(no subject)

[thies.livejournal.com]

Using the constitution as toilet paper - again. The Obama administration authorized the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki who holds US citizenship. There is some nefarious precedent being created by allowing the President to order the killing of American citizens, regardless of their alleged crimes, without granting them their 5th Amendment rights. Bush with his renditions, and the implications of the Patriot Act was bad enough, but ordering a US citizen to be assassinated as Obama now did takes it to a whole new level. I bet Stalin would be proud of Barry Soetoro. Anyone want to wager which other parts of the constitution will be considered void by Obama until he gets kicked out of the white house?

(source)

Comments

Re: Excellent train of logic

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Yeah no shit he's not being "targeted as a criminal", nobody even feels up to the task of proving he's done anything actually illegal to a court of law, that's why he's getting assassinated instead and the President's planting secret prisons like fucking plantation fields all over the world for people someone in some office has a hunch might have done a bad thing - but we'll never know, it's too dangerous to know, the dirty illicit deeds of al Qaeda operatives are like some Lovecraft shit where if you so much as speak their names out loud in front of a judge everyone's eyeballs explode and demons come crawling out of impossible geometries in the room. God knows what one of their preachers could do to a man if we ever tried to capture one alive - can the very insidious harmonies of his voice turn a righteous God-fearing American soldier into a depraved terrorist? Scientists say possibly!

But hey, that's okay, we weren't using all that boring trial shit anyway. I mean who could possibly deal with something as unheard-of as organized crime without tossing out every legal stricture and protected right developed in the last five hundred years? I mean, they act like criminals, pssh, yeah, but they work together! Like, like... an army! So clearly they're military! And that means, uhm... I'm not sure what it means. Those wierdies who wrote military law and policy don't seem to have really thought out how something that isn't really an army would be handled like it's an army. Guess that means they're really a SUPERARMY, and anything anyone does to them is by definition legal.

Hey, cut the feds a break, we've got no other precedent to work with here! Imagine if bad guys - working together - some even travelling across borders - had been skulking around all this time. Would Thomas Jefferson have written all that flowery shit no one reads about due process if he'd ever imagined such a thing? Would anyone have ever been so foolish as to attempt to arrest and try one of these, let's call them "gang members", rather than gun them and everyone they ever spoke to down on sight? Madness! The only reasonable route to a safe and civil social order is to, as one of the founding philosophers of modern ethics said, "Exterminate all the brutes!"

Re: Excellent train of logic

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Hahaha 'have no dispute' - how could anyone dispute the justice and reason of just whacking anyone who makes trouble? What other options, in the end, are open to one with nearly infinite power, reach, and financial resources? It's the logical conclusion of a decade's legal thinking, anyone could've seen Executive-issued fatwahs against citizens with illegal political affiliations as the culmination of everything we've worked for since those dark days on teh eleventh of the ninth! It must be a reasonable and necessary redefinition of standing legal practice, otherwise they wouldn't say it was - and if it wasn't, what difference would it make anyway? Surely this, like every other special legal reshuffling or temporary suspension of rights or reclassification of criminal acts as legal or vice versa we've witnessed since 9/11, will be used in exactly one case and go no further, never to be expanded upon or used as the foundation of even more outrageous proclamations. Sure it's the position of the Obama administration that even providing legal defense to terrorists makes you complicit in terror acts (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/us/24scotus.html), we're already seeing witchhunts (http://iowaindependent.com/29333/grassley-attacks-doj-lawyers-for-defending-detainees-voted-for-detainee-defense) against those involved in trying to get renditioned maybe-terrorists their legally mandated trials (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/meet-doj-lawyers-who-defended-terrorist-detainees), but even given all that heapin' load of context who could see anything particularly sinister about the Obama administration's decision that the Obama administration can murder anyone it declares affiliated with the broadly-defined international terror front. I mean, what's that thing what they call it, where some dude looks at one bad policy and claims it's going to lead to worse policies, and those to even worse, umm, a slippery slope, that's right, it'd be a slippery slope! A fallacy! Therefore no meaningful trend can be inferred from this proclamation and the runup to it and arguing for state-approved murder is the reasonable position QED and I'm sure the President has our best interests at heart in protecting us from a fair public trial of the bad wicked preacher man :-)

In short: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF