Legal experts slam U.S. "Targeted Killings" of American Citizens suspected of being "terrorists"

RIGHTS:
Legal Experts Slam "Targeted Killings" of US Citizens
By William Fisher
February 5, 2010

Civil liberties advocates and legal authorities struck back Friday at what they describe as the "deliberate targeted killing of U.S. citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is."

In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told IPS that "this extrajudicial execution of human beings" violates both international human rights law and the fifth amendment of the U.S. constitution.

"The U.S. government has now established a 'death list' for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called dirty wars," he said.

Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee, told IPS, "As with its embrace of the Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration's even greater reliance on targeted extra-judicial killing - including of U.S. citizens - is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake."

"Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty, this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of U.S. citizens," he said.

Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said, "It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorise the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'"

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http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=2835

this is fucking scary.

hundreds of outraged replies on each thread. But because this is about Obama, far too many people will quietly try to reconcile t his and convince themselves that this is somehow okay.

Even worse, some will convince themselves that this is actually good.

:grr:

This is not good. It is not okay. It is a President of the United States actively destroying the rule of law and any values we could possibly claim we uphold.

Any nation that will assassinate people, even their own citizens, without putting them on trial with real due process to first prove that laws were broken, has descended into the depths of lawless terror.

If our nation hopes to have any claim to be fighting terror it cannot be the Cause of terror.

comminist/fashionists .... or are suspected of being rebels or troublemakers .... or we got tips that they are un-American, heard from some reliable right-wing source they could be subversives ..... or maybe not.

But, why take chances?