King Obama’s Judicial Mouthpiece Said that the King Can Kill You — and There Aint $#*t You Can Do about It — the Incorruptible George Washington Would Be Mortified

© 2013 Peter Free

 

20 July 2013

 

 

Ironically — our first African-American president has decided that being the equivalent of a plantation owner is better than being a supporter of freedom and human rights

 

From the New York Times:

 

 

Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the United States District Court . . . was hearing the government’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by relatives of three Americans killed in two drone strikes in Yemen in 2011:

 

Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric who had joined Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula;

 

Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who had no involvement in terrorism;

 

and Samir Khan, a 30-year-old North Carolina man who had become a propagandist for the same Qaeda branch.

 

Judge Collyer said she was “troubled” by the government’s assertion that it could kill American citizens it designated as dangerous, with no role for courts to review the decision.

 

[Deputy assistant attorney general, Brian] Hauck acknowledged that Americans targeted overseas do have rights, but he said they could not be enforced in court either before or after the Americans were killed.

 

Judges, he suggested, have neither the expertise nor the tools necessary to assess the danger posed by terrorists, the feasibility of capturing them or when and how they should be killed.

 

© 2013 Scott Shane, Judge Challenges White House Claims on Authority in Drone Killings, New York Times (19 July 2013) (paragraphs split, reformatted, and underlines added)

 

 

Not to belittle the complexity of the Constitutional division between the branches of government — really?

 

Americans have rights, but the King can kill you anyway — and that’s just too bad?

 

 

The moral? — If you wonder what the Obama Administration has been up to, you have your answer

 

The only law, apparently, is the King’s whim.

 

Speaking as a constitutional lawyer, historian, and ordinary American — I find this an astonishing reversal of the general thrust of American history.

 

And I am not coward enough to think that the Government’s assertion of national security — and its conniving and enabling secrecy — justifies the Administration’s deluge of morally obvious illegalities.

 

The President’s wrenching distortion of what America stands for makes a mockery of the crosses in Arlington National Cemetery and its companions, here and abroad.

 

The proud stillness of those hallowed grounds shrieks at us to awaken.