Obama Says: “I Am the Law: Accusor, Judge, and Executioner”!

• Obama Says, “I Am the Law: Accusor, Judge, and Executioner”! 
  by http://larouchepac.com/ 
  President Obama has gone the Bush-Cheney gang one better, with his claim to possess a dictatorial right to kill American citizens without any legal process, judicial review, or Congressional oversight. The “legal” rationalization for these targeted assassinations — a process the United States condemns when carried out by other countries — has been oozing out in various speeches and leaks over the past couple of years; now more of this sophistry has been exposed, with the leaking of a Justice Department “White Paper” on assassinations, entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” 
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  The confidential White Paper, reportedly given to the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees last June, was disclosed to NBC’s Michael Isikoff, on the same day that a bi-partisan group of eleven Senators demanded to see the Administration’s full legal justification for targeted killings, believed to be contained in a 50-page memo prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
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  What the White Paper exposes, is the absolutely flimsy and fraudulent nature of Obama’s claim to the right to kill U.S. citizens accused of involvement in terrorism. Obama claims the right to execute an American citizen under three, virtually meaningless, conditions:
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  (1) That “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Who this official is, what his or her qualifications are, what is the quality of the evidence or intelligence required — is nowhere spelled out. On the contrary, the White Paper states, astoundingly, that meeting this condition “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” The concept of “imminent threat” is thus stretched beyond all recognition.
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  Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), characterizes this as follows: “The paper’s basic contention is that the government has the authority to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen if ‘an informed, high-level official’ deems him to present a ‘continuing’ threat to the country. This sweeping authority is said to exist even if the threat presented isn’t imminent in any ordinary sense of that word, even if the target has never been charged with a crime or informed of the allegations against him, and even if the target is not located anywhere near an actual battlefield.”
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  (2) That “capture is infeasible.” This condition is allotted one short paragraph in the 16-page White Paper, which comes down to whether it is convenient or expedient, or not, to attempt to capture the target rather than just killing him.
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  (3) That the killing is conducted in a manner consistent with the laws of war. That’s easy: isn’t this what hired-gun lawyers are for — to come up with a legal justification for what you are going to do anyway? Ask any Wall Street banker, mafia boss — or Dick Cheney, for that matter.
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