02 October 2006; AWOL Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life
and death over the entire world. If he says you're an enemy of
America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he
can. And if he decides you should die, he'll kill you. This is not
hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or "conspiracy theory": it's simply a
fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior
administration figures, recorded in official government documents -
and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and
a national television audience.
When this new law is coupled with the existing "Executive Orders"
authorizing "lethal force" against arbitrarily designated "enemy
combatants," it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill - with
the seal of Congressional approval. It sounds unbelievable to most
people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our
reality, and has been for five years.
Bill Clinton's White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting
the president's right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy
of the United States in self-defense,
prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in
October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the "inherent
powers" of the "Commander in Chief" - that mythical, ever-elastic
construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend his own
unconstitutional usurpations.
The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by
Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton
followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell
out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some
recalcitrant leader or international outlaw - as in his bombing of
the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive
strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the
death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian
infrastructure in Serbia during that nation's collective punishment
for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, Clinton was following
the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel
Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy's
adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive
strike on Libya in 1986.
AWOL Bush also wanted the power to kill individuals at will. Soon
the arbitrary power of life and death was delegated to agents in the
field, after Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill
targets without seeking presidential approval for each attack, the
Washington Post reported in December 2002.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of
an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA
drone missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike
occurred on December 4, 2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house
and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure.
But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children,
the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving
father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on
another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children,
Pakistani officials reported.
Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush's "unitary
executive" dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that
undergirds the assassination program. Underlying this edifice of
tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder. Perhaps the
enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept
it from being fully comprehended.
http://www.truthout
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NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this
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