News broke today that Obama and pals have a memo that says they can kill any citizen of this country even if they are not engaged in a plot to attack the US:
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.
The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration’s most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.
To sum up the memo (available here) it says that the US can target a citizen for death if they believe a threat to be “imminent” even when no threat is immediately present. The citizen must have been involved in “activities”, but doesn’t define “activities,” and it’s not up to the US to prove that the citizen is a imminent threat, no…instead the citizen must prove to one sole government official that he has renounced and abandoned the “activities”
Remember the wails, screams, protests, endless newscasts and so on when Bush just detained and eavesdropped on Americans.
Now Obama targets them for assassination and we get this from the far left?
TOURE NEBLETT: We’re at war with al Qaeda right now, and if you join al Qaeda, you lose the right to be an American. You lose the right to due process. You declare yourself an enemy of this nation, and you are committing treason. And I don’t see why we should expand American rights to people who want to kill Americans, who are working to kill Americans, who are committing treason. This is not criticizing the United States. This is going to war against the United States.
KRYSTAL BALL: …I’m on board with Toure. I think, you know, if we are at war with al Qaeda, and part of the challenge here is that is a war that does not have the borders of a traditional war, and that is what we’re grappling with really here, that’s part of the struggle. But the part that I’m uncomfortable with is, you know, why couldn’t this memo have been made public to start with?
She’s uncomfortable that the memo wasn’t released earlier is all. Who cares what the memo itself says.
Toure was asked on twitter by Kirsten Powers about this:
Wow. RT @toure: He’s the Commander in Chief. RT @kirstenpowers10: You are fine w the White House deciding who is guilty and who should die?
— Nick Dyer (@MrNickDyer) February 5, 2013
He’s the Commander in Chief.
Can you imagine him saying this if it was Bush.
This hypocrisy is just so unimaginable.
John Sexton brings up even more hypocrisy in this memo and the support Obama is getting from the left:
There have actually been several definitions of the Bush Doctrine. One of the most common has been the idea of launching a preemptive strike against any government who might pose a threat.
This idea of preemptive war was much maligned by the left during the Bush years. Mother Jones called it “a romantic justification for easy recourse to war whenever and wherever an American president chooses.” Charlie Gibson, describing it to Sarah Palin, called it “the right to anticipatory self-defense.”
…Key here [in the Obama memo] is the justification of the prevention of “future attacks.” The memo, a declassified summary of a classified memo, is especially elastic on what constitutes an imminent threat. What this amounts to is a justification of a preemptive strike or the right to anticipatory self-defense. This is President Obama’s more intimate version of the Bush Doctrine.
A doctrine the left hated and despised. Many called Bush a war criminal and protested in the streets.
But not for Obama.
Who decides that a particular person presents a threat sufficient to justify the government’s summarily killing him? The Justice Department contends that the Constitution permits this decision to be entrusted to an “informed high-level official” — with no judicial review before the killing or even after. This is wrong and dangerous.
The Constitution prohibits the government from depriving a person of his life without due process, and due process requires judicial process, not just executive fiat. The Justice Department’s argument that judicial process is infeasible in the context of an armed conflict is an argument that the Supreme Court has already rejected. Even in the context of armed conflict, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Constitution “most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake.”
So which is it lefties? You were against it before you were for it?
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