Of all the promis­es made by can­di­date Barack Oba­ma, it was his promise to end the law­less­ness of the Bush years by clos­ing Guan­tanamo, end­ing tor­ture and restor­ing the Unit­ed States’ rep­u­ta­tion for jus­tice that got me out in the streets and knock­ing on doors. And it is Pres­i­dent Obama’s fail­ure to keep these promis­es that makes it impos­si­ble for me to sup­port him again.

The lawyers declared that Obama may accept the word of the CIA, which is able to bury evidence so it can never be second-guessed.

Pres­i­dent Bush’s for­eign pol­i­cy was round­ly crit­i­cized by most of the world and by can­di­date Oba­ma. Fol­low­ing 9⁄ 11 , Bush’s for­eign pol­i­cy was sim­ple: If my admin­is­tra­tion decides that you are a ter­ror­ist or a ter­ror­ist sup­port­er, we reserve the right to invade and occu­py your coun­try, kill you or send you halfway around the world to a prison camp.

To imple­ment this pol­i­cy, admin­is­tra­tion lawyers wrote mem­os mak­ing it all legal for their mas­ters. First, Bush’s lawyers declared that the one-sen­tence ​“Autho­riza­tion for Use of Mil­i­tary Force” enact­ed by a fright­ened Con­gress one week after Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, autho­rized unde­clared wars and the mass incar­cer­a­tion of ter­ror suspects.

But Bush’s team want­ed still more pow­er – they want­ed legal author­i­ty to tor­ture sus­pects. So Bush’s lawyers wrote mem­os stat­ing that tor­ture under the president’s com­mand would not vio­late fed­er­al law (which pro­scribes ​“tor­ture”), or the U.N. Con­ven­tion Against Tor­ture, as long as the tor­tur­er lacks the intent to cause ​“pro­longed men­tal harm” or ​“death or organ fail­ure.” One of these mem­os, authored by Office of Legal Coun­cel attor­ney Jay Bybee, includ­ed a con­ve­nient sec­tion called ​“Inter­pre­ta­tion to Avoid Con­sti­tu­tion­al Problems.”

Bush’s lawyers also wrote mem­os autho­riz­ing the incar­cer­a­tion of U.S. cit­i­zens sus­pect­ed of ter­ror links with­out charge or tri­al. But here the Supreme Court drew the line. In the case of U.S. cit­i­zen Yas­er Ham­di, a ter­ror-sus­pect born in Louisiana, raised in Sau­di Ara­bia, cap­tured in Afghanistan and sent to Guan­tanamo, gov­ern­ment lawyers argued that it would be ​“con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly intol­er­a­ble” to require the gov­ern­ment to sub­mit any evi­dence to sup­port its claim that Ham­di is a ter­ror­ist. The Supreme Court dis­agreed. While the court per­mit­ted the gov­ern­ment to strip Ham­di of most of his con­sti­tu­tion­al rights, it nev­er­the­less ordered the gov­ern­ment to give Ham­di a hear­ing at which it must present some min­i­mal amount of evi­dence. But because the gov­ern­ment had no evi­dence that Ham­di was a ter­ror­ist, it sent him back to Sau­di Ara­bia – on the con­di­tion that he renounced his citizenship.

Oba­ma has car­ried on where Bush left off. Real­iz­ing that cap­tured Amer­i­can-born ter­ror sus­pects must be giv­en a hear­ing, Oba­ma decid­ed it would be more con­ve­nient to kill them. And he asked the lawyers at the Office of Legal Coun­sel to write mem­os stat­ing that killing Anwar al-Awla­ki, the Amer­i­can-born Mus­lim cler­ic liv­ing in Yemen, would not vio­late the Con­sti­tu­tion or fed­er­al statutes ban­ning mur­der and assas­si­na­tions. Once again, the lawyers set aside the most fun­da­men­tal rules of legal ethics to serve their master.

The Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion has not released these assas­si­na­tion mem­os, but it did leak an out­line of the mem­os’ legal rea­son­ing to the New York Times. Their analy­sis is every bit as shod­dy as that found in the tor­ture mem­os. Obama’s lawyers con­clud­ed that the admin­is­tra­tion could legal­ly kill al-Awla­ki so long as the CIA says he is play­ing an oper­a­tional role in al-Qae­da and that it was not fea­si­ble to cap­ture him. The lawyers don’t actu­al­ly ana­lyze any of the evi­dence against al-Awla­ki – they just declare that Oba­ma may accept the word of the CIA, which is able to bury evi­dence so it can nev­er be second-guessed.

Al-Awla­ki was killed Sep­tem­ber 30 by a drone strike in Yemen. Pre­sum­ably his exe­cu­tion­er was a CIA agent rather than a sol­dier in uni­form, but the Oba­ma lawyers said that this would also be law­ful. The drone strike also killed a sec­ond Amer­i­can named Samir Khan, who had pro­duced a jihadist web mag­a­zine titled Inspire. Two weeks after killing al-Awla­ki and Khan, the admin­is­tra­tion used its new­found pow­ers to kill anoth­er Amer­i­can: al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdul­rah­man al-Awla­ki. This strike also killed eight oth­er human beings.

As of this writ­ing, the admin­is­tra­tion has not come for­ward with any expla­na­tion for the killing of the Amer­i­can juve­nile or his com­pan­ions. Pre­sum­ably, an unprin­ci­pled gov­ern­ment lawyer is at work on the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion memo right now.