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Beware: A President who justifies secret drone killings of Americans can justify anything
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Beware: A President who justifies secret drone killings of Americans can justify anything
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
The U.S. Justice Department has just released a 16-page memo outlining its justification for why President Obama can order drone killings of American citizens. The paper is a wild tour of bizarro-land justifications from a government that no longer abides by any Constitutional limits or even principles of human rights.
As NBC News frighteningly reports:
A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be "senior operational leaders" of al-Qaida or "an associated force" -- even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.
White House press secretary Jay Carney, the mouthpiece of tyranny and lawlessness in America today, added that "These strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise." (FreeBeacon.com)
Thus, the idea that an American citizen receives a trial by jury, a defense attorney, due process of law and an ability to face his accusers is utterly thrown out the window. What this memo essentially "legalizes" is the ability of the U.S. President to simply order the murder of anyone he names. No law needs to be followed. No arguments offered. There does not even need to be a single shred of evidence that this person has violated any law whatsoever. The decision process takes place in total secrecy and is not subject to judicial review of any kind.
The President has become a dictator
There's no other way to say it: This is tyranny. A President who has the power to kill anyone he wishes, completely outside of law and the Constitution, is a dictatorial tyrant. He is a "king." This is precisely the kind of thing our Founding Fathers fought against in breaking away from the King of England. Our ancestors were fed up with secret trials, secret executions, secret court proceedings and suffering under the whims of one man whose power was completely unchecked.
"If you believe the president has the power to order U.S. citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable," writes constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald. He goes on to explain:
The memo isn't justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that. The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo - and those who defend Obama's assassination power - willfully ignore it.
This isn't even an Obama issue, by the way: it's an issue of the next President who comes to power, and the one after that. With this Justice Department memo, the office of the President is being granted permanent power to order the killing of any person added to a list. This power is wildly unconstitutional and illegal, yet if it remains unopposed, it is a power that will be retained by the office of the President and used by future Presidents.
As Greenwald writes:
During the early Bush years, the very idea that the US government asserted the power to imprison US citizens without charges and due process (or to eavesdrop on them) was so radical that, at the time, I could hardly believe they were being asserted out in the open.
Yet here we are almost a full decade later. And we have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed - and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight.
But all this isn't even the big story here. The bigger story is found in the title of this article: If the Obama administration would justify drone killings of U.S. citizens, is there anything they can't justify?
Every violation of law and the Constitution can be justified with a "legal memo"
I'm not sure where in the Constitution it says, "...unless a legal memo says otherwise." The U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights lay out immutable rules, limits and guidelines for government. But when an oppressive government regime decides to utterly ignore the Constitution and the limits of power described therein, it become a dictatorial tyranny. We are there now in America.
Learn more: [link to www.naturalnews.com]
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