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[TD]Wayne Madsen (Washington)
Cass Sunstein's cognitive infiltrators are out in force as suck puppets. It appears that humans or programs are posting the same comments on a number of left of center web sites on the Awlaki killing. Some examples:
It is the job of the government in general and of the executive branch in particular, to identify militant threats against the people of the United States and to exercise, on our behalf, our right of self defense.
I don't think the government has made a mistake in identifying Osama and Al-Awlaki as enemies of our nation that require defensive, lethal action.
As far as your concern that those accused of seditious activities be told of the accusations against them and have a chance to answer them, I would say it is naive and unrealistic under the circumstances we are discussing - a militant located in a foreign country actively engaged in operations against our nation.
We, as a people have the right to self defense; our government is the agency of that defense; and we must be realistic and effective in defending ourselves.
The protection of our nation and our people from imminent danger is paramount, and I believe in extreme circumstances, that singular function and effort trumps all others.
The USA has the right to defend America from anyone that declares war on the USA and its citizens.
Al-Awlaki was a rabid animal that was a threat to Americans, whether they pristine innocent or corrupt. He was sent to his place in hell today. Good riddance to him and the jackal that was killed beside him.
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20110930_1
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This all flies in opposition to the body of Constitutional, Statutory, and International Law. We have forgotten and lost our sense of Justice, Legal process, innocent until proven guilty, right to trial, due process and more. If it could happen to al Awalki, it could happen to me - without any warning and any legal process. All that 'needs to happen' is a secret finding that I'm a threat to TPTB and on the 'eliminate' list. Sickening and that there is no general outrage is even more sickening. Lemmings, at best is what most American are - frightened lemmings.
CCR Condemns Targeted Assassination of U.S. Citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki
CCR Cites a Lack of Adherence to Constitutional and International Laws that Afford Due Process
press@ccrjustice.org
September 30, 2011, New YorkToday, in response to the news that a missile attack by an American drone aircraft had killed U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen, the Center for Constitutional Rights, which had previously brought a challenge in federal court to the legality of the authorization to target Al-Awlaki in Yemen, released the following statement:
"The assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki by American drone attacks is the latest of many affronts to domestic and international law," said Vince Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
"The targeted assassination program that started under President Bush and expanded under the Obama Administration essentially grants the executive the power to kill any U.S. citizen deemed a threat, without any judicial oversight, or any of the rights afforded by our Constitution. If we allow such gross overreaches of power to continue, we are setting the stage for increasing erosions of civil liberties and the rule of law."
Pardiss Kebriaei, a CCR senior staff attorney, added: "In dismissing our complaint, the district court noted that there were nonetheless "disturbing questions" raised by the authority being asserted by the United States. There certainly are disturbing questions that need to be asked again, and answered by the U.S. government about the circumstances of the killing and the legal standard that governed it."
Further information on CCR's challenge to targeted killings is online at
http://ccrjustice.org/targetedkillings
[URL="http://politics.salon.com/2011/09/30/awlaki_6/"]The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality
By Glenn Greenwald
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FILE - In this Nov. 8, 2010 file image taken from video and released by SITE Intelligence Group on Monday, Anwar al-Awlaki speaks in a video message posted on radical websites. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official says U.S. intelligence indicates that U.S.-born al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed in Yemen.
(updated below)
It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki. No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was "considering" indicting him). Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even had any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki's father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were "state secrets" and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts. He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner. When Awlaki's inclusion on President Obama's hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that "it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing."
After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.). It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its. The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world. The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.
What's most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law"), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists: criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.
From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture. It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.
* * * * *
In the column I wrote on Wednesday regarding Wall Street protests, I mistakenly linked to a post discussing a New York Times article by Colin Moynihan as an example of a "condescending" media report about the protest. There was nothing condescending or otherwise worthy of criticism in Moynihan's article; I meant to reference this NYT article by Ginia Bellafante. My apologies to Moynihan, who rightly objected by email, for the mistake.
UPDATE: What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process. Remember all that? Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President even Barack Obama vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process.
Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight? So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this: how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?
October 3rd, 2011Via:
The Atlantic:
Outside the U.S. government, President Obama's order to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process has proved controversial, with experts in law and war reaching different conclusions. Inside the Obama Administration, however, disagreement was apparently absent, or so say anonymous sources quoted by the Washington Post. "The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials," the newspaper reported. "The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said."
Isn't that interesting? Months ago, the Obama Administration revealed that it would target al-Awlaki. It even managed to wriggle out of a lawsuit filed by his father to prevent the assassination. But the actual legal reasoning the Department of Justice used to authorize the strike? It's secret. Classified. Information that the public isn't permitted to read, mull over, or challenge.
Why? What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they're asserting is a matter of sound law? This isn't a military secret. It isn't an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding a domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is an analysis of the power that the Constitution and Congress' post September 11 authorization of military force gives the executive branch. This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose his specific reasoning to scrutiny. As the Post put it, "The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process."
Obama hasn't just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set.
Posted in Assassination, Covert Operations, Dictatorship
It turns out there were TWO Americans killed in the one drone strike in Yemen.
25-year-old American is killed with mentor Anwar al-Aulaqi in drone strike [Washinton Post Crap]
The man killed alongside Anwar al-Aulaqi once ran radical Web sites from his parents' North Carolina basement and broke his father's heart when he fled to Yemen to seek jihad as a "proud traitor" to his American homeland.
Samir Khan, 25, who perished with his mentor in the U.S. drone strike over northern Yemen on Friday, according to American and Yemeni officials, was a driving force behind the efforts of al-Qaeda's Yemen affiliate to promote itself among English speakers.
Khan helped edit and write its English-language magazine, Inspire, a mixture of ideology, first-person accounts of operations and do-it-yourself jihad advice. Copies have been found in the possession of several would-be attackers in the United States and Britain.
"I am proud to be a traitor to America," Khan wrote in an article in the second issue of the online magazine, published last fall. He described his life as working in the "jihadi media sector" in North Carolina before his beliefs turned him into a "rebel of Washington's imperialism."
Born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents, Khan grew up mostly in New York. Along with his devout father, mother and younger brother, he attended the Islamic Organization of North America religious center in the city, where the imam, Steve al-Turk, a family friend, remembers a "very kind, very sweet, very generous" young man growing up in the 1990s.
"He was struggling in his school from peer pressure in his teenage years, so he found coming to the mosque and being with Muslims something that was good for him," Turk said. He said neither Khan nor his family held views that were violent or extreme.
After the family moved to North Carolina in 2004, Khan became increasingly radical and ran jihad-focused blogs and online message boards from his parents' home. His father was distressed by this and had him return to New York to visit Turk's center in hopes of countering this new direction.
"I met him in 2005 or 2006 to try to dissuade him, but by that time, he had made up his mind," said Turk, who added that he had spoken with Khan's father Friday morning to offer condolences on the death of his son. "I felt very bad for the parents. He wasted his life."
When Khan decided to travel to Yemen in October 2009, his father was devastated, Turk said.
Khan traveled with little difficulty, which surprised him: "I mean, I was quiet [sic] open about my beliefs online and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out I was al-Qaeda to the core," he wrote in Inspire's fall 2010 issue.
From Sanaa, he traveled to what he called a mujaheddin base in rural Yemen, where he trained and studied. He wrote, "It only brought me gleeful tears and great joy to hear that America labels me as a terrorist."
He wrote that he was being monitored by FBI officials in Yemen and the United States. Administration officials declined to confirm whether Khan was on the list of approved targets compiled by the CIA's National Counterterrorism Center. But, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly, officials said that CIA operatives did not know that Khan was with Aulaqi when conducting the drone strike.
Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) said authorities had tried to stop Khan while he lived in North Carolina. "We tried to shut him down through the FBI, but we couldn't because he was not inciting violence, he was simply putting out information, and because he kept changing his server," she said.
Myrick described Khan as a loner whose departure for Yemen presented a "very clear red flag."
"He was one of the key people in recruiting and radicalizing Americans, and that is of great concern to me. But he was a misguided young person, and really no one celebrates this death," Myrick said.
Khan is thought to have edited seven issues of Inspire magazine while in Yemen, which devoted much space to the thoughts of Aulaqi.
Jarret Brachman, a counterterrorism expert and government consultant who analyzed Khan's writings, described Khan as a "partner in crime" to Aulaqi who was clearly "soaking in as much knowledge as possible" from the older man.
Working together, the two had become effective as propagandists and recruiters, with Khan's articles complementing Aulaqi's Internet sermons and essays. For al-Qaeda, the loss of both men at once is a serious blow, he said.
"If it's true that both were killed, then al-Qaeda's English-language outreach program is dead," Brachman said.