Obama Hesitates to Kill "Known" Terrorist Iman

[longfisher]

Please see:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

The basic issue is can an American President within the constraints of the U.S. Constitution order a state apparatus like the CIA or military to murder American citizens who have not been subject to due process and based on assertions of their guilt, mostly based on their views and their associations?

Taken with the fact that both Bush and Obama have accepted the position that the War on Terror is an uncontained battlefield that includes the U.S. that means that

1) the U.S. could extrajudicially and extraconstitutionally murder U.S. citizens in their beds, while not engaged in any crime

2) the U.S. government could do so without the need for anything but accussations from a government (that until recently most of you once said you don't trust) and without according the citizen due process of law, as required in the Consitution and

3) could do so wantonly without accountability to you or I, the law-abiding citizens.

Some here have said that I side with Obama. Wrong. I'd like to see him in chains for these things. He's as bad as Bush is...and as bad as some of you are. Given this, he sincerely deserves the Adolf Hitler masks the right has used for Obama.

This is what Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali did when they controlled Iraq. It's what we, ostensibly, abhored about him and it's at least one of the actually plausible reasons for the invasion given that self-defense and the presence of WMD's as a justification persists only in simplest of unserious minds.

This is the sort of stuff we reviled about the Soviets and the Nazis and the seemingly interminably long line of repressive South and Central American governments, including Castro.

If you read the above article, you'll see that it cites a recent controversy in which NATO forces targeted for assassination drug lords in Afghanistan which the Afghan government condemned as gross violation of their U.S.-drafted Constitution. Can it be that the lowly Afghans believe more strongly in the rule of law and the constraints it imposes on governments than we do...even after we wrote their Constitution? It's a very weird world if that's true.

So, here's the question. In fighting our enemies, must be become them? Should we build a toggle switch into the Constitution this late in our history which allows it to be switched on and off at the whim of our Presidents when they become fearful and cowardly like Bush and Obama?

Must we become the evils we behold?

LongFisher

[scattered_grass]

Please see:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

The basic issue is can an American President within the constraints of the U.S. Constitution order a state apparatus like the CIA or military to murder American citizens who have not been subject to due process and based on assertions of their guilt, mostly based on their views and their associations?

Taken with the fact that both Bush and Obama have accepted the position that the War on Terror is an uncontained battlefield that includes the U.S. that means that

1) the U.S. could extrajudicially and extraconstitutionally murder U.S. citizens in their beds, while not engaged in any crime

2) the U.S. government could do so without the need for anything but accussations from a government (that until recently most of you once said you don't trust) and without according the citizen due process of law, as required in the Consitution and

3) could do so wantonly without accountability to you or I, the law-abiding citizens.

Some here have said that I side with Obama. Wrong. I'd like to see him in chains for these things. He's as bad as Bush is...and as bad as some of you are.

This is what Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali did when they controlled Iraq. It's what we, ostensibly, abhored about him and it's at least one of the actually plausible reasons for the invasion given that self-defense and the presence of WMD's as a justification persists only in simplest of unserious minds.

So, here's the question. In fighting our enemies, must be become like them? Should we build a toggle switch into the Constitution this late in our history which allows it to be switched on and off at the whim of our Presidents when they become fearful and cowardly?

Must we become what we behold?

LongFisher

You Goddamn right he can!
War is hell, KILL EM ALL

[longfisher]

You Goddamn right he can!
War is hell, KILL EM ALL

Glad you could join us, SC32.

Your response is pretty much what I expected. It's also representative of a lot of unserious thought here.

I recall when some on the left repeated the mantra that those on the right should be careful of arrogating too much extra-Constitutional power to President Bush because they might regret those same powers in the hands of Hillary Clinton. Well, Obama has not rejected any of those powers, has he?

Obama could kill you in your bed tonight along with turning your family and perhaps your proximal neighbors into smoking bits of crimson meat without the slightest accountability. Had Hillary been elected and had she followed Obama's path she could have killed you too.

You see, it's all in the definition of an enemy. And, the one in power gets to set that definition.

Never once in the history of the U.S. and certainly not once in our recent history (see revealing accounts of how the FBI missued it's Patriot Act powers of National Security Letters) have extra-judicial and extra-Constitutional powers not been used against policital enemies so as to secure the power of the party in power.

You could be next, SC32. Ever think about that, SC32?

LongFisher

[scattered_grass]

Glad you could join us, SC32.

Your response is pretty much what I expected. It's also representative of a lot of unserious thought here.

I recall when some on the left repeated the mantra that those on the right should be careful of arrogating too much extra-Constitutional power to President Bush because they might regret those same powers in the hands of Hillary Clinton. Well, Obama has not rejected any of those powers, has he?

Obama could kill you in your bed tonight along with turning your family and perhaps your proximal neighbors into smoking bits of crimson meat without the slightest accountability. Had Hillary been elected and had she followed Obama's path she could have killed you too.

You see, it's all in the definition of an enemy. And, the one in power gets to set that definition.

Never once in the history of the U.S. and certainly not once in our recent history (see revealing accounts of how the FBI missued it's Patriot Act powers of National Security Letters) have extra-judicial and extra-Constitutional powers not been used against policital enemies so as to secure the power of the party in power.

You could be next, SC32. Ever think about that, SC32?

LongFisher

Yes, and when I'm silly enough to strap explosives to myself, or advise someone to strap explosives to themselves for a silly religious cause, then I would deserve to be killed in my bed. Do you not agree that these radical clerics, advising these people to commit murder on innocent Americans, should be defined as an enemy? It could have been you or a loved one on that plane...

[longfisher]

Can you please explain why one could not merely apprehend the individual, charge him, jail him and then have a fair trial rather than murder him and his family and perhaps even some of his innocent neighbors?

It seemed to work with Timothy McVeigh and Mousoui and the Shoe Bomber. All, either in prison for life or dead from lethal injection.

What exactly do you find wrong with the system of justice that has served us to well for more than 250 years that you would prefer a parallel system of "justice" without safeguards and due process even for Americans?

Just asking.

[Sublime]

we all just need to have a smoke and think about this.....

[longfisher]

Taken from an article by Paul Craig Roberts:

As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S. citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas corpus rights. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, an American citizen of Pakistani origin, might have been the first.

Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University, was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military’s notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children, one an 8-month-old baby, were with her at the time she was abducted. She has no idea what has become of her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being tortured, disclosed her presence. An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier’s rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier’s excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach, resulting in her near death.

On Feb. 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: “The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers.”

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim. This is the kind of “justice” that always results when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.

The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen.

I could be you and your kids if you're ever viewed as a threat. Police states are like that. Remember Saddam?

LongFisher

[Fritz]

Please see:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

The basic issue is can an American President within the constraints of the U.S. Constitution order a state apparatus like the CIA or military to murder American citizens who have not been subject to due process and based on assertions of their guilt, mostly based on their views and their associations?

LongFisher

Actually, we used to shoot people for acts of treason. Shoot them with a Predator rocket or a firing squard, its all the same except you don't have to dispose of the body using the former.