Juan Cole: Top Five Objections to the White House's Drone Killing Memo

Actually six--the article misnumbers them.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/15901-focus-top-five-objections-to-the-white-houses-drone-killing-memo

1. In the Western tradition of law, there can be no punishment without the commission of a specific crime defined by statute.
2. To any extent that the president's powers under the memo are alleged to derive from the 2001 Congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force, i.e. from the legislature, they are a form of bill of attainder.
3. The memo's vision violates the principle of the separation of powers. It makes the president judge, jury and executioner.
3. The memo resurrects the medieval notion of "outlawry" - that an individual can be put outside the protection of the law by the sovereign for vague crimes such as "rebellion," and merely by royal decree.
4. The memo asks us to trust the executive to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt the guilt of an individual in a distant land, to whom access is so limited that the US cannot hope to capture him or have local authorities capture him.
5. The memo, as Glenn Greenwald points out, ratifies the Bush/Cheney theory that the whole world is a battlefield on which the US is continually at war.