CGI's oldBuck: Obama’s Expanding Kill List - your day will
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Posted By: Susoni [Send E-Mail]
Date: Monday, 25-Feb-2013 23:09:54
Obama’s Expanding Kill List
Paul Craig Roberts
Prosecutors always expand laws far beyond
their intent. Attorneys in civil cases do the same. For example, the 1970
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was passed in order to
make it easier for the government to convict members of the Mafia. However,
the law, despite its intent, was quickly expanded by prosecutors and
attorneys and used in cases against pro-life activists, Catholic bishops,
corporations accused of hiring illegal immigrants, and in divorce cases.
“Junk bond king” Michael Milken, a person with no ties to organized crime,
was threatened with indictment under the RICO Act. Prosecutors have found
that the asset freeze provision in the Act is a convenient way to prevent a
defendant from being able to pay attorneys and, therefore, makes it easier
for prosecutors to coerce innocent defendants into a guilty plea.
We are now witnessing the expansion of Obama’s
Kill List. The list began under the Bush regime as a rationale for murdering
suspect citizens of countries with which the US was not at war. The Obama
regime expanded the scope of the list to include the execution, without due
process of law, of US citizens accused, without evidence presented in court,
of association with terrorism. The list quickly expanded to include the
American teen-age son of a cleric accused of preaching jihad against the
West. The son’s “association” with terrorism apparently was his blood
relationship to his father.
As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote, the power
of government to imprison and to murder its citizens without due process of
law is the certain mark of dictatorship. Dictatorship is government
unconstrained by law. On February 10 the Wall Street Journal revealed that
the Obama dictatorship now intends to expand the Kill List to include those
accused of acting against foreign governments. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an
“Algerian militant” accused of planning the January attack on an Algerian
natural gas facility, has been chosen as the threat that is being used to
expand Obama’s Kill List to include participants in the internal disputes and
civil wars of every country.
If the Obama regime is on the side of the
government, as in Algeria, it will kill the rebels opposing the government.
If the Obama regime is on the side of the rebels, as in Libya, it will kill
the government’s leaders. Whether Washington sends a drone to murder Putin
and the president of China remains to be seen. But don’t be surprised if
Washington has targeted the president of Iran.
The elasticity of the Kill List and its easy
expansion makes it certain that Washington will be involved in extra-judicial
executions of those “associated with terrorism” over much of the world.
Americans themselves should be alarmed, because the term “association with
terrorism” is very elastic. Federal prosecutors have interpreted the term to
include charitable contributions to Palestinians.
The next time former US Representative Cynthia
McKinney gets on an aid ship to Palestine, will Washington give the green
light to Israel to kill her as a terrorist agent for her association with aid
to Gaza, ruled by the “terrorist organization,” Hamas?
Already a year or two ago, the director of
Homeland Security said that the federal police agency’s focus had shifted
from terrorists to “domestic extremists,” another elastic and undefined term.
A domestic extremist will be all who disagree with Washington. They also are
headed for the Kill List.
Where is the government going with this? The
most likely outcome is that everyone disliked or distrusted by those who have
the power to add to the Kill List will find themselves on the list. The
government can expand the Kill List beyond the original intent as easily as
the RICO Act was expanded beyond its original intent.
As the Founding Fathers knew and the American
people have forgot, no one is safe in a dictatorship.
Clearly, the American public lacks sufficient
comprehension to remain a free people. All indications are that the large
majority of Americans fear alleged terrorists in distant lands more than they
fear their government’s acquisition of dictatorial powers over them–powers
that allow government to place itself above the law and to be unaccountable
to law. This is despite the fact that 99.999% of all Americans will never,
ever, experience any terrorism except that of their own government.
According to a recent poll of registered
American voters, 75% approve of Washington’s assassination of foreign
citizens abroad based on suspicion that they might be terrorists, despite the
fact that the vast majority of the Gitmo detainees, declared by the US
government to be the most dangerous men on earth, turned out to be totally
innocent. Only 13% of registered voters disapprove of the extra-judicial
murders carried out by Washington against foreign citizens, whether based on
wrong intelligence, hearsay, or actual deeds. http://www.ahherald.com/newsbrief-mainmenu-2/monmouth-county-news/14849-public-says-its-illegal-to-target-americans-abroad-as-some-question-cia-drone-attacks
Registered voters have a different view of the
extra-judicial murder of US citizens. In what the rest of the world will see
as further evidence of American double-standards, 48% believe it is illegal
for Washington to murder US citizens without due process of law. However, 24%
agree with the Obama regime that it is permissible for the government to
murder its own citizens on accusation alone without trial and conviction of a
capital crime. As The Onion put it, “24% of citizens were unequivocally in
favor of being obliterated at any point, for any reason, in a massive
airstrike.”http://www.theonion.com/articles/american-citizens-split-on-doj-memo-authorizing-go,31207/
Are we to be reassured or alarmed that 24% of
registered voters believe that the terrorist threat is so great that
suspicion alone without evidence, trial, and conviction is sufficient for
Washington to terminate US citizens? Should not we be disturbed that a
quarter of registered voters, despite overwhelming evidence that Washington’s
wars are based on conscious lies–”weapons of mass destruction,” “Al-Qaeda
connections”–are still prepared to believe the government’s claim that the
person it just murdered was a terrorist? Why are so many Americans willing to
believe a proven liar?
If we add up all the costs of the “war on
terror,” it is obvious that the costs are many magnitudes greater than the
terror threat that the war is alleged to contain. If terrorists were really a
threat to Americans, shopping centers and electric substations would be
blowing up constantly. Airport security would be a sham, because terrorists
would set off the bombs in the crowded lines waiting to clear security.
Traffic would be continually tied up from roofing nails dispensed on all main
roads in cities across the country for each rush hour. Water supplies would
be poisoned. Police stations would be bombed and police officers routinely
terminated on the streets. Instead, nothing has happened despite Washington’s
killing and displacement of huge numbers of Muslims in seven or eight
countries over the past 11 years.
The cost of the “war on terror” is not merely the
multi-trillion dollar financial bill documented by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda
Bilmes. The cost of Washington’s wars is the main reason for the large
national debt, the threat of which politicians are using to destroy the
social safety net. This is a huge cost for a pointless war that pleases
Israel and enriches the armament companies but does nothing for Americans.
The financial cost is huge, but how important
is this cost compared to another cost–the domestic police state supported by
a significant percentage of the population and a majority in Congress and the
media? Is the war on terror worth the evisceration of the US Constitution? A
war that costs us the Constitution means our total defeat.
The cost in human life has been enormous.
Millions of Muslims have been killed, wounded, orphaned, and displaced, and
entire countries have been destroyed as socio-political entities. Washington
locked Iraq in sectarian murder. Libya has no government, just warring
factions, and now Syria is in the process of being disintegrated. The
prospects for people’s lives in these countries have been ruined for years to
come.
The cost in American lives has also been high.
More than 400,000 American lives have been adversely affected by 11 years of
pointless war. The deaths of 6,656 US troops, the 50,000 wounded, the 1,700
life-changing limb amputations, and the suicides http://www.globalresearch.ca/record-numbers-of-us-military-and-veteran-suicides/5322544
are just the tip of the iceberg. Since the Bush-Obama wars began, 129,731 US
troops have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. And now we
learn from a new Congressional Research Service report that more than a
quarter million of US troops have experienced Traumatic Brain Injury. Based
on current diagnostic capability, three-fourths of the cases are classified
as mild. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/02/cost-of-war/
These lost, ruined and impaired lives affect
also the lives of many others–spouses, children, parents, siblings, and those
disheartened by their government’s pointless wars who have to care for the damaged.
There are many Americans who have been collaterally damaged by Washington’s
pointless wars.
Will Americans wake up in time? I wish I could
answer, “yes,” but I regret that Americans are an insouciant people. They are
unaware. Americans are more concerned with sports events, sales, and which
celebrities are sleeping together than they are with their liberty.
Washington can create a police state, because there are insufficient citizens
with the intelligence, education, and awareness to stop Washington.
Congress has accepted the police state and has
given up too much of its power to the executive branch and is too beholden to
the special interests that benefit from the police state to do anything about
it. Congress is even content for the CIA or the Pentagon, perhaps both, to
murder by robot innocent people on the Benthamite presumption that at some
future time they might commit a terrorist act. Some US Senators want a cloak
of legality for the murders and suggest a secret court to rubber-stamp Obama’s
Kill List. CIA nominee director John Brennan reportedly objected to a secret
court on the grounds that not all drone murders are retaliation; some victims
are murdered for what some executive branch official thinks they might do at
some future time, and without evidence the court would have nothing objective
to go by. http://news.antiwar.com/2013/02/10/lawmakers-push-plans-to-advance-drone-strikes/
The federal judiciary has proven to be almost
as impotent. Federal judges did not ask federal prosecutors why, in violation
of the whistleblower protection laws, they were prosecuting National Security
Agency senior executive Thomas Drake for blowing the whistle on the NSA’s
illegal spying on US citizens instead of the officials who broke the law and
committed felonies. Judges did not ask why CIA agent John Kiriakou was
prosecuted for blowing the whistle on the torture program instead of those
who committed crimes by authorizing and committing
torture.http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33894.htm
The innocent and the truth-tellers were
prosecuted. The criminals and the liars were not. The federal judges went
along with the Justice (sic) Department’s prosecutions of those who obeyed
the law and did their duty and non-prosecution of criminals who clearly
without any doubt violated the law, trampled upon the US Constitution, and
committed felonies.
In a police state it is always the innocent
who are the most heavily punished. In his history, The Gulag Archipelago,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn explains that in the prison camps, the Soviet
equivalent to Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret torture prisons, common
criminals such as murderers, rapists, and robbers had a privileged position
compared to the political prisoners who mistakenly thought that the Soviet
Constitution meant something. It will be the same in Amerika.
The destruction of truth and the law in the US
is the legacy of 9/11. Both conservatives and the left-wing have bought into
the government’s preposterous story that a few Saudi Arabians, unsupported by
any government or intelligence agency, outwitted every institution of the
National Security State and inflicted the most humiliating blow against a
superpower in human history. They buy into this story despite unequivocal
evidence that WTC building 7 came down at free fall speed, an event that can
only occur as a result of controlled demolition.
But evidence and expert testimony no longer
have authority in the US, which now has its own form of Lysenkoism.
Lysenko was a quack Soviet scientist, a
charlatan who successfully persecuted Soviet geneticists for “setting
themselves against Marxism” by not having a Marxist theory of genetics.
Soviet geneticists were arrested and executed for being “against the people.”
Even the world famous Soviet geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested and
died in prison.
Americans don’t know any more about physics
and structural architecture and engineering than the Soviet population and
Stalin knew about genetics. Today “Lysenkoism” is used as a metaphor to
denote the corruption of science in behalf of a social, political, or
ideological purpose.
Lysenko used lies to gain power, just as Ponzi
scheme operators use lies to gain wealth. Power is an Aphrodisiac, and
everyone in Washington wants it. All indications are that they have it.
Liberty is disappearing before our eyes. http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/02/11/is-obama-already-holding-us-citizens-in-indefinite-detention/
Expect no help from “progressives,” who
believe in Obama more than they believe in liberty.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/11/progressives-defend-obama-kill-list
http://truth11.com/2013/02/20/obamas-expanding-kill-list/
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=270385