Holder-u.s. can kill its own
 

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20...1547#c63101547

Holder: US can legally kill Americans in terror groupsBy Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent
The U.S. government is legally justified in killing its own citizens overseas if they are involved in plotting terror attacks against America, Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday, offering the Obama administration's most detailed explanation so far of its controversial targeted killing program.

"In this hour of danger, we simply cannot afford to wait until deadly plans are carried out, and we will not," he said in remarks prepared for a speech at Northwestern University's law school in Chicago.

An American-born Islamic cleric, Anwar al Awlaki, was killed in a U.S. drone attack in Yemen in late September. Some civil liberties groups condemned the attack. Others, including members of Congress, called for a more complete explanation of how such a targeted killing of an American civilian was consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

The Fifth Amendment provides that no one can be "deprived of life" without due process of law. But that due process, Holder said, doesn't necessarily come from a court.

"Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process," the attorney general said.




thoughts?

i completely disagree with his stance on this. i am appalled that the AG of the USA would take such a stance as this.



the aclu:

The ACLU called Holder's explanation "a defense of the government’s chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public scrutiny."

"Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.

War is hell....should we send a team in, capture and bring back here for trial?
Maybe lose team members in pursuit...or just don't bother with them?...i dunno..

that's another thing...they say it's a war. and yet, when 9-11 happened, it wasn't an act of war. don't believe me? go ask all the insurance companies. policies don't pay out in an act of war, but the govt. didn't want to have to be on the hook. so that was declared not an act of war. no one has their cake and eats it too like the govt does.

as for americans on foreign soil? holder's right- you don't wait for them to commit the act-but the only alternative is execution? no trial, no jury of your peers-just some members of the govt. deciding that someone is guilty....yeah, i don't like that one bit. talk about a slippery slope!

Ah, you bring up the "official" word, the word that is avoided in much of this. If you haven't had war declared against an enemy as our law requires, what can the executive and military legally do?

I'm also waiting on an explanation for why it was okay for the United States to kill another U.S. citizen in Yemen, al Awaki's 16 year old son.

Double Secret UN probation? Or in the case of Obama, throwing cash at the rebels, a la Ollie North except this time the rebels are groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and groups who believe Israel should be wiped out

You must find it amazing that Al Qaeda is coming back to Iraq when in your mind, they were never there in the first place.

Just think that there are military widows who have been reduced to prostitution to keep their families fed and it could have been prevented if our leaders had the balls to actually declare war. But no, they have to sh.it all over the founding fathers and constitution.

Yeah...we support our troops alright.

i have no doubt that holder could come up with an explanation for that.

this is yet another example of how the current admin. is no better than the previous. we heard from the opposition how bush was leading us down a bad path-but what is this? worse. a member of our presidents administration is attempting to weaken the constitution, in this case to kill the united states' own. who would have thought it would come to this?
wonder why the name robespierre suddenly came to mind? you know, that guy was against the death penalty in the days before the terror. look where that got a lot of france's citizens.

You're such a shallow and stupid person. Making up baseless false crap you invent in your feebled mind. You can't even seen I'm agreeing with everyone else in the thread.

The enabling legislation you are referring to was passed during Bush as a result of 9-11. It is no "attempt to weaken", it is continuing what already exists due to Bush. It "came to this" 10 years ago. The silence at that time was deafening - actually, it was purposely tamped down - as any objection was "anti-American in a time of war". And yes, the current administration continuing it is wrong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/op...=1&ref=opinion


so, obama is the first president to order the killing of a u.s. citizen without due process. he also signed into law a few months back (although with reservations, so i guess it's ok) that allows indefinite detention of u.s. citizens.

chilling actions in both cases. congress should be ashamed they passed that rotten bill a few months back, and the current president should be taken to task for signing the thing.
i'm amazed the lack of outrage in the media about these two moves-but there's been more than ample attention to ol' rush, mitt's dog and santorums idiocy.

not only has obama continued the horrible patriot act that he promised to fix-but of course has not-but he's moved us even further down that road. it's a disgrace.

http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes...g/?ref=opinion

March 12, 2012, 1:42 pm
Targeted Killing
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL


In my post last week about Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent national security speech, I focused on the good news, and promised I’d come back to the parts that I found disturbing. This enraged several readers, who more or less accused me of selling out the Constitution to assist the Democratic president, and apparently didn’t believe I’d come back to the topic in due time.

Those readers will be glad to learn that, on Sunday, we ran an editorial that accentuated the negative.

Under the headline “The Power to Kill,” we said that Mr. Holder failed to justify the administration’s decision to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was living in Yemen at the time of his death.



and at the end:

The bottom line is that the president must receive some kind of judicial input before ordering the death of an American citizen. Even if that happens in secret, the American people should know that someone who doesn’t work for the president looked it over and weighed the evidence.

The Obama administration is saying, “trust us, we’ll handle this responsibly.” But in a nation of laws, that’s not how things are supposed to work.

Mr. Bush authorized the torture of prisoners and the kidnapping of civilians in the “extraordinary rendition” program, and much more. Mr. Obama is much better in some important ways, but he has continued a culture of excessive secrecy, failed to keep his promise to close Guantanamo Bay, and now he’s refusing even to let the world see the legal thinking behind the targeted-killing program.

I got fed up with the “trust me” approach a long time ago.

over a thousand views on the rush thread. barely over a hundred on this.

what is wrong, everyone? why isn't everyone up in arms about this? because it was' just a terrorist'? because it's not you? what if it is you? i bet you'd care then. you trust your govt. to get a targeted killing right? for starters, why don't you ask the guy who got blamed for the atlanta olympic bombing about that? at least he didn't get killed. fat lot of good an apology would have done if he had been. we see all the time about people who get out of jail because they were innocent all along. at least they get out, they have a life. can't do anything tho if you're dead, can you?

what about the law recently signed by obama that allows indefinite detention? why no talk on that? it's amazing, and disheartening.

https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocac...tion&id=4139&s


fill out the info and send to your congressmen, asking him/her to fix the ndaa! and no, i'm not a member...

Geesh - who said nobody is up in arms over this? There's probably just no debate on this thread because everyone agrees. You don't know what people are writing Congressmen, etc. I have, if it makes you feel better.

While it remains to be seen whether Obama will go down as the worst in a series of less than stellar leaders, there can be no argument that Holder is the worst AG in the history of the position.

Because this is real sh.it. It's not trivial, childlike horse s.hit like fake unemployment numbers and racist southerners.