THIS is Amerika NOW ! ..you tell me what's the difference between the Com's , Nazi's & you pick your dick tator ........ just take em "out" any time ? ,anyone? ...we don't like this,that ...you stand 4 what ? ....smile & look at the birdie ....wait ..wait ,just keep smiling ....that's it say cheese ... http://endthelie.com/2013/01/02/federal-judge-obama-admin-never-has-to-explain-legal-basis-for-drone-assassinations-of-americans/#axzz2Gxu6lRNv
Federal judge: Obama admin never has to explain legal
basis for drone assassinations of Americans
By Madison Ruppert
Editor of End the
Lie
An Air Force Reaper drone on patrol
over Afghanistan (Image credit: USAF)
In a tragic yet wholly unsurprising
ruling, a federal judge in Manhattan refused to force the U.S. Department of
Justice to reveal the memorandum outlining the supposed legal justification for
the assassination of Americans, a ruling which the judge called “Alice-in-Wonderland
[in] nature.”
The insane ruling means that the government never has to explain
why it is legal to kill Americans while continuing to claim it is
legal to do so, all using the excuse of secrecy in the name of
maintaining national security.
“A Justice Department spokesman said
officials were reviewing the ruling,” according to Josh Gerstein, and that
appears to be all the information available from the Department of Justice thus
far.
Considering the fact that Obama’s public statements on drones
have been “total baloney” according to experts, I doubt that we’ll
see anything any better from the courts which continually kowtow to the Obama
administration or the Department of Justice which refused to file criminal charges over
deaths of CIA detainees.
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen
McMahon of New York admitted that she was in a “paradoxical situation” in the ruling issued to both The
New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The ruling covered what McMahon
called “an extensive public relations campaign” by a variety of government
officials about the supposed legal justifications for the killing of Americans
and others. McMahon focused on the speech by Attorney General Eric Holder in
which he claimed the secret reviews of
classified evidence count as due process.
The paradoxical situation of the
ruling was put well by David Kravets who writes McMahon is “allowing
the administration to claim it was legal to kill enemies outside traditional
combat zones while keeping the legal rational secret.”
Indeed, McMahon confirmed that “the
government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought
in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to
explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution
and laws of the United States.”
“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of
this pronouncement is not lost on me,” McMahon continued, “but after careful
and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in
which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules —
a veritable catch-22.”
“I can find no way around the
thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of
our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on
their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the
reasons for their conclusion a secret,” ruled McMahon.
However, both the ACLU and The
New York Times are not giving up after the defeat.
“We began this litigation because we
believed our readers deserved to know more about the U.S. government’s legal
position on the use of targeted killings against persons having ties to terrorism,
including U.S. citizens,” said David McCraw in The Times.
“Judge McMahon’s decision speaks
eloquently and at length to the serious legal questions raised by the
targeted-killing program and to why in a democracy the government should be
addressing those questions openly and fully,” said McCraw.
Yet obviously McMahon’s decision
fell far short of the mark in that it didn’t actually hold the Obama
administration responsible for their actions.
“This ruling denies the public
access to crucial information about the government’s extrajudicial killing of
U.S. citizens and also effectively greenlights its practice of making selective
and self-serving disclosures,” said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer.
Indeed even McMahon noted that the
Obama administration’s public statements on the program were “cryptic and
imprecise,” although she used this to claim that they “were thus insufficient
to overcome exemptions in the freedom of information law for classified
materials and internal government deliberations,” according to The Times.
Interestingly, McMahon admitted she
had not even read the withheld documents and instead opted to claim that the
memorandum prepared by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel must
contain detailed analysis “unless the standards at O.L.C. have slipped
dramatically.”
The only information available on
the memo comes from secondary sources who had allegedly read it, as reported by
The Times. In other
words, we have no clue what it really says and McMahon does not either.
“More fulsome disclosure of the
legal reasoning on which the administration relies to justify the targeted
killing of individuals, including United States citizens, far from any
recognizable ‘hot’ field of battle, would allow for intelligent discussion and
assessment of a tactic that (like torture before it) remains hotly debated,”
wrote McMahon.
Reuters reports that McMahon “appeared
reluctant to rule as she did,” although that isn’t quite evident from the
ruling.
In an attempt to show that McMahon
was “reluctant” Reuters points to her writing that disclosure of the actual
legal justification would help the American people understand the “vast and
seemingly ever-growing exercise in which we have been engaged for well over a
decade, at great cost in lives, treasure, and (at least in the minds of some)
personal liberty.”
In February of 2012 I wrote of the
lawsuit, “Hopefully the ACLU will be able to make some progress with this
lawsuit, but I seriously doubt anything will happen given the fact that the
courts have become a tool of the executive and the entire system of checks and
balances has been all but openly eradicated from the American political system
entirely.” Unfortunately it seems I was right.
Did I forget anything or miss any
errors? Would you like to make me aware of a story or subject to cover? Or
perhaps you want to bring your writing to a wider audience? Feel free to
contact me at admin@EndtheLie.com with your concerns,
tips, questions, original writings, insults or just about anything that may
strike your fancy.
No comments:
Post a Comment