cryptogon.com news – analysis – conspiracies

May 15th, 2010

What do we learn from the New York Times in the article below?

Some legal authorities are deeply uneasy about the U.S. Government’s arbitrary assassination of Americans. That is supposed to soothe us, I think. We can rest assured that someone feels deeply uneasy about the government murdering its own citizens.

I don’t know about you, but I feel better already. *phew*

But read on, and what we find is that, actually, the drone atrocities aren’t so bad because only a “few dozen nearby civilians” were killed in attacks that killed “hundreds” of militants. The source for these figures? “Counterterrorism officials.” That’s ok. The sensible, Volvo driving Democrats who subscribe to the New York Times know that you’ve gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. It is helpful to know that people feel uneasy about all of this anyway. Deeply uneasy, I mean.

Maybe the “counterterrorism officials” meant that only dozens of civilians had been killed in about a day’s worth of botched drone attacks? And since Barry cracks wise about it, so what:

On June 22, the US struck at a house officials called a “suspected militant hideout,” burying a few locals inside. When others rushed to the scene to rescue them, they launched another missile, killing 13 apparently innocent Pakistanis. When they held a funeral procession on June 23, the US hit that too, ostensibly on the belief that Baitullah Mehsud might be among the mourners. He wasn’t, but the attack killed at least 80 more people.

Next, we learn that communications intercepts on Americans are subject to legal restrictions. Ah, that’s nice. Let’s go to Starbucks and read the rest of the New York Times there.

Intercept programs that are publicly acknowledged have legal restrictions. What about black world intercept programs? Perhaps the New York Times forgot about Mark Klein and the secret NSA rooms inside the telecom carriers’ facilities.

What legal protections are in place for the millions of Americans who are targeted by MAIN CORE? “The Gray Lady” shrugs its shoulders and thinks, “I don’t deal with conspiracy theories.”

Surely, all of the information on Americans that will be stored in the NSA’s newly built data centers (three million square feet worth) will have been collected with court issued warrants. Mmm hmm.

Oh well, at least the main point is there: The outlaw U.S. regime arbitrarily murders Americans with terminator robots. Here it is with sugar on top.

Via: New York Times:

The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism.

The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.

To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, required no judicial review.

“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”

Administration officials take the view that no legal or constitutional rights can protect Mr. Awlaki, a charismatic preacher who has said it is a religious duty to attack the United States and who the C.I.A. believes is actively plotting violence. The attempted bombing of Times Square on May 1 is the latest of more than a dozen terrorist plots in the West that investigators believe were inspired in part by Mr. Awlaki’s rhetoric.

“American citizenship doesn’t give you carte blanche to wage war against your own country,” said a counterterrorism official who discussed the classified program on condition of anonymity. “If you cast your lot with its enemies, you may well share their fate.”

President Obama, who campaigned for the presidency against George W. Bush-era interrogation and detention practices, has implicitly invited moral and legal scrutiny of his own policies.

But like the debate over torture during the Bush administration, public discussion of what officials call targeted killing has been limited by the secrecy of the C.I.A. drone program. Representative John F. Tierney, who on April 28 held the first Congressional hearing focused on the lawfulness of targeted killing, said he was determined to air the contentious questions publicly and possibly seek legislation to govern such operations.

The reported targeting of Mr. Awlaki “certainly raises the question of what rights a citizen has and what steps must be taken before he’s put on the list,” said Mr. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of a House subcommittee on national security.

Counterterrorism officials, with the support of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, say the drone missile strikes have proved to be an extraordinarily successful weapon against militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the location of all the known C.I.A. strikes except one in Yemen in 2002. By their count, the missiles have killed more than 500 militants since 2008, and a few dozen nearby civilians.

In the fullest administration statement to date, Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, said in a March 24 speech the drone strikes against Al Qaeda and its allies were lawful as part of the military action authorized by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as under the general principle of self-defense. By those rules, he said, such targeted killing was not assassination, which is banned by executive order.