We have previously discussed the President’s “kill list” policy under which Obama claims the right to be able to kill any American based on his sole judgment and discretion. A confidential Justice Department memo now sheds more light on that policy and states a broader basis for such killings than previously suggested by the Administration. It is also not clear why this memo was kept secret by the Administration since it deals only with legal interpretations — not classified operational information.
Last March, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared at the Northwestern University Law School to present the new policy, claiming that the President did not need any conviction or even a charge to kill an American citizen. While he stressed that this was based on a rationale that the citizen posed “an imminent threat of violent attack,” I noted at the time that any such limitation was purely discretionary under the theory of executive power being advanced by the Obama Administration.
It now appears that the Administration lawyers reached the same conclusion. The memo notes that there does not need to be an imminent attack in terms of an unfolding plan or operation: “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
In plain language, that means that the President considers the citizens to be a threat in the future. Moreover, the memo allows killings when an attempt to capture the person would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel. That undue risk is left undefined.
The memo, entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force,” is a tour de force of an imperial presidency. It was provided previously to both Democratic and Republican members of Congress on the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees. However, those members did nothing to stop such an extreme assertion of unilateral presidential power or to alert the public that the president was claiming far greater latitude in ordering the killings of citizens.
In an Orwellian twist, the memo insists “A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination.” It is more like a very pointed expression of presidential displeasure.
Here is the memo: 020413_DOJ_White_Paper
Source: NBC
“Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music”
http://blendzpolitik.blogspot.com/2012/04/senator-frank-church-in-1975-nsas.html
“Senator Frank Church – who chaired the famous “Church Committee” into the unlawful FBI Cointel program, and who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – said in 1975:
“Th[e National Security Agency’s] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“
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NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims
By Ryan Singel
10.11.07
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p/
Excerpt:
Did the NSA’s massive call records database program pre-date the terrorist attacks of 9/11?
That startling allegation is in court documents released this week which show that former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio — the head of the only company known to have turned down the NSA’s requests for Americans’ phone records — tried, unsuccessfully, to argue just that in his defense against insider trading charges.
Gene,
mespo made a statement yesterday during your discussion … to whit …
“we’ve seen opportunity after opportunity for tyranny to rise missed and missed basically because the people we’ve elected eschewed the chance. I think its cultural. …”
which, after thinking about it, may contain a real kernel of truth
“The best thing we could do is afford other countries the right to run their governments how they see fit and only worry about them if they actually threaten or harm Americans as the guiding principle of our foreign policy.”
********************
We tried that in Bosnia, Somalia, Nazi Germany,Imperial Japan, and a host of tyrannized countries. Eventually they get around to threatening us or their own populations. We can’t afford to wait until one of the new crop of criminals or fools get their very own working nuclear device. That’s the point people of the extreme left conveniently omit. They may crave self-immolation in service to some exaggerated notion of principle. I don’t.
MM:
“Blaming the rest of the world for not appreciating America’s self-defeating belligerency will not change, much less reverse, the downward slope of America’s imperial decline.”
********************
And blaming America for every calamity visited by the rest of the world on itself does nothing but confirm in the minds of most rational folks that you have an agenda far different from the constructive criticism you claim. America behaves quite differently than any other superpower (and it is one of course, your silly doubt notwithstanding) and allows itself to be criticised, mocked, and even castigated by the very people it helps. You may demand the self-neutering and purity of motive never exhibited by any world power in all of history. Most of us are more pragmatic than that.
A virulent hate for your former country on a par with that of its enemies does you no credit. So I ask for the third time: Whose side are you on?
mespo,
“He routinely chastises America for trying to model the world in its own image but fails to explain how any super power could model the world in anything else.”
—
America, the self-styled “superpower,” could begin by trying to model itself in its own image, something which America has not proven very good at doing for a long, long time. In fact, I continually hear American presidents swearing their “exceptionalism” to the very idea that America should live up to the international agreements and understandings that American presidents insist — at the point of a gun — that other nations follow. “Do as we say. Not as we do.” What cheeky hypocrisy.
I live abroad — in Taiwan — although I have spent time living, working, studying, and traveling in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan, as well. Most of these countries have chosen not to emulate the American model of Imperial Militarism — something many of them have had bitter experience with in the past. Generally, these countries try to mind their own business while staying out of America’s blundering path.
America could do so much better, but has chosen not to. Blaming the rest of the world for not appreciating America’s self-defeating belligerency will not change, much less reverse, the downward slope of America’s imperial decline. I wonder how much longer the American government can go on shouting to its own citizens and the world: “9/11”, “buy our guns, or else”; “9/11”, “buy our guns, or else.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. had it right when he said: “My own government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” True back in the 1960s. Just as true today. The American government, a.k.a., The Lunatic Leviathan, has no learning curve. Just a flat-lined EEG.
“By the way, when is this great constitutional calamity which you say started in the 60s going to befall us? — mespo.
I finally made my long-postponed pilgrimage to the Vietnam War Memorial two years ago. I’ll submit that monument and the lost lives it commemorates as the answer to your question. I would also submit the monuments to America’s dead and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan, too, but no one has designed and constructed them yet. Future generations will have to do that, if they even care to. This continuing sequence of decades-long disasters — over several generations — obviously does not qualify as a “Constitutional Calamity” in your view. You sound like a programmed ideologue — if not a “special ops” groupie — to me: one who has no actual understanding of military life nor any real appreciation for life and death themselves. That, to me, seems “cavalier” in the extreme.
You can talk at me all you want. But if you can’t recognize a Constitutional Calamity like The Imperial Presidency when it bleeds our country dry for decades, then you will never find yourself talking to or with me. I don’t trust what goes on in the “secret” bowels of the American government. Period.
Finally, America’s current crop of corporate thieves do not wear jackboots. Too obvious and crude. Instead they reap the benefits of privatized government fascism while safely hiding behind the expensive and stylish facade of of corporate anonymity and the myth of the Sacred Symbol Soldier. You can catch up on all this modernity, if you would like, by reading Sheldon Wolin’s classic: Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008)
mespo,
“He routinely chastises America for trying to model the world in its own image but fails to explain how any super power could model the world in anything else.”
We could allow them their own self-determination for starters. Our country is built on the idea of freedom from a remote tyrant to determine our own destinies. Such a policy is the very essence of freedom. Again, just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do something. However, that being said, a goodly amount of our policy would have shifted to what it was out of necessity brought about by the policies of the Cold War Soviet Union.
“He blames Western culture for most every malady facing the world and explains it as misplaced religiosity. That may persuade some but I find it historically inaccurate, wildly simplistic, and pessimistic in the extreme.”
That first sentence indeed paints a simplistic view, but not necessarily an inaccurate view. Consider that a cause has an effect and that how you do something is often as important as doing anything at all. For example, our policy of backing vile but easy to manipulate dictators has backfired to the point where we are doing the dirty work in the ME for the very scumbags who attacked us on 9/11 in pursuing their desire for a Saudi-Wahabbist Caliphate. We weren’t “building democracy” in the Cold War. Our policy built enemies that we had the illusion of controlling but were hostile to our major enemy, the Soviets.
“Ask the Japanese, South Koreans, and Western Europeans about the ill-effects of Post WWII US foreign policy as they sit in their rebuilt homes and factories. He may get a surprise.”
Just as you might get a surprise. As the majority of my experience is with the Japanese (and I do have a minor in East Asian History), I’ll speak first to their reaction of Post-WWII policy. They don’t understand it. They expected to be made the 51st state because annexation is precisely what they would have done to us given the chance. They are grateful for the rebuilding effort in general, but a very vocal segment of the population really resents our persistent meddling in their internal and international affairs even though they realize our military presence has helped deter Chinese aggression over the years. They also know that was a necessity manufactured by the terms of their surrender and the effective neutering of their domestic military. I’d describe it as a love-hate relationship with a dash of confusion. I suspect the South Koreans have a similarly schizophrenic view of our policies. Western Europe? A slightly different story as most of those countries were long standing allies, but consider that we treated Germany quite differently after WWI than we did after WWII. By “we” I also include the Brits and the French. The draconian reparations and other sanctions levied against the Germans after WWI were in part responsible for creating the conditions that led to the rise of the Third Reich and the advent of WWII. A tangential but related factor to consider, but the post-WWII situation in Western Europe was fundamentally different in that the Soviets under Stalin were a substantial and imminent threat to all of Western Europe which predisposed the Europeans to be a bit more welcoming to our meddling in their affairs.
I would also point out that if one wants to the an example of the chaos meddling in the self-determination of another country can cause as policy, look no further than the hot bucket o’ mess that is post-colonial Africa. True, it was mostly the Europeans that screwed that up, but they had help.
Our post-WWII foreign policy has largely been a mixed bag at best and arguably an ongoing disaster at worst.
The best thing we could do is afford other countries the right to run their governments how they see fit and only worry about them if they actually threaten or harm Americans as the guiding principle of our foreign policy.
Mespo,
Yes, very apropos, comparing 9/11 to Pearl Harbor. Should we continue to kill the Japanese, or are we done nurturing that particular injury?
Hell, a lot of people are still obsessing about the Civil War. Perpetual victimhood.
Apology accepted. Can we move on to some other bad guys, now? Oh, yeah, we haven’t obliterated the Iranians yet, have we?
We need to maintain that perpetual war thing, to keep our minds off what’s going on, at home.
For eighteen months in Vietnam I managed to avoid getting killed or maimed for nothing but the vainglory, stupidity, mendacity, and incompetence of America’s civilian and military “leaders.” It will take a lot more than rear-echelon commandos endlessly and hysterically moaning “9/11” “9/11” “9/11”, ad nauseum, to re-awaken the childish “patriotic” credulity that once led me to take at face value the transparently bogus proclamations of the dumb and criminally reckless bureaucratic buffoons who ceaselessly float to the surface of America’s imperial sewer.
Turning my own government’s pronounced policy back upon itself, I consider America’s “foreign policy elite” guilty of venality and malfeasance until and unless they can posthumously return from the dead and prove their innocence.
MM:
“I got your “noun, verb, and 9/11″ message long ago. Have you anything else to contribute to this discussion of obsessive government secrecy and its ruinous costs?
I didn’t think so.”
************************
I have plenty but it’s hard to get someone like you to listen when all you worry about are American bogeymen coming to get you. By the way, when is this great constitutional calamity which you say started in the 60s going to befall us. We’re through about two generations now and no jackboots marching from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Ave. yet. Not saying it couldn’t happen, it’s just that Vegas isn’t exactly calling you for handicapping advice now are they?
I hope you also got my comparisons, too. Now which side did you say you were on?
Mike A:
William Pfaff is a bright man but he’s never seen an American foreign policy initiative he likes. He routinely chastises America for trying to model the world in its own image but fails to explain how any super power could model the world in anything else. He blames Western culture for most every malady facing the world and explains it as misplaced religiosity. That may persuade some but I find it historically inaccurate, wildly simplistic, and pessimistic in the extreme. Ask the Japanese, South Koreans, and Western Europeans about the ill-effects of Post WWII US foreign policy as they sit in their rebuilt homes and factories. He may get a surprise.
mespo:
I got your “noun, verb, and 9/11” message long ago. Have you anything else to contribute to this discussion of obsessive government secrecy and its ruinous costs?
I didn’t think so.
MM:
” I can only speak for myself when I say that I consider every single one of my Constitutional protections and amendments worth at least as many American deaths as the Second Amendment costs America each day, week, month, and year — if not more so. So I’ll gladly tolerate a few loser jihadis every ten years who can’t even successfully set their shoes, underwear, or cars on fire. ”
***********************
Sorry, but I must have missed this little gem in that diamond mine you wrote. Like I said before, you’re quite cavalier with the lives of your fellow citizens. How many exactly are you willing to see die decennially at the hands “loser jihadists” so you can feel good about YOUR constitutional protections?
.
mespo:
In my view, William Pfaff’s analysis of U.S. interventionism following World War II is spot on.
Bob Kauten:
“Invoking 9/11 in an argument is even worse, these days, than invoking comparisons to Nazis.”
************************
You’re right of course,Bob. Why should we mention the 9/11 massacre when discussing our response to it. Dare say we should never mention Pearl Harbor when discussing the Second World War! It’s embarrassing to all those Hirohito sympathizers out there. My bad.
MM:
““I know about 3,000 dead New Yorkers who would disagree with your characterization …”
—
No, you don’t know any such thing or any such persons. You merely project your own suppositions upon others who can no longer speak for themselves.”
******************
I always enjoy your little anti-American rant. Most of the time we would have to translate it from the native language of the usual gang of kooks and psychos who inhabit the lands of our enemies but we have our own homegrown ex-pat who speaks it in the mother tongue. Most becoming and I’m grateful for that.
Now as to your thought that the 3000 victims of terror would rather be knowledgeable of every aspect of our government’s intelligence war on al-Qaeda than alive, well it’s just breath-taking. I’ll let those with a functioning cerebral cortex take that assertion in and process it in any way they see fit. I think I know the conclusion but why spoil your day.
Finally just to give you a little comparison between the terrorists’ thoughts and you’re own, I’ll juxtapose a few so we can gain the true measure of the bile you spew:
Michael Murry: My own government wants me to live in fear, and has tried to terrify me with lurid tales of evil “communists” and “terrorists” for nearly my whole life. I’ve long since had enough of it. … Far-off foreigners do not frighten me. The bungling psychopathic lunatics in my own government do. I prefer to keep my eye on the real threats — the omnivorous corporate/mercenary oligarchy — not the imaginary ones growing poppies or begging on a street corner half-a-world away.
(…)
As a matter of fact, the ludicrous, overweening U.S. Government claims to “military” secrecy — just since 2001 — have resulted in at least six-thousand dead Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan along with another 40,000 Americans wounded and thousands more mentally crippled for the rest of their natural lives — unless, of course, you don’t consider American military personnel real “Americans.”
Ayman al-Zawahiri (al-Qaeda leader): Bush and his gang are shedding your blood, and wasting your money in failed adventures. They are involving you in a conflict with the Muslims, which you cannot win, in order to increase their wealth. They are drawing up a future for you which is painted with the color of blood, the smoke of bombings, and the darkness of fear. The mujahid lion of Islam, Sheik Osama bin Laden, has offered you an honorable way out of the crisis you are in. But your leaders-because of their desire to accumulate wealth-insist upon casting you into perdition and causing your deaths, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even, Allah willing, within your own home.
Suleiman Abu Gheith(al-Qaeda spokesman): What happened to America is something natural, an expected event for a country that uses terror, arrogant policy, and suppression against the nations and the people.…
…America must prepare itself; it must go on maximum alert…because, Allah willing, the blow will come from where they least expect it.…
…We have the right to kill 4 million Americans-2 million of them children-and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans’] chemical and biological weapons.
Now remind me again whose side you are on? It’s hard to tell from your words.
Michael Murry – Excellent.
Invoking 9/11 in an argument is even worse, these days, than invoking comparisons to Nazis.
9/11 was the rallying cry of the Bush administration, whenever it had nothing valid to say. Absolutely anything can be, and has been, justified by invoking 9/11. Nurturing this injury has become the national religion.
It was eleven years ago. Must we continue abandoning our freedoms, ruining our infrastructure, and squandering lives, over this holy event?
Is it time to get a life, yet?
mespo727272 1, February 6, 2013 at 3:38 pm
MM:
“But straw-men non-sequiturs about “adversaries” aside, ”
**********************
“I know about 3,000 dead New Yorkers who would disagree with your characterization …”
—
No, you don’t know any such thing or any such persons. You merely project your own suppositions upon others who can no longer speak for themselves.”
I could just as easily say that more than 3,000 dead Americans every year would disagree with American gun freaks who will gladly tolerate any number of dead Americans rather than give up their so-called “second amendment rights and remedies,” which the text of the Constitution clearly reserves only to those citizens who serve in a “well-regulated militia.”
But I don’t claim to speak for dead people. I leave that up to you. I can only speak for myself when I say that I consider every single one of my Constitutional protections and amendments worth at least as many American deaths as the Second Amendment costs America each day, week, month, and year — if not more so. So I’ll gladly tolerate a few loser jihadis every ten years who can’t even successfully set their shoes, underwear, or cars on fire. 9/11/2001 happened because of lax airport security overseen and administered by cost-cutting airline companies. The crass exploitation of that one-off tragedy for economic and political gain by the Bush/Cheney administration deserves nothing but contempt.
As a matter of fact, the ludicrous, overweening U.S. Government claims to “military” secrecy — just since 2001 — have resulted in at least six-thousand dead Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan along with another 40,000 Americans wounded and thousands more mentally crippled for the rest of their natural lives — unless, of course, you don’t consider American military personnel real “Americans.” And all of this death and maiming has nothing to do with anyone who died in New York on 9/11/2001. As William Pfaff put it here about American military interventions abroad:
Government secrecy simply increases “the risk of stupidity, hypocrisy, deception, and naivete” and, in fact, exists primarily to conceal conclusive evidence of these manifest failures by government officials. I do not consider the obvious and spectacular evidence of these failures — just over the past five decades — anywhere worth the costs in American lives and treasure, let alone the loss of my Constitutional freedoms. Government secrecy breeds nothing but abuse. Openness and transparency, on the other hand, allows us to identify the abusers and rid our government of them. I do not fear the natural sunshine. I fear the deliberately created and endlessly expanding shadows.
Obama To Provide Drones Memo To Congress (UPDATE)
Posted: 02/06/2013 8:20 pm EST | Updated: 02/06/2013 9:13 pm EST
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/06/obama-drones-memo_n_2634535.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl1|sec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D267027
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has directed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to grant congressional intelligence committees access to a classified memo outlining the administration’s legal justification for targeted killing, an administration official said Wednesday evening.
The administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the president personally made the decision to release the memo.
Obama was facing increased pressure from members of Congress to provide the memorandum — which the administration had not formally acknowledged existed — after NBC News published a copy of the white paper, which provides the broad legal justification for targeted killing of suspected terrorists using drones.
News of the disclosure came on the eve of John Brennan’s appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee for his confirmation as director of the CIA. Brennan had help manage the drone program for the administration.
While select members of Congress will have access to the document, there are no plans to make it public. But the administration’s acknowledgement that the OLC memo does in fact exist could help the cause of reporters and civil liberties advocates who are suing to obtain the full memorandum under the Freedom of Information Act.
UPDATE: 9:10 p.m. — Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told Charlie Savage of The New York Times that the president called him around 6:30 p.m. to tell him that the Intelligence Committee would be able to access the memo. Obama reportedly told Wyden that a process would be set up to allow senators not on the Intelligence Committee to see the document as well.
Wyden said in a statement that he received the call from Obama as he was preparing to question Brennan and “assured me that all of the documents concerning the legal opinions on the targeted killing of Americans will immediately be made available to the Intelligence committee.”
“I think this is an encouraging first step,” Wyden said. “We need to conduct robust oversight of the intelligence community and find a way to make sure the American people understand the rules under which a president may make these consequential decisions.”