Sovereign: Is President Obama “Licensed to Kill?”

Bob Bauman (February 9, 2010)

Glen Greenwald of Salon.com recently wrote about a shocking revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest.

Greenwald’s article described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed by the President to be “terrorists.”

As The Washington Times’ Eli Lake reports, Adm. Dennis Blair was asked about this program at a Congressional hearing last Tuesday, and he acknowledged its existence:

The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . .He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen that include “whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved.”

Although Blair emphasized that it requires “special permission” before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, consider from whom that “permission” is obtained: President Obama, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch. There are no outside checks or limits at all on how these “factors” are weighed.

I don’t know about you, but it disturbs me greatly that this or any president has the absolute power to target and order American citizens assassinated – with no judicial oversight.

Greenwald writes: “It would be perverse in the extreme, but wouldn’t it be preferable to at least require the President to demonstrate to a court that probable cause exists to warrant the assassination of an American citizen before the President should be allowed to order it? That would basically mean that courts would issue “assassination warrants” or “murder warrants” — a repugnant idea given that they’re tantamount to imposing the death sentence without a trial — but isn’t that minimal safeguard preferable to allowing the President unchecked authority to do it on his own, the very power he has now claimed for himself? And if the Fifth Amendment’s explicit guarantee — that one shall not be deprived of life without due process — does not prohibit the U.S. Government from assassinating you without any process, what exactly does it prohibit?”

I urge you to follow the web links (above) to Greenwald’s articles…then consider the implications of the Bush-Obama assassination policy he describes.

The Obama administration – like the Bush administration before it – defines the “battlefield” as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

In an age when “terrorist” can be so loosely defined in secret by faceless government, one might ask which U.S. citizen is next on the hit list?