The United States of America has gone to a place I never believed it would go. It is doing things now that only happen in Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy novels; things that we Americans think are so un-American that no president would ever even suggest we do them. We now have a list of American citizens targeted for assassination without ever having been subject to due process of law. My how we have fallen.
President Obama's top terrorism expert, John Brennan, almost bragged in an interview to the Washington Times' Eli Lake that such a list now exists.
I'm asking this literally -- if you're someone who believes, or are at least willing to acquiesce to the claim, that the U.S. President has the power to target your fellow citizens for assassination without a whiff of due process, what unchecked presidential powers wouldn't you support or acquiesce to? I'd really like to hear an answer to that. That's the question Al Gore asked about George Bush in a 2006 speech condemning Bush's claimed powers merely to eavesdrop on and imprisonAmerican citizens without charges, let alone assassinate them: "If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed,are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? . . . If the president has th[is] inherent authority. . . . then what can't he do?" Can anyone defending this Obama policy answer that question?
Mr. Greenwald is completely correct. If the President can order the assassination of a US Citizen without benefit of due process of law then there is nothing he cannot order with regard to that citizen. He can order that you be enslaved. He can order that all your property belongs to the government. He can order that you divorce your wife. He can order what sermons your church teaches. He can order that you move out of your house today. With this power--the power to kill, to murder--he is all powerful. He has complete control over our very lives and everything we do. If President Obama can do this then we are no longer free.
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