Obama’s Expanding Kill List
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.
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 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 that 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
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