The Day the 5th Amendment was Droned to Death
http://www.juancole.com/2014/02/amendment-droned-death.html
The Day the 5th Amendment was Droned to Death
By Juan Cole | Feb. 17, 2014
(By Peter van Buren via Tomdispatch)
While youre savoring your cup o joe, imagine the president of the United States hunched over his own coffee, considering the murder of another American citizen. Now, if you were plotting to kill an American over coffee, you could end up in jail on a whole range of charges including depending on the situation terrorism. However, if the presidents doing the killing, its all nice and lets put those quote marks around it legal. How do we know? Were assured that the Justice Department tells him so. And thats justice enough in post-Constitutional America.
Through what seems to have been an Obama administration leak to the Associated Press, we recently learned that the president and his top officials believe a U.S. citizen name unknown to us out here probably somewhere in the tribal backlands of Pakistan, is reputedly planning attacks against Americans abroad. As a result, the White House has, for the last several months, been considering whether or not to assassinate him by drone without trial or due process.
Supposedly, the one thing thats held up sending in the drones is the administrations desire to make sure the kill is legal. (Those quotes again.)
Last May, Obama gave a speech on the subject. It was, in part, a response to growing anger in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere over the CIAs ongoing drone assassination campaigns with all their collateral damage, and to the White Houses reported kill list. In it, he insisted that any target of the drones must pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people. At the time, the White House also issued a fact sheet that stated: Lethal force must only be used to prevent or stop attacks against U.S. persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible and no other reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat effectively. While that sounds like a pretty imposing set of hurdles to leap, all of the legal criteria are determined in secret by the White House with advice from the Justice Department, but with no oversight or accountability.