Obama Personally Approves Killings Of Americans Suspected Of Terrorism

Including children. What a sick and evil person.


http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/panetta-obama-signs-killings-americans-suspected-terrorism



President Obama walks with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey.


In an interview with CBS <em>60 Minutes</em>' Scott Pelley</a>, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed more about the secret process the Obama administration uses to <a target="_blank" href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/al-awlakis-innocence-beside-point">kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial</a>. According to Panetta, the president himself approves the decision based on recommendations from top national security officials.&nbsp;</p>
<p>&quot;[The] President of the United States, obviously reviews these cases, reviews the legal justification and in the end says, go or no go,&quot; Panetta said.&nbsp;</p>
<p>&quot;So it&rsquo;s the requirement of the administration under the current legal understanding is that the president has to make that declaration, not you?&quot; Pelley asked. Panetta replied, &quot;That is correct.&quot;</p>
<p>The process by which national security officials determine whether or not American citizens suspected of terrorism can be killed <a target="_blank" href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/senate-armed-services-committee-chairman-release-awlaki-memo">remains opaque</a>. The administration has leaked information about certain targets, but it has never released the legal justification for doing so, nor has it explained the system by which members of the National Security Council <a target="_blank" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-cia-killlist-idUSTRE79475C20111005">reportedly decide</a>&nbsp;to put an American citizen on a so-called &quot;kill list.&quot; In October, Reuters' Mark Hosenball wrote that the president doesn't necessarily explicitly approve strikes&mdash;instead, the&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-cia-killlist-idUSTRE79475C20111005">attacks go forward</a> unless the president objects.</p>
<p>Panetta's explanation of why he believes killing an American citizen without due process is legal wasn't exactly comforting. Here's the exchange:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>PANETTA:<strong> Without getting into the specifics of the operation, if someone is a citizen of the United States, and is a terrorist, who wants to attack our people and kill Americans, in my book that person is a terrorist. And the reality is that under our laws, that person is a terrorist.</strong> And we&rsquo;re required under a process of law, to be able to justify, that despite the fact that person may be a citizen, he is first and foremost a terrorist who threatens our people, and for that reason, we can establish a legal basis on which we oughta go after that individual, just as we go after bin Laden, just as we go after other terrorists. Why? Because their goal is to kill our people, and for that reason we have to defend ourselves.</p>
<p>PELLEY: They&rsquo;re not entitled to due process of law under the Constitution of the United States? They lose their citizenship if this administration decides they&rsquo;re a terrorist?</p>
<p>PANETTA: <strong>If this person wanted to suddenly raise questions about whether or not they&rsquo;re a terrorist, and the were to return to the United States of course they would be entitled to due process. that&rsquo;s something we provide any US citizen. And for that matter frankly any terrorist who is arrested, we provide due process to that individual as well.</strong> But if a terrorist is out there on the battlefield, and the terrorist is threatening this country, that person is an enemy combatant, and when an enemy combatant holds a gun at your head, you fire back.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Panetta's explanation isn't much more complex than &quot;when we say someone is a terrorist, then we can kill them, because they're a terrorist.&quot; The entire point of due process, however, is to determine whether or not someone is actually guilty. The defense secretary's metaphor&mdash;that you can fire back when someone &quot;holds a gun to your head&quot;&mdash;might justify killing an American citizen who is fighting on an actual battlefield, like Afghanistan. But it suggests violence as an appropriate response to an imminent threat, rather than the actual circumstances under which say, radical cleric and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki appears to have been killed.</p>
<p>President Obama just signed a bill that, <a target="_blank" href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/obama-signs-controversial-defense-bill-new-years-eve">if not for its many administrative loopholes</a>, would &quot;mandate&quot; military detention for non-citizen terror suspects apprehended on American soil, so it's not accurate for Panetta to state that &quot;any&quot; suspected terrorist apprehended by the US receives due process. The vast majority of the nearly two hundred detainees at Gitmo have never been charged with anything, let alone tried and convicted. Osama bin Laden was <a target="_blank" href="http://prospect.org/article/liberals-guide-why-killing-bin-laden-was-legal">the admitted leader of a group engaged in an armed conflict</a> against US troops in Afghanistan; concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was more than a font for extremist propaganda has never been aired.</p>
<p>There's also an Orwellian element to Panetta's argument that anyone on the US kill list should simply turn themselves in and get a fair trial. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.salon.com/2012/01/30/leon_panettas_explicitly_authoritarian_decree/singleton/">As Glenn Greenwald reminds us</a>, we only know that al-Awlaki was on the &quot;kill list&quot; because his name was leaked to the press. Any other Americans who might be on the list have no way of knowing they've been targeted absent leaks from administration officials or the sound they hear right before they're annihilated by a Hellfire missile. (<a target="_blank" href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/catch-22-drone-assassinations">Even calling friends, family, or a lawyer to turn yourself in could be the act that gets you killed</a>.) If such an individual did know he was on the list, how exactly is he supposed to believe he'd have &quot;due process&quot; after giving himself up, given that he's already been sentenced to death by the administration? Is a fair trial even possible under those circumstances?</p></div>

 

Obama and his supporter's hands are covered with the blood of innocents.

 

Hypothetical lies vs reality. Not even close.

 

Blame the government for destroying the market.

Nancy Pelosi once had trouble finding a babysitter. So her aspiration these days is "doing for child care what we did for health care reform"—pushing a comprehensive solution. In fact, it's not just an aspiration—it's at the top of her agenda.

This sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea. But if "we" really are going to do for child care what we have done for health care, the U.S. will have to take some intermediate steps in order to replicate the experience faithfully.

(1) First, the U.S. should create a labor shortage by launching a major war and drafting men and women to fight.

(2) Then it should impose wage and price controls, as Washington did during WWII, to prevent employers from bidding up the price of labor. (That would further drive up the prices for war materiel, which would be costly and inconvenient to the government. The Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, for instance, stipulated that its aim was "to assure that defense appropriations are not dissipated by excessive prices.")

(3) The president—Barack Obama, presumably—should then establish a War Manpower Commission with the power to forbid people to change jobs, as just such a commission did during WWII. This will prevent individuals from skirting around the wage controls by quitting one job to take another that pays more.

(4) Practices such as these will encourage employers to compete for scarce labor by offering non-wage benefits. During WWII, employer-provided health coverage was one such benefit. It is reasonable to assume employer-provided child care would be another one today.

(5) To facilitate the spread of employer-provided child care, Washington should grant it preferential tax status, as it does with health care. The IRS should back this up by declaring that child-care benefits do not count as wages.

(6) To further ensconce the third-party-payer system, the National Labor Relations Board should declare, contra the IRS finding, that child-care benefits do count as wages for the purposes of collective bargaining (just as it did with health coverage). This, combined with the favored tax status, will encourage labor unions to push for extravagantly generous child-care policies for current workers and for pensioners.

(7) Washington then should enact two major new entitlement programs akin to Medicaid and Medicare, guaranteeing government-funded babysitting for the poor and elderly. Washington should produce wildly low-balled estimates of the future costs of such programs.

(8) While all this is going on, the states should impose complex bureaucratic oversight of the child-care system—especially a "Certificate of Need" program through which bureaucrats, rather than the free market, would decide whether new child-care facilities are needed and may be allowed to open. That way, existing child-care facilities will have government allies in their attempts to limit competition that might hold down costs.

(9) Likewise, professional child care associations should lobby Congress for market-entry barriers requiring providers to obtain highly restricted licenses for performing even the most mundane procedures.

(10) Meanwhile, politicians at both the state and federal level should propose a host of various mandates on employer-provided child care—requiring such programs to pay for trips to the zoo, cultural institutions and parks; to cover weekend child care for romantic parents' getaways; and to cover full-time au pair services for parents of children with special needs. This will help drive up the cost of insurance even faster.

(11) As the share of GNP devoted to child care begins to spiral out of control and the government assumes control of 50 cents out of every child-care dollar, liberals and progressives should argue that this proves the current free market in child care doesn't work, so the government should stop sitting on the sidelines and step in to fix everything.

(12) Ideally, the stepping in would consist of a complete government takeover of child care: a single-payer system in which the government does all the child care in the country, and nobody else is allowed to.

(13) Short of that, Washington should pass legislation forbidding providers to turn anyone away, and requiring all Americans to buy child-care coverage—whether they have children or not. This should be part of a massive child-care overhaul that will drive costs up even further and prove equally untenable. Then the country can go back and try Step 12—and we will all live happily ever after. Right?

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But let's try to keep on topic about Obama personally approving the killings of Americans and their children.