tyrannical treatment of Jose Padilla? Bush merely imprisoned Padilla for years without a trial. If that's a vicious, tyrannical assault on the Constitution -- and it was -- what should they be saying about the Nobel Peace Prize winner's assassination of American citizens without any due process?
All of this underscores the principal point made in this excellent new article by Eli Lake, who compellingly and comprehensively documents what readers here well know: that while Obama's "speeches and some of his administration’s policy rollouts have emphasized a break from the Bush era," the reality is that the administration has retained and, in some cases, built upon the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism. As Al Gore asked in his superb 2006 speech protesting Bush's "War on the Constitution":
Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?
If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?
If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?
Notice the power that was missing from Gore's indictment of Bush radicalism: the power to kill American citizens. Add that to the litany -- as Obama has now done -- and consider how much more compelling Gore's accusatory questions become.
UPDATE: When Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination, the Constitutional Law Scholar answered a questionnaire about executive power distributed by The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage, and this was one of his answers:
5. Does the Constitution permit a president to detain US citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants?
[Obama]: No. I reject the Bush Administration's claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.
So back then, Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges. Now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges. Could even his hardest-core loyalists try to reconcile that with a straight face? As Spencer Ackerman documents today, not even John Yoo claimed that the President possessed the power Obama is claiming here.
UPDATE II: If you're going to go into the comment section -- or anywhere else -- and argue that this is all justified because Awlaki is an Evil, Violent, Murdering Terrorist Trying to Kill Americans, you should say how you know that. Generally, guilt is determined by having a trial where the evidence is presented and the accused has an opportunity to defend himself -- not by putting blind authoritarian faith in the unchecked accusations of government leaders, even if it happens to be Barack Obama. That's especially true given how many times accusations of Terrorism by the U.S. Government have proven to be false.
UPDATE III: Congratulations, Barack Obama: you're now to the Right of National Review on issues of executive power and due process, as Kevin Williamson objects: "Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. . . . Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. " But Andy McCarthy -- who is about the most crazed Far Right extremist on such matters as it gets, literally -- is as pleased as can be with what Obama is doing (or, as Gawker puts it, "Obama Does Something Bloodthirsty Enough to Please the Psychos").
____________
How Empires Rule at Home
By: Professor Francis A. Boyle, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence - Could The US War On Terrorism Go Nuclear? (Clarity Press, 2002),
original HERE...
Undoubtedly, the further expansion of the American Empire and Pax Americana abroad will require the further imposition of an American police state here at home. As the Romans discovered, an Empire is incompatible with a Republic. No point would be served here by reviewing the extensive literature that was generated during the Vietnam War comparing the United States with the demise of the Imperial Athenian Democracy during what Thucydides first denominated as the “Peloponnesian War” that really extended over 27 years. Yet the Bush Jr. administration is publicly and shamelessly promising us a war against terrorism without a conceivable end in sight. Not even the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
Bush Jr.'s Constitutional Coup D'Êtat
From the Supreme Court's installation of Bush Jr. as President to the Ashcroft/Federalist Society post-September 11th regime of police state “laws,” the politico-legal functioning of America is increasingly resembling that of a Banana Republic. Since September 11th, we have seen one blow against the U.S. Constitution after another. For example, Attorney General John Ashcroft unilaterally instituted the monitoring of attorney-client communications despite the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures and the Sixth Amendment right to representation by Counsel in criminal cases. He just went ahead and did it, without even bothering to inform anyone.
Over 1100 aliens have been picked up and “disappeared” by Ashcroft and his Department of Injustice. The American People have no idea where most of these people are. They are being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law, for a period of detention which has not been defined. Ashcroft proclaimed another ukaze that these immigration proceedings must be held in secret. The phenomenon of “enforced disappearances” is considered to be a crime against humanity by Article 7(I)(i) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court.
It appears that many of these aliens have been deprived of their basic human rights to consular notification and access as set forth in the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which the United States is a contracting party and which even the U.S. State Department concedes constitutes binding customary international law. Apparently Bush Jr.'s left hand does not care about what his right hand does. Yet another international convention set at naught.
The one characteristic these detained foreigners have in common is that they are mostly Muslims, Arabs, and Asians. Everyone needs a scapegoat for the 11 September tragedy, and it looks like we have one, both at home and abroad. Thousands more such aliens are being moved into the pipeline for the Ashcroft gulag by the FBI.
Ashcroft is now planning to reinstate the infamous COINTELPRO Program, whose atrocities against the civil rights and civil liberties of the American People have been amply documented elsewhere.
It is just a matter of time before the Bush Jr. Leaguers unleash the newly-augmented powers of the FBI, CIA and NSA directly against the American People. (Professor Boyle was almost clairvoyant here in that his prediction has now come true) And we already have 2 million Americans rotting away in prison -- the highest rate of incarceration in the world, a disproportionate majority of whom are Americans of Color, victims of the Nixon/Ford, Reagan/Bush, and Clinton administrations' racist “war on drugs,” which is really a war against people of color. [32] The American Police State has already arrived for people of color!
Ashcroft's Police State
This brings the analysis to the Ashcroft Police State Act. There are no other words to describe it. While Bush failed to get a formal declaration of war that would have rendered him a constitutional dictator, clearly Attorney General John Ashcroft and his right-wing Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into what they called an anti-terrorism bill, and then rammed it through Congress, giving it the appropriately Orwellian name of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. According to one report, Ashcroft's first draft would have had Congress suspend the ancient Writ of Habeas Corpus -- the necessary prerequisite for imposing a police state in the United States of America. Many Members of Congress publicly admitted that they did not even bother to read the Ashcroft Police State Act. Another Congressman said basically: “Right, but there's nothing new about that.” Interestingly enough the so-called liberal Democrats in the House and the Senate were willing to give Bush Jr. and Ashcroft more police state powers than the conservative Republicans in the House. But there are no real differences that matter between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to promoting America's self-proclaimed “Manifest Destiny” to control the World and now Outer Space too.
Bush's Kangaroo Courts
It would take an entire law review article for me to analyze all the legal and human rights problems with Bush Jr.'s proposed military commissions. Here a cabal of Federalist Society Lawyers in the White House got President Bush to sign a Presidential Order on 13 November 2001 which, when implemented, will be widely recognized to constitute a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and establish a prima facie case of criminal accountability against the President himself. It is emblematic of this particular war that right towards its very outset President George W. Bush personally incriminated himself under both international criminal law and United States domestic criminal law. The Bush Jr. administration has severely undermined the integrity of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. By doing this, the Bush Jr. administration has opened up U.S. Armed Forces and civilians around the world to similar reprisals, which has already happened.
As a licensed attorney for 25 years, a law professor for 23 years and someone who has done a good deal of criminal defense work in U.S. Federal Courts, I am opposed to the insinuation of these Federalist Society Lawyers that America's Federal Courts established by Article III of the U.S. Constitution cannot hold accountable those responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. This is an insult to all Federal Judges, Federal Prosecutors, Federal Public Defenders and all the Lawyers who are Officers of these Courts.
In one fell stroke these Federalist Society lawyers have besmirched and undermined the integrity of two Branches of the United States Federal Government established by the Constitution -- the Presidency and the Judiciary. So far the U.S. Congress has supinely gone along with the Bush Jr. police state agenda. If and when these Bush/Ashcroft police state practices make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, many of them will probably be upheld. After all, a 5 to 4 majority of the Supreme Court already gave the Presidency to Bush Jr. We need to seriously consider whether they would strike down laws and practices that would give Bush Jr. a Police State as well.
Philosophers have taught that a People get the type of government they deserve. If the American People permit the Bush Jr. Leaguers to impose a Police State at home in the name of furthering Pax Americana abroad, we will have deserved it by abnegating our responsibilities as Citizens living in what is supposed to be a constitutional Republic with a commitment to the Rule of Law. The same thing happened to the Romans and to the Athenians. The United States of America is not immune to the laws of history. Sic transit gloria mundi!
____________
Obama's US Assassination Program? Part 1
by: Chuck Norris
Human Events.com
Posted 07/27/2010 ET
Updated 07/28/2010 ET
Sound too conspiratorial to be true? Like the cover-up ops of spy novels? Well, it's reality. And it is possibly the most bizarre, inhumane and abusive way that the White House is expanding its power over the American people.
It's not an extremist belief or theory of the far right. It's a fact that has been confirmed by The New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC and even documented by the far-left online magazine Salon.com. (Glen Greenwald of Salon and Chuch Norris are at opposite ends of the political spectrum and yet both agree on this).
And it's the gravest nightmare of U.S. citizens and abandonment of our Constitution to date: a presidential assassination program in which U.S. citizens are in the literal scopes of the executive branch based upon nothing more than allegations of terrorism involvement as the branch defines it.
Of course, the CIA has executed covert assassinations of foreigners for decades. But tragically, Obama is expanding this program to include American, non-Islamic, stateside, homegrown terrorists.
It all started in January, when The Washington Post reported: "As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a (Yemeni) compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture."
"A shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing"?
That's right. No arrest. No Miranda rights. No due process. No trial. Just a bullet.
While the Obama administration continues its Bush-blaming for the economy, it is mega-morphing Bush policy in covert ops overseas, which was, according to the Post, "to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests."
Well, in recent weeks, the Obama administration has taken this overseas killing op to a new low: stateside assassinations.
A former director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, confessed before Congress: "We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community. If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
If you are wondering who the "we" are to whom Adm. Blair refers, they are Smith, Wesson and the White House.
Now we know what deputy national security adviser John Brennan meant when he admitted in May, "And under President Obama, we have built upon the work of the previous administration and have accelerated efforts in many areas." (Remember when Bush's eavesdropping on U.S. citizens seemed harsh?)
Brennan further explained then that the problem of homegrown terrorists ranks as a top priority because of the increasing number of U.S. individuals who have become "captivated by extremist ideology or causes." He went on to say, "There are ... dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the world and ... are very concerning to us."
Do you think "different parts of the world" doesn't include their country of origin?
Conveniently, the Obama administration also is integrating a pervasive plan to ensure the termination of radicals as the feds deem them abroad and domestic, too, with the resurrection of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, introduced by Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif. Also known as H.R. 1955, it was passed in the House by the Democratic majority but was rejected by the Senate.
Everyone thought that legislation was dead until the Obama administration resurrected its tenets in its 52-page "National Security Strategy," released in May. So alarming is the feds' potential abuse of power that officials from London to the Kremlin are recognizing the threat to U.S. citizens.
The European Union Times reported, "Foreign Ministry reports circulating in the Kremlin today are warning that an already explosive situation in the United States is about to get a whole lot worse as a new law put forth by President Obama is said capable of seeing up to 500,000 American citizens jailed for the crime of opposing their government."
Woodrow Wilson, during his reign as president, incarcerated more than 2,000 U.S. citizens for speaking out against the government. And now for the first time since, a U.S. president is highlighting the threats of homegrown terror and literally hunting U.S. citizens as terrorists. One senior administration official said, "For the first time since 9/11, the (national security strategy) integrates homeland security and national security."
And what type of "integration" does that entail?
President Obama explained in an often overlooked statement within the "National Security Strategy": "We are now moving beyond traditional distinctions between homeland and national security. ... This includes a determination to prevent terrorist attacks against the American people by fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions and precautions that we take at home."
Could it be any clearer? Right out of the horse's mouth. Or do I need to spell out what "fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions and precautions that we take at home" means?
Remember the words "a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing"?
That's right. No arrest. No Miranda rights. No due process. No trial. Just a bullet.
By: Adam Cohen
Time
Thu Aug 26, 3:45 am ET
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.
After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)
In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.
The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.
Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."
The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state - with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.
Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's - including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.
In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous - decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."
Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.
____________
Confirmed: Obama Authorizes Assassination of U.S. Citizen
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com original HERE...
Wednesday, Apr 7, 2010 07:08 ET
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.
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield. I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they're sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind. I won't repeat those arguments, but I do want to highlight how unbelievably Orwellian and tyrannical this is in light of these new articles today.
Just consider how the NYT reports on Obama's assassination order and how it is justified:
The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday. . . .
American counterterrorism officials say Mr. Awlaki is an operative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate of the terror network in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They say they believe that he has become a recruiter for the terrorist network, feeding prospects into plots aimed at the United States and at Americans abroad, the officials said.
It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president. . . .
"The danger Awlaki poses to this country is no longer confined to words," said an American official, who like other current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke of the classified counterterrorism measures on the condition of anonymity. "He’s gotten involved in plots."
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.
Instead, in Barack Obama's America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens -- and a death penalty imposed -- is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone's guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America's newspapers -- cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they're granted -- to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist. It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist "involved in plots." These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth. And the punishment is thus decreed: this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done. What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?
Just to get a sense for how extreme this behavior is, consider -- as the NYT reported -- that not even George Bush targeted American citizens for this type of extra-judicial killing (though a 2002 drone attack in Yemen did result in the death of an American citizen). Even more strikingly, Antonin Scalia, in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, wrote an Opinion (joined by Justice Stevens) arguing that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. Government merely to imprison (let alone kill) American citizens as "enemy combatants"; instead, they argued, the Constitution required that Americans be charged with crimes (such as treason) and be given a trial before being punished. The full Hamdi Court held that at least some due process was required before Americans could be imprisoned as "enemy combatants." Yet now, Barack Obama is claiming the right not merely to imprison, but to assassinate far from any battlefield, American citizens with no due process of any kind. Even GOP Congressman Pete Hoekstra, when questioning Adm. Blair, recognized the severe dangers raised by this asserted power.
And what about all the progressives who screamed for years about the Bush administration's tyrannical treatment of Jose Padilla? Bush merely imprisoned Padilla for years without a trial. If that's a vicious, tyrannical assault on the Constitution -- and it was -- what should they be saying about the Nobel Peace Prize winner's assassination of American citizens without any due process?
All of this underscores the principal point made in this excellent new article by Eli Lake, who compellingly and comprehensively documents what readers here well know: that while Obama's "speeches and some of his administration’s policy rollouts have emphasized a break from the Bush era," the reality is that the administration has retained and, in some cases, built upon the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism. As Al Gore asked in his superb 2006 speech protesting Bush's "War on the Constitution":
Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?
If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?
If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?
Notice the power that was missing from Gore's indictment of Bush radicalism: the power to kill American citizens. Add that to the litany -- as Obama has now done -- and consider how much more compelling Gore's accusatory questions become.
UPDATE: When Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination, the Constitutional Law Scholar answered a questionnaire about executive power distributed by The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage, and this was one of his answers:
5. Does the Constitution permit a president to detain US citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants?
[Obama]: No. I reject the Bush Administration's claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.
So back then, Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges. Now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges. Could even his hardest-core loyalists try to reconcile that with a straight face? As Spencer Ackerman documents today, not even John Yoo claimed that the President possessed the power Obama is claiming here.
UPDATE II: If you're going to go into the comment section -- or anywhere else -- and argue that this is all justified because Awlaki is an Evil, Violent, Murdering Terrorist Trying to Kill Americans, you should say how you know that. Generally, guilt is determined by having a trial where the evidence is presented and the accused has an opportunity to defend himself -- not by putting blind authoritarian faith in the unchecked accusations of government leaders, even if it happens to be Barack Obama. That's especially true given how many times accusations of Terrorism by the U.S. Government have proven to be false.
UPDATE III: Congratulations, Barack Obama: you're now to the Right of National Review on issues of executive power and due process, as Kevin Williamson objects: "Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. . . . Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. " But Andy McCarthy -- who is about the most crazed Far Right extremist on such matters as it gets, literally -- is as pleased as can be with what Obama is doing (or, as Gawker puts it, "Obama Does Something Bloodthirsty Enough to Please the Psychos").
____________
How Empires Rule at Home
By: Professor Francis A. Boyle, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence - Could The US War On Terrorism Go Nuclear? (Clarity Press, 2002),
original HERE...
Undoubtedly, the further expansion of the American Empire and Pax Americana abroad will require the further imposition of an American police state here at home. As the Romans discovered, an Empire is incompatible with a Republic. No point would be served here by reviewing the extensive literature that was generated during the Vietnam War comparing the United States with the demise of the Imperial Athenian Democracy during what Thucydides first denominated as the “Peloponnesian War” that really extended over 27 years. Yet the Bush Jr. administration is publicly and shamelessly promising us a war against terrorism without a conceivable end in sight. Not even the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
Bush Jr.'s Constitutional Coup D'Êtat
From the Supreme Court's installation of Bush Jr. as President to the Ashcroft/Federalist Society post-September 11th regime of police state “laws,” the politico-legal functioning of America is increasingly resembling that of a Banana Republic. Since September 11th, we have seen one blow against the U.S. Constitution after another. For example, Attorney General John Ashcroft unilaterally instituted the monitoring of attorney-client communications despite the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures and the Sixth Amendment right to representation by Counsel in criminal cases. He just went ahead and did it, without even bothering to inform anyone.
Over 1100 aliens have been picked up and “disappeared” by Ashcroft and his Department of Injustice. The American People have no idea where most of these people are. They are being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law, for a period of detention which has not been defined. Ashcroft proclaimed another ukaze that these immigration proceedings must be held in secret. The phenomenon of “enforced disappearances” is considered to be a crime against humanity by Article 7(I)(i) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court.
It appears that many of these aliens have been deprived of their basic human rights to consular notification and access as set forth in the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which the United States is a contracting party and which even the U.S. State Department concedes constitutes binding customary international law. Apparently Bush Jr.'s left hand does not care about what his right hand does. Yet another international convention set at naught.
The one characteristic these detained foreigners have in common is that they are mostly Muslims, Arabs, and Asians. Everyone needs a scapegoat for the 11 September tragedy, and it looks like we have one, both at home and abroad. Thousands more such aliens are being moved into the pipeline for the Ashcroft gulag by the FBI.
Ashcroft is now planning to reinstate the infamous COINTELPRO Program, whose atrocities against the civil rights and civil liberties of the American People have been amply documented elsewhere.
It is just a matter of time before the Bush Jr. Leaguers unleash the newly-augmented powers of the FBI, CIA and NSA directly against the American People. (Professor Boyle was almost clairvoyant here in that his prediction has now come true) And we already have 2 million Americans rotting away in prison -- the highest rate of incarceration in the world, a disproportionate majority of whom are Americans of Color, victims of the Nixon/Ford, Reagan/Bush, and Clinton administrations' racist “war on drugs,” which is really a war against people of color. [32] The American Police State has already arrived for people of color!
Ashcroft's Police State
This brings the analysis to the Ashcroft Police State Act. There are no other words to describe it. While Bush failed to get a formal declaration of war that would have rendered him a constitutional dictator, clearly Attorney General John Ashcroft and his right-wing Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into what they called an anti-terrorism bill, and then rammed it through Congress, giving it the appropriately Orwellian name of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. According to one report, Ashcroft's first draft would have had Congress suspend the ancient Writ of Habeas Corpus -- the necessary prerequisite for imposing a police state in the United States of America. Many Members of Congress publicly admitted that they did not even bother to read the Ashcroft Police State Act. Another Congressman said basically: “Right, but there's nothing new about that.” Interestingly enough the so-called liberal Democrats in the House and the Senate were willing to give Bush Jr. and Ashcroft more police state powers than the conservative Republicans in the House. But there are no real differences that matter between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to promoting America's self-proclaimed “Manifest Destiny” to control the World and now Outer Space too.
Bush's Kangaroo Courts
It would take an entire law review article for me to analyze all the legal and human rights problems with Bush Jr.'s proposed military commissions. Here a cabal of Federalist Society Lawyers in the White House got President Bush to sign a Presidential Order on 13 November 2001 which, when implemented, will be widely recognized to constitute a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and establish a prima facie case of criminal accountability against the President himself. It is emblematic of this particular war that right towards its very outset President George W. Bush personally incriminated himself under both international criminal law and United States domestic criminal law. The Bush Jr. administration has severely undermined the integrity of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. By doing this, the Bush Jr. administration has opened up U.S. Armed Forces and civilians around the world to similar reprisals, which has already happened.
As a licensed attorney for 25 years, a law professor for 23 years and someone who has done a good deal of criminal defense work in U.S. Federal Courts, I am opposed to the insinuation of these Federalist Society Lawyers that America's Federal Courts established by Article III of the U.S. Constitution cannot hold accountable those responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. This is an insult to all Federal Judges, Federal Prosecutors, Federal Public Defenders and all the Lawyers who are Officers of these Courts.
In one fell stroke these Federalist Society lawyers have besmirched and undermined the integrity of two Branches of the United States Federal Government established by the Constitution -- the Presidency and the Judiciary. So far the U.S. Congress has supinely gone along with the Bush Jr. police state agenda. If and when these Bush/Ashcroft police state practices make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, many of them will probably be upheld. After all, a 5 to 4 majority of the Supreme Court already gave the Presidency to Bush Jr. We need to seriously consider whether they would strike down laws and practices that would give Bush Jr. a Police State as well.
Philosophers have taught that a People get the type of government they deserve. If the American People permit the Bush Jr. Leaguers to impose a Police State at home in the name of furthering Pax Americana abroad, we will have deserved it by abnegating our responsibilities as Citizens living in what is supposed to be a constitutional Republic with a commitment to the Rule of Law. The same thing happened to the Romans and to the Athenians. The United States of America is not immune to the laws of history. Sic transit gloria mundi!
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Obama's US Assassination Program? Part 1
by: Chuck Norris
Human Events.com
Posted 07/27/2010 ET
Updated 07/28/2010 ET
Sound too conspiratorial to be true? Like the cover-up ops of spy novels? Well, it's reality. And it is possibly the most bizarre, inhumane and abusive way that the White House is expanding its power over the American people.
It's not an extremist belief or theory of the far right. It's a fact that has been confirmed by The New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC and even documented by the far-left online magazine Salon.com. (Glen Greenwald of Salon and Chuch Norris are at opposite ends of the political spectrum and yet both agree on this).
And it's the gravest nightmare of U.S. citizens and abandonment of our Constitution to date: a presidential assassination program in which U.S. citizens are in the literal scopes of the executive branch based upon nothing more than allegations of terrorism involvement as the branch defines it.
Of course, the CIA has executed covert assassinations of foreigners for decades. But tragically, Obama is expanding this program to include American, non-Islamic, stateside, homegrown terrorists.
It all started in January, when The Washington Post reported: "As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a (Yemeni) compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture."
"A shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing"?
That's right. No arrest. No Miranda rights. No due process. No trial. Just a bullet.
While the Obama administration continues its Bush-blaming for the economy, it is mega-morphing Bush policy in covert ops overseas, which was, according to the Post, "to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests."
Well, in recent weeks, the Obama administration has taken this overseas killing op to a new low: stateside assassinations.
A former director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, confessed before Congress: "We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community. If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
If you are wondering who the "we" are to whom Adm. Blair refers, they are Smith, Wesson and the White House.
Now we know what deputy national security adviser John Brennan meant when he admitted in May, "And under President Obama, we have built upon the work of the previous administration and have accelerated efforts in many areas." (Remember when Bush's eavesdropping on U.S. citizens seemed harsh?)
Brennan further explained then that the problem of homegrown terrorists ranks as a top priority because of the increasing number of U.S. individuals who have become "captivated by extremist ideology or causes." He went on to say, "There are ... dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the world and ... are very concerning to us."
Do you think "different parts of the world" doesn't include their country of origin?
Conveniently, the Obama administration also is integrating a pervasive plan to ensure the termination of radicals as the feds deem them abroad and domestic, too, with the resurrection of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, introduced by Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif. Also known as H.R. 1955, it was passed in the House by the Democratic majority but was rejected by the Senate.
Everyone thought that legislation was dead until the Obama administration resurrected its tenets in its 52-page "National Security Strategy," released in May. So alarming is the feds' potential abuse of power that officials from London to the Kremlin are recognizing the threat to U.S. citizens.
The European Union Times reported, "Foreign Ministry reports circulating in the Kremlin today are warning that an already explosive situation in the United States is about to get a whole lot worse as a new law put forth by President Obama is said capable of seeing up to 500,000 American citizens jailed for the crime of opposing their government."
Woodrow Wilson, during his reign as president, incarcerated more than 2,000 U.S. citizens for speaking out against the government. And now for the first time since, a U.S. president is highlighting the threats of homegrown terror and literally hunting U.S. citizens as terrorists. One senior administration official said, "For the first time since 9/11, the (national security strategy) integrates homeland security and national security."
And what type of "integration" does that entail?
President Obama explained in an often overlooked statement within the "National Security Strategy": "We are now moving beyond traditional distinctions between homeland and national security. ... This includes a determination to prevent terrorist attacks against the American people by fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions and precautions that we take at home."
Could it be any clearer? Right out of the horse's mouth. Or do I need to spell out what "fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions and precautions that we take at home" means?
Remember the words "a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing"?
That's right. No arrest. No Miranda rights. No due process. No trial. Just a bullet.
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