Obama Administration Refuses To Say If Americans Can Be Killed By Drones On U.S. Soil
The Justice Department “white paper” purporting to authorize Obama’s power to extrajudicially execute US citizens was leaked three weeks ago. Since then, the administration - including the president himself and his nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan - has been repeatedly asked whether this authority extends to US soil, i.e., whether the president has the right to execute US citizens on US soil without charges. In each instance, they have refused to answer.
Brennan has been asked the question several times as part of his confirmation process. Each time, he simply pretends that the question has not been asked, opting instead to address a completely different issue. Here’s the latest example from the written exchange he had with Senators after his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee; after referencing the DOJ “white paper”, the Committee raised the question with Brennan in the most straightforward way possible:

Obviously, that the US has not and does not intend to engage in such acts is entirely non-responsive to the question that was asked: whether they believe they have the authority to do so. To the extent any answer was provided, it came in Brennan’s next answer. He was asked:
“Could you describe the geographical limits on the Administration’s conduct drone strikes?”
Brennan’s answer was that, in essence, there are no geographic limits to this power: “we do not view our authority to use military force against al-Qa’ida and associated forces as being limited to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan.” He then quoted Attorney General Eric Holder as saying: “neither Congress nor our federal courts has limited the geographic scope of our ability to use force to the current conflict in Afghanistan” (see Brennan’s full answer here).
Revealingly, this same question was posed to Obama not by a journalist or a progressive but by a conservative activist, who asked if drone strikes could be used on US soil and “what will you do to create a legal framework to make American citizens within the United States believe know that drone strikes cannot be used against American citizens?” Obama replied that there “has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil” - which, obviously, doesn’t remotely answer the question of whether he believes he has the legal power to do so. He added that “the rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States”, but these “rules” are simply political choices the administration has made which can be changed at any time, not legal constraints. The question - do you as president believe you have the legal authority to execute US citizens on US soil on the grounds of suspicions of Terrorism if you choose to do so? - was one that Obama, like Brennan, simply did not answer.
As always, it’s really worth pausing to remind ourselves of how truly radical and just plainly unbelievable this all is. What’s more extraordinary: that the US Senate is repeatedly asking the Obama White House whether the president has the power to secretly order US citizens on US soil executed without charges or due process, or whether the president and his administration refuse to answer? That this is the “controversy” surrounding the confirmation of the CIA director - and it’s a very muted controversy at that - shows just how extreme the degradation of US political culture is.
As a result of all of this, GOP Senator Rand Paul on Thursday sent a letter to Brennan vowing to filibuster his confirmation unless and until the White House answers this question. Noting the numerous times this question was previously posed to Brennan and Obama without getting an answer, Paul again wrote:
“Do you believe that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a US citizen on US soil, and without trial?”
After adding that “I believe the only acceptable answer to this is no”, Paul wrote: “Until you directly and clearly answer, I plan to use every procedural option at my disposal to delay your confirmation and bring added scrutiny to this issue.”
Source: anarcho-queer








![Scahill: Obama Has ‘Murdered’ People With Drone Strikes
Upset over President Barack Obama’s “kill list” and continued usage of drone striking throughout his administration, The Nation‘s national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill called the commander-in-chief’s actions “murderous.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, Scahill argued for the justification of labeling President Obama’s decisions to authorize the strikes as “murder,” specifically the drone attack on al-Qaeda America figure Anwar Al-Awlaki’s son in Yemen in 2011 recently covered by PBS’ Frontline.
“If someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people, and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they’ve murdered those people,” Scahill said.
“If you go to Yemen where I was, and you see the unexploded cluster bombs, and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do, of women and children that represented the vast majority of deaths in the first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen, those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from al-Qaeda in that area. There’s only one person that’s been identified that had any connection to al-Qaeda there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike.”
“And the U.S. tried to cover it up and say it was a Yemenize strike. And we know from the Wikileaks cables that David Petraus conspired with the president to lie to the world about who did that bombing. It’s murder, it’s mass murder. When you say, ‘We’re going to bomb this area because we believe a terrorist is there,’ and you know that women and children are there, [then] the United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe women and children are there. That’s murder.”
Scahill added: “The most dangerous thing that the U.S. is doing, besides murdering innocent people in many cases, is giving people in Yemen or Somalia, or Pakistan, a non ideological reason to hate the United States, to fight the United States. Non-ideological reasons, meaning personal vendetta, is much more powerful than, ‘We hate your freedom, we hate your McDondalds, we have your Christianity, that’s real to them.”
Source](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m50qp10z7Y1r4vpxio1_1280.png)