Will the Government Use Drones Against U.S. Citizens — 83 Percent of Americans Say 'Drone Away!'

Holder: It’s ‘Legal’ to Drone Strike Americans

CNN’s Erin Burnett asked whether or not law enforcement should use drones as they try to fine former cop turned revenge killer, Christopher Dorner. Is this what it’s come to? Are drone attacks abroad so normalized that we can honestly ask if drones would be a good idea to use domestically? Cenk Uygur, Jimmy Dore (TYT Comedy) and Ben Mankiewicz (Turner Classic Movies) discuss Burnett’s question and its implications. - TYT, Februay 12, 2013

February 5, 2013

Infowars.com - NBC news has produced a chilling, confidential Department of Justice (DOJ) white paper outlining the supposed legality of extrajudicial drone strikes on U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism even without intelligence to show involvement in a plot to attack America.

While admitting that U.S. citizens are still afforded constitutional protections such as due process when they travel abroad, the 16-page report claims, “The U.S. citizenship of a leader of al-Qa’ida or its associated forces, however, does not give that person constitutional immunity from attack” [emphasis added]. Continuing, “The Due Process Clause would not prohibit a lethal operation of the sort contemplated here.”

As it has with thousands of men, women, and children in the Middle East, our federal government apparently thinks it’s somehow allowed to use drones to openly murder Americans outside the law of our land.

The memo also claims, “This conclusion is reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal operation by the United States against a U.S. citizen.” Regardless of its extraordinary nature, such lethal drone operations would be “justified as an act of national self-defense.”

According to the DOJ, a lethal strike against an American citizen is okay if he or she is a suspected al-Qa’ida leader on foreign soil and the following three conditions are met:

1) an informed, high level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;

2) capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and

3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

The paper does not discuss considerations of drone strikes on Americans suspected of high-level terrorism on domestic soil.

Although this is the first time this deadly assertion has been spelled out in black and white, the U.S. government has already killed multiple U.S. citizens with drone strikes. Born in Denver, Colorado, Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son was an American citizen when he was murdered in a strike in Yemen. According to family member accounts, the teenager was not even involved in the suspected terrorist activities for which his father (also a U.S. citizen)  was killed in another U.S. drone strike a week earlier.

Neither al-Awlaki nor his son were afforded due process before they were killed.

Even the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows for the indefinite detainment of U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism without a guaranteed trial, at least pretends to consider the Authorization for Use of Military Force’s inability to deny an American their constitutional rights.

The New York Times reported on Obama’s “secret kill list” at length last spring, noting the list included several U.S. citizens and two teens, “including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.” The article outlines how the president deems himself judge, jury, and executioner of those on the list.

Despite multiple Freedom of Information Act requests placed by the ACLU and others, the government has yet to release any information on its extrajudicial drone killings, what requirements must be met to be added to the list, or how the president goes about choosing the next suspect to die by drone.

Even as it amps up the drone war in Yemen, reports have come out just this month that the U.S. is now mulling over expanding drone strikes to Mali, a region that admittedly houses secret U.S. drone bases. Former Rand Corporation head Bruce Hoffman felt most Americans would not consider this action to be controversial because it isn’t “boots on the ground,” a position illustrating just how much unmanned aerial vehicles have further dehumanized American wars.

It’s time more Americans admitted these unconstitutional drone strikes are more than just controversial; they are murder. How can the DOJ “ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans” as its mission statement claims it must when it is calling for the outright extrajudicial slaying of American citizens?

The American system of criminal justice is supposedly based on the idea that one is innocent until proven guilty. Now, not only are we guilty until proven innocent, but apparently, proof is no longer required.

America Loves Drone Strikes

February 12, 2013

azizonomics - This graph shows everything we need to know about the geopolitical reality of Predator Drones (coming soon to the skies of America to hunt down fugitives?).

The American public does not approve of the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. But for everyone else, it’s open season.

But everyone else — most particularly and significantly, the countries in the Muslim world — largely hates and resents drone strikes.

And it is the Muslim world that produces the radicalised extremists who commit acts like 9/11, 7/7, the Madrid bombings, and the Bali bombings.  With this outpouring of contempt for America’s drone strikes, many analysts are coming to believe that Obama’s drone policy is now effectively a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and similar groups:

Indeed, evidence is beginning to coalesce to suggest exactly this. PressTV recently noted:

The expanding drone war in Yemen, which often kills civilians, does in fact cause blowback and help al-Qaeda recruitment – as attested to by numerous Yemen experts, investigative reporting on the ground, polling, testimony from Yemen activists, and the actual fact that recent bungled terrorist attacks aimed at the U.S. have cited such drone attacks as motivating factors.

After another September drone strike that killed 13 civilians, a local Yemeni activist told CNN, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of al-Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake. This part of Yemen takes revenge very seriously.”

“Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,” a Yemeni villager named Mohammed told the Post. “If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.”

Many in the U.S. intelligence community also believe the drone war is contributing to the al-Qaeda presence in Yemen. Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, told The Guardian in June that he is “very concerned about the creation of a larger terrorist safe haven in Yemen.”

“We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield,” he said regarding drones in Yemen.

Iona Craig reports that civilian casualties from drone strikes “have emboldened al-Qaeda” and cites the reaction to the 2009 U.S. cruise missile attack on the village of al-Majala in Yemen that killed more than 40 civilians (including 21 children):

That one bombing radicalized the entire area,” Abdul Gh ani al-Iryani, a Yemeni political analyst, said. “All the men and boys from those families and tribes will have joined [al-Qaeda] to fight.

And al-Qaeda’s presence and support in Yemen has grown, not shrunk since the start of the targeted killing program:

Meanwhile Yemen Central Security Force commander Brig. Gen. Yahya Saleh, nephew of ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh, told Abdul-Ahad that al-Qaeda has more followers, money, guns and territory then they did a year and a half ago.

All at a time when Yemen is facing a “catastrophic” food crisis, with at least 267,000 children facing life-threatening levels of malnutrition. Hunger has doubled since 2009, and the number of displaced civilians is about 500,000 and rising.

As U.S. drones drop bombs on south Yemen villages and AQAP provides displaced civilians with “free electricity, food and water,” tribes in the area are becoming increasingly sympathetic to AQAP.

Let’s be intellectually honest. If a country engages in a military program that carries out strikes that kill hundreds of civilians — many of whom having no connection whatever with terrorism or radicalism — that country is going to become increasingly hated. People in the countries targeted — those who may have lost friends, or family members — are going to plot revenge, and take revenge. That’s just how war works. It infuriates. It radicalises. It instils hatred.

The reality of Obama’s drone program is to create new generations of America-hating radicalised individuals, who may well go on to be the next Osama bin Laden, the next Ayman al-Zawahiri, the next Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The reality for Obama’s drone program is that it is sowing the seeds for the next 9/11 — just as American intervention in the middle east sowed the seeds for the last, as Osama bin Laden readily admitted.

Congress Prepares to Kill 6th Amendment with Secret “Drone Court”

Obama and Congress continue the process of trashing centuries of English common law dating back to the Magna Carta.

February 11, 2013

Infowars.com - In response to Obama’s imperial killing machines – his fleet of roaming drones – a gaggle of senators, led by the gun-grabber Dianne Feinstein, is poised to kill off Sir William Blackstone’s “palladium of English liberty,” the Sixth Amendment.

Feinstein has proposed “legislation to ensure that drone strikes are carried out in a manner consistent with our values, and the proposal to create an analogue of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the conduct of such strikes,” in other words a secret tribunal that will hand down kill orders for Americans the government believes are “suspected militants.”

Maine independent Senator Angus King imagined a scenario where Obama’s imperial courtiers would go behind the closed doors of a drone court and “in a confidential and top-secret way, make the case that this American citizen is an enemy combatant, and at least that would be … some check on the activities of the executive.”

The Constitution spells out the right to trial by jury numerous times – in the Sixth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Seventh Amendment and in the original Constitution in Article 3, Section 2. English common law and the Magna Carta of 1215 (Article 39) did away with trials by ordeal and by the 1600s the idea that juries served as a protection against the unrestrained power of kings was universally accepted. All 13 of the original states included in their constitutions the Right to Trial by Jury clauses. The Virginia Bill of Rights of 1788 held “ancient trial by jury” to be “one of the greatest securities to the rights of the people.”

“I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Thomas Paine. “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus,” he told Alexander Donald in 1788. He wrote to James Madison the previous year that “trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of nations.”

The wisdom of Jefferson, Madison, and the founders is now dead – apparently irrevocably. On Friday, Senator King got the ball rolling when he sent a letter to Feinstein and Republican intelligence committee vice-chairman Saxby Chambliss asking that the Constitution be ignored and they work with him on legislation to create a secret and unanswerable court which could provide “judicial review” of proposals to target drone attacks against citizens of the United States.

Barry’s handlers consider the idea of a secret court issuing kill orders of Americans as a trade-off after Democrats and Republicans on the Senate and House Judiciary committees sent him letters requesting that their respective committees be given access to Justice Department documents justifying drone strikes. The administration tried to placate critics by allowing hand-picked members of congressional intelligence committees to examine documents the night before Brennan went before a confirmation hearing as Barry’s pick to lord over the CIA.

Reuters reported that the ACLU and civil libertarians “would … likely have problems with” the idea that the government can issue death warrants in secret. Geoffrey Robertson, a prominent British human rights lawyer, denounced the horrific concept of “execution without trial” and “international killing (which) … violates the right to life.”

In Congress, however, the concept of trial by jury, held sacred by our forefathers, is little more than a momentary bargaining chip to be traded in as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights continue to be trashed and more than 800 years of common law is systematically dismantled in deference to a forever war against a manufactured al-Qaeda continues.