Obama's License To Kill

From Gonzo Times, Liberty Pulse and Mother Jones:

Obama’s License to KillBy: Mopowell

Oct 1, 2010 Current, Fear And Loathing, Libertarianism, Police State, Rothbard, Uncategorized







I’ve been on this earth for almost a quarter of a century, and I’ve seen some disappointing presidential policies as well as some encouraging ones. It was probably for the best that we intervened in Bosnia and stopped the first major genocide in Europe since World War II. Clinton’s free trade agreements opened us up to all sorts of culture and goods that have enriched our lives.



Beyond that, Clinton refused to agree to a ban on land mines. Then came the Bush years, where UC Berkeley lawyer John Yoo wrote a legal justification for the president to be able to torture for information.



Eventually one should get used to civil liberties being stomped upon. The United States seems like a police state, with fatal encounters increasing beyond anything I knew growing up. As my conservative friend Larry Bernard said, when a people are in decline, you need to control them. Is that what is motivating Obama?



President Barack Obama has signed off on having the unprecedented authority to assasinate any U.S. citizen anywhere, anytime for any reason. This is unbelievably frightening and disturbingly underreported. Is the Fourth Amendment just a piece of paper? Do Americans not care about freedom anymore at all except as a jingoistic rallying cry or baton to use against opponents?



From Mother Jones:



Right now this list is confined (we think) to suspected terrorists in places like Yemen and Pakistan, and I think that distracts us from what’s going on. Even if, in principle, it seems wrong, killing jihadist wannabes in Karachi or Mogadishu just doesn’t get our alarm bells going. Our instinctive reaction is that these are third-world hellholes where life is cheap anyway, so why not?



But it’s the still the principle that matters. If you can do it in Karachi, you can do it in Paris. And if you can do it to a New Mexico-born cleric who preaches vengeance against the U.S. from a mosque every Friday, you can do it to an expat from Oregon who runs a grimy little anti-American newspaper from a basement in Berlin. We might not be doing that right now, but what’s to stop us? The good will of whoever happens to be president at the moment?



For what should be obvious reasons, the U.S. government should not be allowed to execute U.S. citizens without trial regardless of whether they happen to be on U.S. soil. It’s a little hard to believe that this is even a debatable notion.



This is really frightening stuff. In Orwell’s 1984, rockets were regularly dropped upon the proletariat in order to keep them in a continued state of anxiety and fear, perfect for perpetuating warfare. What’s most disturbing is that while George W. Bush was taken to task on network television for spying on phone calls, debates over Obama obtaining a free license to kill are resigned to Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum.