"
Part of what I'm gonna have to work with Congress on is to make sure that whatever it is we're providing Congress that we have mechanisms to also make sure that the public understands what's going on, what the constraints are, what the legal puh... legal parameters are, uh... and... and that's something... uh... I take very seriously."
lol What on earth is this idiot talking about?
Here's how it works...
If you're POTUS, you can do anything you want. That includes popping anyone you choose. How? Very simple. You get your lawyers to write a legal memo saying it's legal to do it.
If you have the stomach to read the Obama memo (or a semblance of it), find it
here (PDF).
There. It's a done deal. You're good to go. As POTUS, you've now vested yourself with
the power to kill folks...
The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki's 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.
...
What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch - with no checks or oversight of any kind - but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president's underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president - at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as "Terror Tuesday" - then chooses from "baseball cards" and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark.
Clearly, whether this happens on U.S. soil or not is a minor detail.
By the way, this isn't the first time this sort of thing has been done. (Some folks still play the Red vs. Blue shell game, so it's worth pointing this out.) Bush did it with torture. He got his lawyers to draft a legal memo saying POTUS could order folks to be strung up, cut up, electrocuted, drowned, and made to scream, regardless of guilt or due process.
Now, why would a lawyer do such a thing, presumably risking his career in the process? Because there are incentives. For example, one of the lawyers who wrote the torture memo is
now a federal judge.
Lovely.
And when folks come calling to see the official memo, just mumble something about national security and send them away. From Greenwald...
But when it comes to Obama's assassination power, this is exactly what his administration has done. It has repeatedly refused to disclose the principal legal memoranda prepared by Obama OLC lawyers that justified his kill list. It is, right now, vigorously resisting lawsuits from the New York Times and the ACLU to obtain that OLC memorandum. In sum, Obama not only claims he has the power to order US citizens killed with no transparency, but that even the documents explaining the legal rationale for this power are to be concealed. He's maintaining secret law on the most extremist power he can assert.
So what about reining in the President and limiting his powers? lol That ship sailed a long time ago, right under the public's collective nose. If you're POTUS, it definitely helps that the public refuses to think critically and avoids reading like the plague. Even better when the peasants demonize those who
do think and read as cranks and conspiracy theorists.
It also helps that people are confused and ignorant about economics, rights, ethics, property, and how incentives work. With a little luck, boobus Americanus will try to "fix" the problem by voting. And that's the easiest game in town to fix.
