CHILLING: Legal Memo
from Obama DOJ Justifies Assassination of US Citizens
The most extremist power any political leader
can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any
charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has
not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in
practice. In September 2011, it killed US US Yemen
Since then, senior Obama officials including
Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama’s top terrorism adviser
and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the
president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from
Octoberreported that the administration is formally
institutionalizing this president’s power to decide who dies under the
Orwellian title “disposition matrix”.
When the New York Times back in April, 2010 first confirmed the existence of Obama’s hit list, it made clear
just what an extremist power this is, noting: “It is extremely rare, if
not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted
killing.” The NYT quoted a Bush intelligence official as saying “he did not
know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former
president”. When the existence of Obama’s hit list was first reported several months
earlier by the
Washington Post’s Dana Priest, she wrote that the “list includes three
Americans”.
What has made these actions all the more
radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not
only is the entire process carried out
solely within the Executive branch –
with no checks or oversight of any kind – but there is zero transparency and
zero accountability. The president’s underlings compile their proposed lists of
who should be executed, and the president – at a charming weekly event dubbed
by White House aides as “Terror Tuesday” – then chooses from “baseball cards”
and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor,
judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those
powers are exercised in the dark.
In fact, The Most Transparent Administration
Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama
lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this
power. During the Bush years, when Bush refused to disclose the memoranda from
his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that legally authorized torture, rendition,
warrantless eavesdropping and the like, leading Democratic lawyers such as Dawn
Johnsen (Obama’s first choice to lead the OLC) vehemently denounced this practice as a grave threat, warning
that “the Bush Administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens
the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from
Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the system
of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of
government.”
But when it comes to Obama’s assassination
power, this is exactly what his administration has done. It has repeatedly
refused to disclose the principal legal memoranda prepared by Obama OLC lawyers
that justified his kill list. It is, right now, vigorously resisting lawsuits
from the New York Times and the ACLU to obtain that OLC memorandum. In sum,
Obama not only claims he has the power to order US citizens killed with no
transparency, but that even the documents explaining the legal rationale for
this power are to be concealed. He’s maintaining secret law on the most
extremist power he can assert.
Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page “white paper” prepared by the Obama DOJ that
purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination
without due process (the memo is embedded in full below). This is not the primary
OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list – that is still concealed – but it
appears to track the reasoning of that memo asanonymously described to the
New York Times in
October 2011.
This new memo is entitled: “Lawfulness of a
Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational
Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force”. It claims its conclusion is
“reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal
operation by the United States US
Read more: The Guardian
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