Censored 2012 by Mickey Huff Read Free Book Online

II presidency: creating a de facto “presidential international assassination program.” Court documents, evidence offered by Human Rights Watch, and a special United Nations report allege that US citizens suspected of encouraging “terror” had been put on “death lists.” Reports of these death lists show that Obama’s director of national intelligence told a congressional hearing that the program was within the rights of the Executive Branch of the governmentand did not need to be revealed. At least two people are known to have been murdered by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives under this program. When the program was challenged in a New York City court, the judge refused to rule, saying, as reported by William Fisher for the Inter Press Service: “There are circumstances in which the executive’s unilateral decision to kill a US citizen overseas is ‘constitutionally committed to the political branches’ and judicially unreviewable.”
    A moral, ethical, and legal analysis of assassinations seems to be significantly lacking inside corporate media. The unquestioned announcement that the Obama administration had authorized assassinations of supposed terrorists, including US citizens, was on the front page of the
Washington Post
on January 27, 2010, by Dana Priest:
    After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill US citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or US interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose “a continuing and imminent threat to US persons and interests,” said one former intelligence official.
    The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a US citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”
    Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three US citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added. 6
    The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are currently challenging this notion in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. This lawsuit stems from the killing of Nasser Al-Aulaqi’s son, a US citizen, who was targetedand killed by the United States government. It is interesting to note that according to CCR staff attorney Pardiss Kabriaei, “the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the government’s claim to an unchecked system of global detention, and the district court should similarly reject the administration’s claim here to an unchecked system of global targeted killing.” The ACLU and CCR hope the court will rule that the US government can only kill a US citizen if there is proof of an imminent threat to life.
    Focusing on American targets in a February 4 press release, Ben Wizner, a staff attorney for the ACLU National Security Project, emphasized, “It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the US, but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified ‘threat.’ ” 7
    Francis A. Boyle at the University of Illinois College of Law wrote, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In