Holder-u.s. can kill its own

[Danzig]

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.