This cartoon by Leon Kuhn is featured in the book
Murder and Assassinations are illegal under the US constitution, but
that doesn't stop Obama killing 16-year-old Americans without
explanation.
By Leonard C. Goodman
In These Times via Stop the War Coalition
In These Times via Stop the War Coalition
Of
all the promises made by candidate Barack Obama, it was his promise to
end the lawlessness of the Bush years by closing Guantanamo, ending
torture and restoring the United States’ reputation for justice that got
me out in the streets and knocking on doors.
And it is President Obama’s failure to keep these promises that makes it impossible for me to support him again.
President Bush’s foreign policy was roundly criticized by most of the
world and by candidate Obama. Following 9/11, Bush’s foreign policy was
simple: If my administration decides that you are a terrorist or a
terrorist supporter, we reserve the right to invade and occupy your
country, kill you or send you halfway around the world to a prison camp.
To implement this policy, administration lawyers wrote memos making it all legal for their masters.
First,
Bush’s lawyers declared that the one-sentence “Authorization for Use of
Military Force” enacted by a frightened Congress one week after
September 11, 2001, authorized undeclared wars and the mass
incarceration of terror suspects.
But Bush’s team wanted still more power—they wanted legal authority
to torture suspects. So Bush’s lawyers wrote memos stating that torture
under the president’s command would not violate federal law (which
proscribes “torture”), or the U.N. Convention Against Torture, as long
as the torturer lacks the intent to cause “prolonged mental harm” or
“death or organ failure.”
One of these memos, authored by Office of Legal Councel attorney
Jay Bybee, included a convenient section called “Interpretation to Avoid
Constitutional Problems.” Bush’s lawyers also wrote memos authorizing
the incarceration of U.S. citizens suspected of terror links without
charge or trial. But here the Supreme Court drew the line.
In the case of U.S. citizen Yaser Hamdi, a terror-suspect born in
Louisiana, raised in Saudi Arabia, captured in Afghanistan and sent to
Guantanamo, government lawyers argued that it would be “constitutionally
intolerable” to require the government to submit any evidence to
support its claim that Hamdi is a terrorist. The Supreme Court
disagreed. While the court permitted the government to strip Hamdi of
most of his constitutional rights, it nevertheless ordered the
government to give Hamdi a hearing at which it must present some minimal
amount of evidence. But because the government had no evidence that
Hamdi was a terrorist, it sent him back to Saudi Arabia—on the condition
that he renounced his citizenship.
Obama has carried on where Bush left off. Realizing that captured
American-born terror suspects must be given a hearing, Obama decided it
would be more convenient to kill them. And he asked the lawyers at the
Office of Legal Counsel to write memos stating that killing Anwar
al-Awlaki, the American-born Muslim cleric living in Yemen, would not
violate the Constitution or federal statutes banning murder and
assassinations. Once again, the lawyers set aside the most fundamental
rules of legal ethics to serve their master.
The Obama administration has not released these assassination memos,
but it did leak an outline of the memos’ legal reasoning to the New York Times. Their analysis is every bit as shoddy as that found in the torture memos.
Obama’s lawyers concluded that the administration could legally kill
al-Awlaki so long as the CIA says he is playing an operational role in
al-Qaeda and that it was not feasible to capture him. The lawyers don’t
actually analyze any of the evidence against al-Awlaki—they just declare
that Obama may accept the word of the CIA, which is able to bury
evidence so it can never be second-guessed.
Al-Awlaki was killed September 30 by a drone strike in
Yemen. Presumably his executioner was a CIA agent rather than a soldier
in uniform, but the Obama lawyers said that this would also be lawful.
The drone strike also killed a second American named Samir Khan, who had
produced a jihadist web magazine titled Inspire. Two weeks
after killing al-Awlaki and Khan, the administration used its newfound
powers to kill another American: al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son,
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. This strike also killed eight other human beings.
As of this writing, the administration has not come forward with any
explanation for the killing of the American juvenile or his companions.
Presumably, an unprincipled government lawyer is at work on the
justification memo right now.
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