Out-Cheneying Cheney

No, I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and sing lalalalalalala at the top of my lungs. This is happening; it's illegal, unconstitutional, unAmerican and unconscionable, and Barack Obama is doing it.

Kevin Drum:

Conor Friedersdorf on the Obama administration's creation of a "kill list" of individuals whom the US can kill anywhere, anytime:

I wish the right would do less scoffing at the ACLU. It's often unjustified. But I'll live with scoffing if it's followed by the dawning realization that the Obama Adminstration has imprudently asserted for itself an extraordinary extra-constitutional power, the potential abuse of which ought to terrify any citizen who is half paying attention.

Once that realization has sunk in, I'd encourage this followup thought: whereas the ACLU is standing against this radical expansion of federal power — an executive branch death panel, if you will — conservative instituitions like The Heritage Foundation aren't merely silent, they're hiring a senior staffer who believes that the ability to draw up a list of American citizens to be killed is inherent in the power of the presidency.

I don't write about this often enough. But it really is extraordinary. 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.

Suzanne Ito at Crooks and Liars has video.

Now, no one disputes that the United States is at war. But wars are waged in specific geographic areas. Currently, the U.S. is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The U.S. is not at war in Somalia. Yet that is where a missile strike killed Ruben Shumpert, a U.S. citizen from Seattle.

The U.S. is also not at war in Yemen. Yet that is where Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, is purportedly in hiding, and where the government has attempted to assassinate him as many as a dozen times using armed drones.

The Constitution protects all Americans' right to life, whether they're living at home or abroad. If the government thinks you should be dead, it should at least tell you why. The fact that the standard that puts Americans on the "kill list" is a secret is itself unconstitutional. As our complaint states, "U.S. citizens have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their own government. Due process requires, at a minimum, that citizens be put on notice of what may cause them to be put to death by the state."

SNIP

A few weeks ago, ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer was on Democracy Now talking about the targeted killing program. He said: "A lot of us agree that the last administration's argument for worldwide detention authority, the authority to detain people without charge or trial, was extreme and unlawful. This administration is claiming worldwide execution authority." It's death without due process, far from any battlefield, which is alarming, dangerous, and unconstitutional.

Read the whole thing and watch the video here.
Smirky/Darth are laughing their asses off.