And you thought Bush was a bad dude?

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. (Taken from some quaint document)

Anwar al-Awlaki is dead, murdered by Barack Obama. There was no due process, no burden of proof. Just a cold-blooded murder. Obama now sits aside Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld as a state terrorist. He too deserves to be at the business end of a rope, feet a-twitching their final twitches.

It’s so much worse than just killing one man – it’s the whole of this nonsense of American victimhood. “Al Qaeda” is insignificant, hardly something to lose sleep over. Whatever they were before 9/11, and that wasn’t much, they (along with thousands of innocent Afghans) were wiped out in October of 2001. But their threat is deliberately overstated to keep the premise for American terror and aggressive war alive and well. An American citizen is far more likely to drown in a bath tub than die by the hand of a “terrorist.”

But that’s agitprop. It destroys people, it destroys intellects. American agitprop has decimated a whole generation of citizens, turning our brains to mush. This has unleashed our government to terrorize the world without reprisal or discipline. I mentioned some years back that if Obama “killed” Osama bin Laden (who was already long dead) after taking office in 2008, then indeed we might have a new regime. But he didn’t do so until the Arab spring mandated a shift of resources from the Pakistan attack. So Obama was merely Bush II. Nothing new going on there except …

… since Obama is a Democrat, that half of the American spectrum will naturally approve of the murder of an American citizen. Had Bush done this, most of them would be upset. But who ever accused them of thinking!

It’s a sad day, a corrupt government that sponsors terror all over the globe has now taken upon itself the right to murder Americans as well. Our neighbors to the south, the people of Southeast Asia, the people of the Middle East are all well aware of the true nature of “America,” and are not surprised by this. Maybe they even chuckle to themselves today, thinking “Hey guys – this is what unbridled power and terror are like. Anyone can be killed any time for any reason, and there is no justice.”

27 thoughts on “And you thought Bush was a bad dude?”

  1. So when did the actual coup take place? Agreed, there is no doubt that the Republic is/was lost. Was it when Congress abdicated in 2002, granting Bush II unqualified power to attack “terrorists?” Or was it in the early 1970s when Chile and Vietnam and Cambodia were being leveled by neocons like Kissinger and Nixon? I have no idea, but history cannot be properly written until that specific date is established.

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  2. Mark, don’t let the facts or the law get in the way of your rant. Anwar al-Awlaki was connected with the failed Time Square bombing, the Fort Hood shooting, and the underwear bomber that failed to bring the aircraft down over Detroit. He meant business. Consider the thoughts of professor Kenneth Anderson: http://volokh.com/2011/09/30/anwar-al-aulaqi-apparently-killed-by-drone-in-yemen/

    Al-Aulaqi was an American-born radical Muslim cleric who had emerged as both a leading voice in Al Qaeda recruiting and propaganda over the internet and, according to the US government, was also involved in operations and operational planning with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an offshoot Al Qaeda terrorist organization that the US governments regards as an “associated force” with Al Qaeda (and hence covered by the terms of the original Authorization to Use Military Force)…

    The government has maintained throughout all this that Al-Aulaqi was deemed a lawful target not on account of his expression of opinions, including calls to violence against the United States and its citizens, but instead on account of his operational involvement in AQAP, in ways going to leadership of an associated force terrorist organization and operational and planning involvement.

    During WWII similar American born citizens fought for both Japan and Germany. Many of their lives ended with a bullet or bomb burst.

    Professor Anderson goes on to write:

    As to the due process claims, as Robert Chesney notes at Lawfare, the US government does not appear to be taking a blanket position that a US citizen deemed to be a targetable participant in a terrorist group has no due process rights outside of the US in any sense, on the one hand, but neither does it appear to take the position that the vindication of whatever those due process rights are entitles the citizen to merely being subject to an attempt to arrest, including in a remote location in Yemen, and to warning before using lethal force. I don’t think the US government has a worked out position suitable for every case — as seems to me quite appropriate. It is in the process of working out something that is only partly like straight-up armed conflict law and something that is gradually, inchoately emerging as a sort of “state practice” of covert intelligence operations. The working out of those positions is proceeding case by case.

    One thing that does appear quite settled as far as the US government’s position is concerned, however, is that it is simply inapposite to talk about this as “summary execution upon nothing more than the order of the President” — it’s simply not the correct legal frame. Ben Wittes names a number of these factors in his Lawfare discussion of the process that is due in this matter. I’d say that among other things, the “summary execution without due process” meme fails to take account of

    * taking up operational roles in armed conflict against the United States;
    * fleeing to places beyond the bounds of law enforcement that might serve to arrest Al-Aulaqi if he had been in the territorial US;
    * the existence of robust domestic legal authorities for undertaking lethal action even against a US citizen (it is not as if this was not understood as a possibility in the Cold War);
    *acknowledgment that the US was willing to consider ways to accepting surrender and coming into custody that would allow judicial review; and
    *a lengthy judicial opinion that refused to take a simplistic view of due process in this very case (in either direction, simply targetable combatant or US citizen denied due process) irrespective of whether one thinks the outcome correct or not.

    These and other such circumstances re-draw the caricature offered on some of the blogs of the President taking it into his head to assassinate, using death from the skies, some US citizen who merely happens to be outside the US at that moment. Whatever the situation is exactly, it is a lot more than that.

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  3. The exact situation is this: Our government assassinated an American citizen without a trial, without any discussion, without consent. We are not at war with Yemen. All else is rationalization.

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    1. Ladybug, you seem oblivious to the court proceeding that his father brought with the ACLU about targeting his son. He lost. That is what professor Anderson is referring to. Again he said:

      *a lengthy judicial opinion that refused to take a simplistic view of due process in this very case (in either direction, simply targetable combatant or US citizen denied due process) irrespective of whether one thinks the outcome correct or not.

      A court proceeding with MUCH discussion.

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  4. …according to the US government..

    Craig, you are a sad, pathetic and frightened little man. Do you come around here to remind me that agitprop actually works on people?

    Do you know what I think of when I think of shoe bomber, underwear bomber, Times Square bomber? I see two possibilities: 1) If there is indeed an enemy out there, he is frightfully incapable of doing much damage, or 2) these incidents might simply be part of the agitprop machine. After all, neither the underwear or shoe bombers had enough explosive to actually do any damage, and the Times Square incident was merely a car filled with explosives. Could be anything. Could be our own government trying to keep us in perpetual fear.

    In the meantime, the US really is equipped to do real damage and has indeed been killing hundreds of thousands of people. While you sit in your little lighted pup tent in your bedroom at night fearing teh mean old Muslims, Muslims are dying by legions. Innocent people, murdered by the US.

    Please look over the highlighted words in the Fifth Amendment above, and point out to me, where it says “deprived of life” where it says “unless our government says it is OK.” In fact, those words were written to rein in our government.

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    2. You literally are a poster board exhibit of everything I write about here – agitprop, fear, ignorance of the real world beyond our TV’s. Do not feign to lecture me on “reality”. I do not see where you are even remotely acquainted with it.

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  7. Trust everything the government leads us to believe. And where is this written? Henry VIII? It’s much worse than I imagined.

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  8. Craig, at one time or another you learned that history is often (usually) an attempt to impose order on chaos, to reconstruct events as a “narrative.” You are correct in that assertion. But the other extreme of the strict narrative approach is to imagine that all is random, that human scheming does not exist behind events of importance, that there is no cause and effect resulting in a sequence of events that do indeed form a chain that can be confused with “narrative.”

    9/11 was a real event, and out of it we got AFPak and Iraq, the erosion of civil liberties, and destruction of what intelligence there was in American life by incessant agitprop. This can be seen in the current crop of presidential candidates – it appears that stupidity vaults one or another to the top of the polls. (Don’t confuse that with partisanship – I regard Obama as more dangerous than any Republican.)

    Wikileaks and the self-immolation of a Tunisian man were random events, and out of that grew the “Arab Spring” which prompted the US response -it necessitated the “death” of bin Laden to refocus our attention elsewhere, to suppress rebellion where we had effective client states (Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen), to encourage it where we wanted regime change (Syria), and attack yet another country rich in oil (Libya).

    What does the future hold? I do not know. But I read your words and see you are frightened, and that is a sad spectacle. I am not afraid. I would do away with all airport security so we could just get on our planes and fly. I would eliminate all the metal detectors, restore the police to the role of protection and service as opposed to oversight and suppression of rebellion. I would just live in peace with vigilance, and with the understanding the the most powerful military force on the planet cannot be benign – if we have these weapons, dangerous people will insist that we use them. We need to disarm. We are the biggest existing threat to planetary survival and civilized existence.

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    1. Actually Mark, you are projecting. Fright is not on the board. Saying so on your part fits your narrative. For the rest of what you last wrote? Perhaps your reach far exceeds your grasp in assuming that I and others don’t already boil those factors in the overall calculus of our opinions and come to a different answer than you.

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      1. Please, Craig, you insult my intelligence. Fear sells. The American people are kept in a constant state of fear, and have been since the end of World War II. 9/11 was merely an opportunity to replace “commun” with “terror” ists and restart the war. You are sitting there telling me that what is false is real, and accusing me of not having enough depth to see that.

        Enough. You’re scared. Do not deny it. It seeps out of your words.

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        1. The insult to your intelligence is triggered by your arrogance in assuming you are right about things you have no real idea about. Deep down you know better leading to your embarrassment that you confuse with insult.

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    2. For your enjoyment, here is a far more robust discussion than the meme you present: http://creoncritic.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/if-they-want-me-let-them-search-for-me-%e2%80%93-anwar-al-aulaqi/

      It begins:

      As far as I have seen, one’s overarching vision about how the US should conduct itself in the conflict with al-Qaeda determines one’s view on the killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi. Those viewing al-Qaeda as a criminal enterprise and favoring a law enforcement approach are likely to view the al-Aulaqi killing as unlawful assassination, the presidency overstepping its bounds, and yet another affront to a clearly laid out constitutional order.

      In contrast, those viewing al-Qaeda as combatants in an armed conflict against the US will see the al-Aulaqi killing as falling in line with the dictates of the laws of armed conflict; the rules of necessity, distinction, and proportionality having been satisfied al-Aulaqi’s killing is both lawful and legitimate. There is also the possibility of viewing the conflict with al-Qaeda as a hybrid, seeing the need for using elements of both approaches, in which case it’s a tossup as to how to interpret al-Aulaqi’s killing. I’d place myself in the hybrid category…

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        1. Enjoy your illusions of intellectual grandeur. Wiser men than you or me caution:

          The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know. — Socrates

          The more you know, the less you understand. — Lao-Tse

          The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. –Albert Einstein

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  9. Craig,

    What a wonderful label for the “country” we now live in: Totalitarian-military “hybrid.” The more I know, the less I like it.

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  10. just remember, some al-Qaeda are evil combatants and must perish, and some al-Qaeda elements, like the ones NATO is helping out in Libya, are freedom fighters engaged in a struggle against tyranny.

    it’s simply heartwarming to know this administration can rely on their friend “president” Saleh for being such a compliant guy. if he keeps going along with this kind of heroic battle against the evil al-Qaeda, then i’m sure the Obama administration can overlook those pesky protestors Saleh keeps killing.

    but if Saleh doesn’t play along, well, there’s a very good example of what will happen: he could get NATO’d like Libya, turning evil al-Qaeda into good al-Qaeda through the amazing process of geopolitical transubstantiation.

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    1. Lizard, I think a far more interesting comparison is to say that al-Qaeda is to the US as Hamas and its like minded terrorists are to Israel. Across the western world there is celebration over taking out al-Qaeda militants, but when it comes to Israel, just the opposite seems to be the norm. Go figure.

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      1. that’s a great comparison. Israel helped fund Hamas back in the 70’s and 80’s, then their pawn against the PLO got away from them. same thing with the US and al-Qaeda.

        but don’t we have a massive security state to protect us from blowback? do we really need to provoke more violence by using targeted assassinations to take out this recruiter for jihad?

        and do you really think this makes us safer as American citizens?

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