Secret panel can put Americans on 'kill list'

WASHINGTON — American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

Read the rest here.

US invokes "state secrets" in defense of assassinating an American citizen

When senior Obama administration officials invoked the state secrets privilege Saturday to dismiss a lawsuit brought on behalf of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, they declared in federal court that the case threatened to expose secret military and intelligence operations against al-Qaeda's overseas network.

In a 60-page filing, the government asked U.S. District Judge Robert Bates to dismiss a lawsuit filed by civil rights groups retained by Aulaqi's father seeking to block his Yemen-based son's placement on the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command capture-or-kill list of suspected terrorists.

The filing also asked the court to dismiss the case without debating the merits of any future actions potentially taken against Aulaqi on the grounds that targeting in wartime is a matter for presidents, and that Aulaqi's father did not have legal standing to bring the case.

Civil rights groups filed a suit last month to halt the targeting of Aulaqi, arguing that such an action outside a war zone and absent an imminent threat amounted to an extrajudicial execution order against a U.S. citizen.

Read the rest here.

"You have the right to die. If you do not invoke the right to die, we, the government may do it for you. You do not have the right to remain silent. You do not have the right to a lawyer or to a trial before a jury of your peers. Because we are the government, and we have determined that you are an enemy of the state. Trust us; would we ever lie to you or abuse our power?"

I don't ever recalling being as frightened about where we are going as a nation as I have become in the last year or so. God save the United States of America.

None dare call it tyranny

If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.

It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.

Read the rest here.
H/T The Young Fogey

The first half or so of the linked post is pretty good and I generally agree with its complaints. The second part seems divorced from reality to me. Reasonable people can disagree with the war in Iraq. I have come around 180 degrees on that subject myself. It was a war of choice against a nation that posed no danger to the United States. Afghanistan is a different matter altogether. Sometimes I think people need to be reminded that THEY CAME HERE AND ATTACKED US ON OUR SOIL. Sorry but no one gets a free pass on that.

Afghanistan in 2001 had become the Walt Disney World of terrorism. It was being used, with the full and active support of the de-facto government, as the main base for the world's most lethal terrorist organization. An organization dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the establishment of Sharia worldwide. If you allow your country to be used as the launch pad for an attack on another country and provide material support for those carrying out the attack, that is customarily regarded as a casus belli.

Yes civilians have been killed during the war. And that is deeply regrettable. But there is an important distinction between us and those we are fighting there. We make every effort, often at the expense of our own military interests and even to the point of endangering our people, to avoid civilian casualties. The other side uses civilians as human shields and deliberately targets them as a matter of policy.

I think the author needs to climb down from his high horse and take a good stiff drink of reality.

As for Iran I have no clue where he is getting his information from. He claims our own intelligence says three is no nuclear weapons program. If so I missed that. Every report I have seen flatly states the exact opposite. Even Russia is now reluctantly turning on their long time business partner.

Still if Iran does go over the top and Israel decides it's not inclined to wait and see how nutty Iran's dictator is, that's their business. As for us, I see almost no chance we will become involved in another war. I have little use for Obama, but he is I think coming to terms with an unpleasant reality. We are broke and wars cost money. He won't do anything that might endanger his precious domestic agenda.

What's more is I suspect that his military people have told him the same thing they told George Bush. Iran is not a military midgit. And they posess the ability to inflict a cripling blow without ever using nukes. They control the land on the eastern side of the Straits of Hormuz. That means that they can very easily shut down the flow of about half of the world's oil supply and short of a full scale invasion there is damned little we could do about it.

The simple truth is that we have no real military option for dealing with Iran. And unfortunately, they know it.

The Tea Party and the campaign to repeal the 17th(?) amendment

Until recently, hardly anyone ever bothered with the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which, if you don’t know, is the one that gives you the right to vote for your United States senator, rather than allowing state legislators to choose a senator for you. But then came the rise of the Tea Party movement, whose members in several states have been calling for repeal of the amendment — and making something of a political mess in the process.

To be fair, on the to-do list of the Tea Party types, this idea ranks well behind calls to curtail spending and roll back taxes. And yet, as the blog Talking Points Memo reported, the proposal recently became an issue in pivotal House campaigns in Ohio and Idaho, where two of the Republican Party’s most highly recruited candidates got caught up in the moment and declared themselves for repeal, only to try to back off from it later. In the case of Idaho, the candidate in question, Vaughn Ward, lost his primary to a more steadfast anti-17ther.

It is an odd stance, to be sure. (If you really want to start repealing amendments, why not go after the Third Amendment — the one that outlaws the forcible quartering of soldiers in peacetime? Would anyone really mind letting a few cadets stay the night?) But the idea is worth a more serious examination, if only to try to understand the forces that would lead a group of politically engaged Americans to demand the curtailment of their own franchise.

For more than a century after the nation’s founding, as part of the framers’ compromise between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian ideals, the power to appoint senators rested with state legislators, while the masses got to directly choose members of the House of Representatives. In 1906, the writer David Graham Phillips published a series of articles in Cosmopolitan — a New Yorker of its day — exposing corruption among senators who bought their seats from legislators and used them to get even richer. (Mr. Phillips’s main target was a Rhode Island senator named Nelson Aldrich, a rubber and sugar magnate whose ties to corporate interests make today’s senators, by comparison, look like a fraternity of Buddhist monks.)

Read the rest here.

Tincture of Lawlessness

Anyone, said T.S. Eliot, could carve a goose, were it not for the bones. And anyone could govern as boldly as his whims decreed, were it not for the skeletal structure that keeps civil society civil -- the rule of law. The Obama administration is bold. It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.

In February, California's Democratic-controlled Legislature, faced with a $42 billion budget deficit, trimmed $74 million (1.4 percent) from one of the state's fastest-growing programs, which provides care for low-income and incapacitated elderly people and which cost the state $5.42 billion last year. The Los Angeles Times reports that "loose oversight and bureaucratic inertia have allowed fraud to fester."

But the Service Employees International Union collects nearly $5 million a month from 223,000 caregivers who are members. And the Obama administration has told California that unless the $74 million in cuts are rescinded, it will deny the state $6.8 billion in stimulus money.

Such a federal ukase (the word derives from czarist Russia; how appropriate) to a state legislature is a sign of the administration's dependency agenda -- maximizing the number of people and institutions dependent on the federal government. For the first time, neither sales nor property nor income taxes are the largest source of money for state and local governments. The federal government is.

The SEIU says the cuts violate contracts negotiated with counties. California officials say the state required the contracts to contain clauses allowing pay to be reduced if state funding is.

Anyway, the Obama administration, judging by its cavalier disregard of contracts between Chrysler and some of the lenders it sought money from, thinks contracts are written on water. The administration proposes that Chrysler's secured creditors get 28 cents per dollar on the $7 billion owed to them but that the United Auto Workers union get 43 cents per dollar on its $11 billion in claims -- and 55 percent of the company. This, even though the secured creditors' contracts supposedly guaranteed them better standing than the union.

Read the rest here.

That sound you hear...

Is what little is left of the Fourth Amendment being fed into a shredder by the Bush Administration. Somewhere George Orwell is enjoying a round of "I told you so's."

WASHINGTON — The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement allowing law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Read the rest here.

The Right to Keep Arms

The United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has accepted the first case that will directly address the long controversial issues surrounding the Second Amendment (2nd amnd) in living memory. It is expected to decide specifically if a near absolute ban on private ownership and possession of handguns in the District of Columbia violates an individual right to keep and bear arms which is widely claimed to exist in the 2nd amnd of the Constitution. SCOTUS has not ruled even vaguely on the matter since the late 1930's. At issue is whether the wording of the 2nd amnd creates an individual right held by all law abiding Americans or merely a collective right on the part of the states to maintain their own militias.

Revisionist and liberal historians have been bending over backwards for years in an effort to shore up the latter interpretation. However such simply does not square with the actual history surrounding the document and its interpretation by the Founders. I believe that while reasonable people can debate the wisdom of retaining a broad individual right for citizens to be armed in the early 21st century when so much has obviously changed from the late 18th century, one can not reasonably argue that the framers intended anything other than to guarantee an individual right to be armed.

Those who believe that society would benefit from broad restrictions on the private ownership and possession of firearms should press their case more honestly and seek to repeal the 2nd amnd. That would indeed be a debate worth having. However the question of the meaning of the 2nd amnd is simply too weighted by the clear historical record demonstrating the intent of the Founders for the revisionist interpretation to be a legitimate basis for debate . I refer the reader to this excellent editorial from today's Wall Street Journal.*

...The amendment reads: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." If "the right of the people" to keep and bear arms was merely an incident of, or subordinate to, a governmental (i.e., a collective) purpose -- that of ensuring an efficient or "well regulated" militia -- it would be logical to conclude, as does the District of Columbia -- that government can outlaw the individual ownership of guns. But this collective interpretation is incorrect.

To analyze what "the right of the people" means, look elsewhere within the Bill of Rights for guidance. The First Amendment speaks of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble . . ." No one seriously argues that the right to assemble or associate with your fellow citizens is predicated on the number of citizens or the assent of a government. It is an individual right.

The Fourth Amendment says, "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . " The "people" here does not refer to a collectivity, either.

The rights guaranteed in the Bill of Right are individual. The Third and Fifth Amendments protect individual property owners; the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments protect potential individual criminal defendants from unreasonable searches, involuntary incrimination, appearing in court without an attorney, excessive bail, and cruel and unusual punishments.

The Ninth Amendment protects individual rights not otherwise enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Here, "the people" are separate from "the states"; thus, the Second Amendment must be about more than simply a "state" militia when it uses the term "the people."

I strongly recommend the entire editorial which can be read here.

* The WSJ does not generally allow free access to its articles for more than seven days from publication except to subscribers. It should be available through Friday November 30th though.

Hat tip to Brian.