Obama Administration Says President Can Use Lethal Force Against Americans on US Soil

Mother Jones  By Adam Serwer  | Tue Mar. 5, 2013

Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in "an extraordinary circumstance," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday.

"The US Attorney General's refusal to rule out the possibility of drone strikes on American citizens and on American soil is more than frightening," Paul said Tuesday. "It is an affront the constitutional due process rights of all Americans."

Last month, Paul threatened to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, Obama's pick to head the CIA, "until he answers the question of whether or not the president can kill American citizens through the drone strike program on US soil." Tuesday, Brennan told Paul that "the agency I have been nominated to lead does not conduct lethal operations inside the United States—nor does it have any authority to do so." Brennan said that the Justice Department would answer Paul's question about whether Americans could be targeted for lethal strikes on US soil.

Holder's answer was more detailed, however, stating that under certain circumstances, the president would have the authority to order lethal attacks on American citizens. The two possible examples of such "extraordinary" circumstances were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. An American president ordering the use of lethal military force inside the United States is "entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront," Holder wrote. Here's the bulk of the letter

As members of this administration have previously indicated, the US government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat. We have a long history of using the criminal justice system to incapacitate individuals located in our country who pose a threat to the United States and its interests abroad. Hundreds of individuals have been arrested and convicted of terrorism-related offenses in our federal courts.

The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.

The letter concludes, "were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the president of the scope of his authority."

In a Google+ Hangout last month, President Obama refused to say directly if he had the authority to use lethal force against US citizens. As Mother Jones reported at the time, the reason the president was being so coy is that the answer was likely yes. Now we know that's exactly what was happening. "Any use of drone strikes or other premeditated lethal force inside the United States would raise grave legal and ethical concerns," says Raha Wala, an attorney with Human Rights First. "There should be equal concern about using force overseas."

Battle Looms with the UN Over Pot Legalization

November 21, 2012

Source: Michael Krieger

A couple of weeks ago, following Colorado and Washington’s historic vote to become the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational use, a piece titled Colorado Legalizes Marijuana: Your Move Eric Holder subsequently went viral.  Now the most useless and corrupt organization on the planet has weighed in – the United Nations.

The head of the UN drug watchdog (the International Narcotics Control Board or INCB), Raymond Yans, has come out in a press release essentially instructing the Attorney General of the United States to enforce Federal Prohibition of pot against the rights of the states to implement a law that is not only Constitutional, but a perfect example of a free people deciding what they want for themselves.

Perhaps that is why the United Nations is so panicky about the legislation in Colorado and Washington.  The organization consists of a bunch of global government-craving, control-freak bureaucrats, and as such some welcome this battle as an opportunity to marginalize it further and expose them for the undemocratic creeps they really are.  Anyone remember the massive corruption within the UN’s Oil for Food Program?  Who would let these creeps decide what every citizen in every corner of the planet can put into their own bodies.

From the UN press release:

VIENNA, 15 November (UN Information Service) – The President of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), Raymond Yans, has voiced grave concern about the outcome of recent referenda in the United States of America that would allow the non-medical use of cannabis by adults in the states of Colorado and Washington, and in some cities in the states of Michigan and Vermont. Mr. Yans stated that “these developments are in violation of the international drug control treaties, and pose a great threat to public health and the well-being of society far beyond those states”.

He went on to further state that for the international drug control system to function effectively, to achieve its aim of ensuring availability of drugs for medical purposes while preventing their abuse, the conventions must be universally adhered to and implemented by all States. In this regard, Mr. Yans stressed that national laws, policies and practices in drug abuse prevention and control should be fully aligned with the conventions.

The INCB President requested the Government of the United States to take the necessary measures to ensure full compliance with the international drug control treaties within the entire territory of the United States, in order to protect the health and well-being of its citizens.

The full press release is here.  It’s one page, I suggest you read it.  Such an intense concentration of hyperbole, panic and propaganda could only be created by the United Nations.

What's with the larger than Normal High Level Resignations, lately?

NEW:  BBC General Director George Entwistle resigns over elitist child sex ring allegations

CIA director David Petraeus resigns in wake of extramarital affair:
[link to www.thestar.com] 

Hillary Clinton stepping down:
[link to theweek.com] 

Eric Holder (Attorney General):
[link to washington.cbslocal.com] 

Frank Stronach steps down from Magna board chairmanship:
[link to www.theglobeandmail.com] 

Roger Ortiz’ resignation official, Cameron Co. searches for replace…
[link to www.valleycentral.com] 

Lockheed Martin’s incoming CEO resigns; replacement named:
[link to www.latimes.com] 

PetroShale Announces Resignation of Director:
[link to www.stockhouse.com] 

And at least 6 high level resignations in Canada alone.

House Votes to Put AG Holder in Contempt of Congress

Thursday, June 28, 2012 by Common Dreams

The Republican-led House of Representatives voted on Thursday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for not turning over documents related to the "Fast and Furious" program.

Some Democratic members led a walk-out in protest of the vote, which passed by a 255-67 vote.

Robert Beckhusen writes in Wired's Danger Room blog that the vote is nearly meaningless, as "what Congress is asking the Justice Department to do is to prosecute itself." The Hill notes that the House may also pass a second "resolution allowing the GOP House to pursue civil court action against Holder."


Who doesn't have contempt for congress, I ask you?!?! --jef

How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare

Obama has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration's worst policies.

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on April 18, 2012

When Barack Obama took office, he was the civil liberties communities’ great hope. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, pledged to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and run a transparent and open government. But he has become a civil libertarian’s nightmare: a supposedly liberal president who instead has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration’s worst policies, lending bipartisan support for a more intrusive and authoritarian federal government.

It started with the 9/11 attacks. Within a week, Congress, including many liberals, gave the White House blanket authority to wage a war on the terrorists. A month after that, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, authorizing many anti-terrorism measure including expanded surveillance. By mid-November, the White House ordered creation of military tribunals to try terrorists who were not U.S. citizens.

Bush quickly expanded covert operations, creating a shadow arrest, interrogation and detention system based at Guantanamo that violated international law and evaded domestic oversight. While the Supreme Court eventually ruled that detainees have some rights, the precedent that the Constitution does not restrict how a president conducts an endless war against a stateless enemy was firmly planted. In response, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union proposed reforms the newly elected president could make. What few anticipated was how he would embrace, expand and institutionalize many of Bush’s war on terror excesses.

President Obama now has power that Bush never had. Foremost is he can (and has) order the killing of U.S. citizens abroad who are deemed terrorists. Like Bush, he has asked the Justice Department to draft secret memos authorizing his actions without going before a federal court or disclosing them. 

Obama has continued indefinite detentions at Gitmo, but also brought the policy ashore by signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which authorizes the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of assisting terrorists, even citizens. That policy, codifying how the Bush treated Jose Padilla, a citizen who was arrested in a bomb plot after landing at a Chicago airport in 2002 and was transferred from civil to military custody, upends the 1878’s Posse Comitatus Act’s ban on domestic military deployment.

Meanwhile, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, Washington’s wartime posture has trickled down into many areas of domestic activity—even as some foreign policy experts say the world is a much safer place than it was 20 years ago, as measured by the growth in free-market economies and democratic governments. Domestic law enforcement has been militarized—as most visibly seen by the tactics used against the Occupy protests and also against suspected illegal immigrants, who are treated with brute force and have limited access to judicial review before being deported.

One of Bush’s biggest civil liberties breaches, spying on virtually all Americans via their telecommunications starting in 2003, also has been expanded. Congress authorized the effort in 2006. Two years later, it granted legal immunity to the telecom firms helping Bush—a bill Obama voted for. 

The National Security Agency is now building its largest data processing center ever, which Wired.com’s James Bamforth reports will go beyond the public Internet to grab data but also reach password-protected networks. The federal government continues to require that computer makers and big Web sites provide access for domestic surveillance purposes. More crucially, the NSA is increasingly relying on private firms to mine data, because, unlike the government, it does not need a search warrant. The Constitution only limits the government searches and seizures.

The government’s endless wartime footing is also seen in its war on whistleblowers. Obama has continued cases brought by Bush, such as going after the "leaker" in the warrantless wiretapping story broken by the New York Times in 2005, as well as the WikiLeaks case, prosecution of Bradley Manning, and others for allegedly mishandling classified materials related to the war on terrorism. Its suppression of war-related information given to journalists extends overseas, where the State Department this month has blocked a visa for a Pakistani critic from speaking in the U.S. The White House also recently pressured Yemen’s leader to jail the reporter who exposed U.S. drone strikes. 

Meanwhile, the administration has stonewalled Freedom of Information Act requests, particularly the Justice Department, which has issued the secret wartime memos.

How bad is it? Anthony Romero, the ACLU executive director, exclaimed in June 2010 that Obama “disgusted” him. Meanwhile, the most hawkish Bush administration officials have defended and praised Obama.

Last summer, liberal lawyer-journalist Glenn Greenwald tallied a list of Obama's Bush warrior endorsements. Jack Goldsmith, the former DOJ official who approved the torture and domestic spying efforts, wrote in The New Republic in May 2009 that Obama actually was waging a more effective war on terror than Bush.

“The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expended some of it, and has narrowed only a bit,” Goldsmith wrote. “Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol and rhetoric.” Bush’s final CIA director, General Michael Hayden—whose confirmation Obama opposed as a senator—told CNN there was a “powerful continuity between the 43rd and 44th presidents.” And in early 2011 Vice-President Dick Cheney told NBC News, “He’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate.”

All of these civil liberties issues—executive authority to order assassination of citizens, unlimited detention without charges at Guantanamo, authority to deploy the military domestically to arrest and indefinitely detail terrorism suspects, a parallel "due process" that is outside the judicial branch, the expansion of the surveillance state, the increased militarization of local police and federal agencies especially ICE, the increasingly punitive treatment of protesters including strip searches, the war on whistleblowers, and others—are very complicated. The details are filled with shades of gray.

Bradley Manning’s harsh treatment, for example, is thought to be tied to the White House’s fear that the vast WikiLeaks cache contained references to the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden before his assassination—and could have alerted Al Qaeda. Better data mining and analysis could have detected the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act’s defenders past and present have repeatedly argued. But from a civil liberties perspective, Obama has more than chipped away at freedom from federal intrusion. The underlying problem is the tactics and values forged in foreign war have seeped into domestic policing.

“We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national security state,” Jack Balkin, a liberal Yale University Law School professor, told the New Yorker in a 2011 feature about a prominent NSA whistleblower. “The question is not whether we will have a surveillance state in the years to come, but what sort of state we will have,” he wrote in a prescient law review article published early in Obama’s presidency.

The larger dangers, Balkin said, was that the government is creating a “parallel track of preventative law enforcement that bypasses traditional protections in the Bill of Rights.” Moreover, he worries “traditional law enforcement and social services will increasingly resemble the parallel track.” And because the Constitution only restricts government actions, not “private parties, government has increasing incentives to rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it.”

“The major defining feature of the Obama administration on this issue is the eagerness with which it embraced the stunning evisceration of civil rights and liberties that was a hallmark of the Bush administration, and then deepened those outrageous programs,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, who is an attorney representing many Occupy protesters swept up in last fall’s mass arrests. “He has successfully counted on the acquiescent silence of the liberals.”

Eric Holder, the Defender

The biggest difference between Bush and Obama on civil liberties and the war on terror is the Obama administration is more attuned to the optics of trying to appear reasonable as it conducts much of the same policies. To be fair, Obama has not kidnapped innocent people en masse in Afghanistan and warehoused them in Cuba, as Bush did. But he has launched drone strikes in numerous counties, where the victims include children.

In 2010, the ACLU and New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented many Guantanamo detainees, filed a suit asking a federal court to set legal standards when the government could use lethal force against a U.S. citizen who was overseas but not on an active battlefield. That suit was dismissed. But Eric Holder, perhaps giving a victory to critics who have condemned the administration’s secrecy, gave an speech this March at Chicago’s Northwestern University School of Law explaining Obama’s wartime actions and authority. The speech was exactly what Goldsmith had described a year earlier in The New Republic—nearly identical on substance to Bush administration policy, but with more attention to the packaging for the public.

“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger,” Holder began, quoting President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural at the height of the Cold War. “But just as surely as we are a nation at war, we are also a nation of laws and values,” Holder continued, saying, “Our actions must always be grounded on the bedrock of the Constitution.”

Holder explained the challenge for government was what to do after someone is found who is suspected of participating in a terrorist plot against the United States. He said the federal courts have done an excellent job in dealing with suspected terrorists since 9/11—and those who claim otherwise “are simply wrong.” But then Holder built the case for using a “reformed” military commission system—granting foreign detainees a right to counsel, a right to see evidence against them, and a right to cross-examine witnesses.

Moreover, Holder defended the administration’s right to transfer a terrorism suspect from civilian courts to military custody “based on the considered judgment of the President’s senior national security team.” And he said that in a “war with a stateless enemy” that the federal government has a right an obligation “to target specific senior operational leaders of Al Qaeda and associated forces,” just as the military shot down the plane with the top Japanese Admiral who led the Pearl Harbor attacks in World War II. “It is important to explain these legal principles publicly,” Holder said. “The Constitution does not require the President to delay action until some theoretical end stage of planning—when the precise time, pace and manner of an attack become clear.”

Holder then said there is no constitutional requirement that the President “get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

Holder’s arguments sound reasonable until you stop and ask where it ends up. The U.S. is still involved in dubious warfare efforts overseas—particularly Afghanistan. But the full wartime powers invoked by Obama to endlessly fight stateless terrorists, which are on par to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s suspension of civil liberties in World War II, arguably are disproportionate to the scope of military actions. Moreover, people like Obama who are schooled in constitutional law know there are reasons why the foundation of American democracy is based on being a nation of laws—not arbitrary decisions by men—and are expected to respect that distinction govern with due deference and restraint.

Those who understand Obama’s civil liberties failing best include lawyers serving in the military, like David Frakt, a lawyer in the Air Force and Barry University School of Law professor. He recently wrote on Jurist.org that Obama’s targeted assassinations—a word Holder rejected in the speech—was the foreign policy equivalent of the domestic "Stand Your Ground" laws that led to Trayvon Martin's killing.

“During the Bush administration, we developed the rule of ‘we can kill you, but you can’t kill us,’” Frakt wrote. “Now, under the Obama administration, we have added a corollary… namely, ‘you can’t kill us, only we can kill us,’” referring to killing U.S. citizens abroad where “capture is not feasible.” The Stand Your Ground laws “are the logical domestic criminal counterpart to our nation’s aggressive pre-emptive self defense doctrine, under which we have gone to war on the same flimsy suspicions that George Zimmerman acted upon.”

The problem—as seen with more than 600 innocent people taken to Guantanamo—is that the White House can make mistakes. Cheney famously called them “the worst of the worst,” but by 2009 only one in seven were seen as being enemy combatants. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, responding to Holder’s talk, said that, “Based on what I’ve heard so far, I can’t tell whether or not the Justice Department’s legal arguments would allow the president to order intelligence agents to kill an American inside the United States.”

Domestic civil liberties are fragile. They are not the same as a World War II battlefield where a grunt shoots first and asks questions later. Civil liberties take years to create and accrue, whereas a domestic terrorist attack can occur in a flash and then unwind those protections quickly and for many years. What started under Bush and has continued under Obama are battlefield values that have been conflated with domestic policing.

Just as Stand Your Ground laws turn every American going about their lives into a threat that needs to be measured, so too does a growing surveillance state encroach on privacy and specific constitutional rights, such as freedom from warrantless searches, judicial review and other constitutional checks and balances.

The question, as Balkan noted at the start of the Obama presidency, is not whether we will have a growing surveillance and police state, but what that state will be like. Obama has begun to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he hasn’t begun to roll back the most extreme civil liberties abuses tied to the earliest phases of that war. Liberals expected otherwise from a former constitutional law professor and candidate who campaigned against the excesses of the Bush administration.   

"It is time for a new approach on marijuana policy," Drug Policy Coalition says to Obama

Six National Drug Policy Organizations Call on President Obama to End Unnecessary Assault on Medical Marijuana Providers
Wednesday, 04 April 2012

Contact: Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director, (202) 483-5500
Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, paul@norml.org

Washington, DC -- In the wake of recent attacks on medical marijuana providers and patients by multiple branches of the federal government, including Monday's raids on Oaksterdam University in Oakland, CA, a coalition of six national drug policy reform organizations is appealing to President Obama and his administration to follow its own previously stated policies respecting state medical marijuana laws. In the letter, posted in full below, the organizations call on the Obama administration to bring an end to the federal government's ongoing campaign to undermine state efforts to regulate safe and legal access to medical marijuana for those patients who rely on it.

The Obama Administration's National Drug Control Strategy Report 2012, reportedly being released in the coming days, is expected to cling to failed and outdated marijuana policies which further cement the control of the marijuana trade in the hands of drug cartels and illegal operators, endangering both patients in medical marijuana states and citizens everywhere. The members of this coalition stand together with members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, current and former Latin American leaders whose countries are being ravaged by drug cartels, state officials from five medical marijuana states, and tens of millions of Americans in their call for a more rational approach to marijuana policy.

###

THE LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA:

April 4, 2012 

President Barack ObamaThe White House
Washington D.C. 20500
Via Fax: 202-456-2461 

Dear Mr. President: 

Our coalition represents the views of tens of millions of Americans who believe the war on medical marijuana patients and providers you are fighting is misguided and counterproductive. As your administration prepares to release its annual National Drug Control Strategy, we want to speak with one voice and convey our deep sense of anger and disappointment in your lack of leadership on this issue. 

Voters and elected officials in sixteen states and the District of Columbia have determined that the medical use of marijuana should be legal. In many of these states, the laws also include means for providing medical marijuana patients safe access to this medicine. These laws allowing for the cultivation and distribution of medical marijuana actually shift control of marijuana sales from the criminal underground to state-licensed, taxed, and regulated producers and distributors. 

Instead of celebrating - or even tolerating - this state experimentation, which has benefited patients and taken profits away from drug cartels, you have turned your back as career law enforcement officials have run roughshod over some of the most professional and well-regulated medical marijuana providers. We simply cannot understand why you have reneged on your administration's earlier policy of respecting state medical marijuana laws. 

Our frustration and confusion over your administration's uncalled-for attacks on state-authorized medical marijuana providers was best summed up by John McCowen, the chair of the Mendocino County (CA) board of supervisors, who said, "It's almost as if there was a conscious effort to drive [medical marijuana cultivation and distribution] back underground. My opinion is that's going to further endanger public safety and the environment - the federal government doesn't seem to care about that." 

The National Drug Control Strategy you are about to release will no doubt call for a continuation of policies that have as a primary goal the ongoing and permanent control of the marijuana trade by drug cartels and organized crime. We cannot and do not endorse the continued embrace of this utterly failed policy. We stand instead with Latin American leaders, members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and the vast majority of people who voted you into office in recognizing that it is time for a new approach on marijuana policy. 

With approximately 50,000 people dead in Mexico over the past five years as the result of drug war-related violence, we hope that you will immediately reconsider your drug control strategy and will work with, not against, states and organizations that are attempting to shift control of marijuana cultivation and sales, at least as it applies to medical marijuana, to a controlled and regulated market. 

Sincerely, 

Drug Policy Alliance (DPA)
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)
Marijuana Policy Project (MPP)
National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA)
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) 

cc: Eric Holder, Attorney General, Department of Justice
James Cole, Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice
Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy

No Fault Corporate Crime

Holding Holder to Account
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

Ten years ago, if you wanted to quickly find out what was going on in the world of corporate crime, you would just type in the word “fined” into a news database.

Up would come a series of penalties or fines brought against big corporations by federal law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C.

Exxon fined for pollution.

Or ADM fined for antitrust violations.

But over the past decade, corporate lobbyists have worked their will in Washington, and enforcement against corporations has been watered down to the point where now corporate crime enforcement is way down the list.

Last night I typed “fined” into Google News – and these were the top five stories that came up:

1. A french perfume executive was fined for making racist remarks.
2. Fifteen people were fined for spitting in India.
3. The NBA fined Los Angeles Clippers foward Reggie Evans $25,000 for making an obscene gesture.
4. Only twenty five dog owners in northeast Scotland have were fined in the last year for dog fouling.
5. And the Houston Dynamo soccer midfielder Colin Clark was fined for using a gay slur at a ball boy.

Story number six did have to do with corporate crime – but it was from Europe.

Last week, the EU fined 14 air-shipping companies a combined $225 million for price fixing.

Now, try typing in the phrase “corporate crime” into Google News.

The phrase has been pretty much banished from American journalism and politics.

So, when you type in the words “corporate crime” into Google News, you will primarily see reports from overseas say the Irish Times or a newspaper in Australia – or you will see a quote from Ralph Nader, or a story from Corporate Crime Reporter.

Last night, I typed in the words “corporate crime” into Google News, and much to my surprise the first thing that came up was a Reuters story about the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

I have been reporting on Holder since he took office three years ago.

As far as I can tell, last month was the first time in his three years as Attorney General that he uttered the phrase “corporate crime.”

And this is what he said at a meeting of state Attorney Generals in Washington.

“We’re gonna make some news with regard to holding individuals responsible for things we tend to think of as corporate crimes,” Holder said.

Get it?

We’re going to hold individuals responsible.

Not hold corporations responsible.

Hold individuals responsible for things we tend to think of as corporate crimes.

Now, what Holder said here is important.

Because he comes from a corporate law firm – Covington & Burling – where he represented primarily corporations, not individuals.

And when he leaves office, Holder most likely will return to Covington & Burling.

Where he will represent primarily corporations – not individuals – against federal law enforcement officials, in their increasingly weakened state.

Every week in Corporate Crime Reporter, we run a question/answer format interview with someone who has something to say about corporate crime.

When we started Corporate Crime Reporter 25 years ago this month, our first ever interview – the first of now over 1,200 interviews – was with Rudy Giuliani – who at the time was the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.

At the time, Giuliani believed that if you were to bring a case against a major American corporation, you secured a guilty plea, or took the case to trial.

Or you just didn’t bring the case.

And Giuliani’s view was the view of federal law enforcement back then.

Bring a criminal charge if you have a criminal case. And secure a guilty plea. Or don’t bring the case.

As a result, major American corporations were convicted of crimes on a regular basis.

Because they engaged in crimes on a regular basis.

And the message was sent – you commit a crime, you will be convicted and publically shamed.

Today, major American corporations are still committing crimes on a regular basis.

But the difference is today major American corporations are rarely convicted of their crimes.

It’s not that they no longer engage in corporate criminal behavior.

It’s that they have set up a system where they no longer have to plead guilty to their crimes.

Instead, they settle these major corporate crime cases with deferred and non prosecution agreements.

These are the criminal equivalents of the neither admit nor deny consent decrees used for decades by the Securities and Exchange Commission and that recently have come under fire by federal judge Jed Rakoff in New York.

And so, if you are a criminal defense attorney at Holder’s former firm of Covingon & Burling, this is how you practice corporate crime law:

1. Your client comes to you with evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the corporation.
2. You approach the Justice Department and disclose it.
3. The Justice Department offers you a deal.
4. The Justice Department says to you – if you cooperate in the criminal investigation against the individuals involved at the company, we will let you off the hook with a deferred or non prosecution agreement.
5. There will be no criminal conviction against your corporate client.
6. But you must cooperate against the individuals involved.
7. And those individuals will likely be convicted and go to jail.

Thus, Holder’s statement – “We’re gonna make some news with regard to holding individuals responsible for things we tend to think of as corporate crimes.”

Last month, we interviewed David Uhlmann.

Uhlmann is the former head of the Environmental Crimes Section at the Justice Department.

And he’s currently a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

When Uhlmann was head of the Environmental Crimes Section, he didn’t use deferred and non prosecution agreements in corporate crime cases.

Uhlmann says that deferred and non prosecution agreements have no place in major corporate crime cases.

These agreements were originally meant for minor street cases, not major corporate crime cases.

When the Department entered into a non-prosecution agreement last year to resolve criminal investigation into the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, Uhlmann wrote a scathing opinion article in the New York Times titled For 29 Dead Miners, No Justice.

“Twenty-nine miners died in West Virginia. They died because Massey had a history of mine safety violations,” Uhlmann told us.

“They died at a facility where the company kept a double set of books – one for internal purposes, which documented violations, and one for mine safety officials that covered up those violations.”

“To enter a non-prosecution agreement in a case where 29 people died and there is so much evidence of criminal wrongdoing reflects poorly on the Justice Department.”

Uhlmann says that the Environmental Crimes Section to this day does not settle corporate crime cases with deferred and non prosecution agreements.

Maybe that’s why Holder and his aides stripped the Environmental Crimes Section of authority over the criminal investigation into the Gulf oil spill cases and gave it to the Criminal Division.

Uhlmann believes that it will be a travesty of justice if the Department doesn’t secure guilty pleas in the Gulf oil spill cases.

But they didn’t in the Massey Energy case.

And the odds are not good that they will in the BP oil spill cases.

Not that crimes weren’t committed in the Gulf oil spill cases. They clearly were. But after all, Holder is from Covington & Burling. And he’s going back to Covington & Burling. And his top deputies came from corporate law firms and they are going back to corporate law firms.

Obviously, this practice of no fault corporate crime has taken hold at the top and been filtered right down through the entire federal enforcement system.

Last month, I caught this headline from a Canadian newspaper:

“Wal-Mart Pleads Guilty in Teen’s Death.”

The story began:

“Walmart Canada pled guilty Tuesday in the case of a teenager who was electrocuted on the job last year."

When I saw that, I went to our federal OSHA web site and searched for a similar case. And I found one also from last month where a Verizon worker was electrocuted on the job. OSHA proposed a civil fine of $140,700.

The point is that a criminal conviction sends a message that a civil fine or a deferred and non prosecution can’t.

A criminal conviction says to the corporation – what you have done is serious and we are bringing out our most serious weapon to bear – a criminal conviction.

Corporations get it.

What big corporations fear most is the reputational hit of that headline –“Wal-Mart Pleads Guilty in Teen’s Death." Corporations will do – and have done – everything in their power to avoid that headline.

So, our criminal justice system is out of whack.We must get back to the days of when you brought a case, you secured a guilty plea or you went to trial. Like Professor Uhlmann says, deferred and non prosecution agreements have no place in corporate crime practice.

And now the question becomes – how to bring back some balance to our corporate criminal justice system?

There is a clear power imbalance in Washington with the corporate law firms holding the upper hand. Young law students would much rather go for the fancy offices and big salaries of a corporate law firm than a Justice Department cubicle.

When I was a teenager, I had an uncle who would warn me about U.S. colleges being high priced tool factories for the corporations. The choice of which college or law school to go to was not nearly as important as the choice of what you did with your education.

Education for what? – was the question we were asked. And it was made clear to us that a decision to work for a corporate law firm or not was a moral choice.

And that’s what is missing. A moral code and a shaming mechanism to enforce it.

We were told, in effect, – shame on you if you decide to slave away working to undermine the criminal justice system on behalf of Wal-Mart and BP or Massey Energy.

Sure, every corporation deserves legal representation. But it doesn’t have to be you.

We must also shame our public officials into securing convictions when convictions are warranted. To insist on corporate criminal prosecutions in worker death cases where warranted. To do away with deferred and non prosecution agreements in corporate crime cases. To demand action where action is due.

It’s shameful that more than three years since the financial crisis crippled the American economy there has not been a single prosecution of a Wall Street firm even though fraud and financial misrepresentations played a significant role in the meltdown.

Even Sixty Minutes pointed this out in December of last year.

But still, nothing.

And before he goes back to Covington & Burling, Eric Holder has to be held to account.

It is shameful that Holder cares more about individual wrongdoing than he does about corporate wrongdoing.

Most importantly, we need to support our local corporate crime police, to bolster their enforcement budgets, to begin to level the playing field between corporate criminals and the police.

Obama and Holder Remove Restrictions on Gathering and Keeping Data about All Americans

Matt Bewig - March 26, 2012
Source: All Gov.

Even as the Obama administration goes full speed ahead on its version of the Bush administration’s supposedly defunct “total information awareness” program by building a massive complex in the Utah desert that will intercept, analyze and store communications from around the world, including the U.S., last week it approved guidelines allowing the government to retain private information about U.S. residents for up to five years–even if they have no known connection to terrorism. Previously, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) had 180 days to destroy any information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to terrorism was evident. The NCTC, established by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, collects data from many agencies and maintains access to about 30 data sets across the government.

 

Administration officials defended the guidelines by arguing that they are aimed at ensuring that relevant terrorism information is accessible to analysts, while guarding against privacy intrusions by, among other things, allowing agencies that share data with the NCTC to negotiate to have the data held for shorter periods.

 

Nevertheless, civil liberties advocates voiced alarm. Michael German of the American Civil Liberties Union cautioned that “watering down the rules raises significant concerns that U.S. persons are being targeted or swept up in these collection programs and can be harmed by continuing investigations for as long as these agencies hold the data.”

 

Intelligence officials have indicated that the government has been working on the new rules since the intelligence community’s failure to connect the dots about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber,” before his Dec. 25, 2009, failed attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner.

 

New Counterterrorism Guidelines Permit Data on U.S. Citizens to be Held Longer
(by Sari Horwitz and Ellen Nakashima)

U.S. Relaxes Limits on Use of Data in Terror Analysis (by Charlie Savage, New York Times)

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) (by James Bamford, Wired) 

Senators Attack Government's Use of Patriot Act

Friday, March 16, 2012 by Common Dreams
Sens. Wyden, Udall: Americans would be 'Stunned' at Justice Department's Surveillance Powers

Two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have expressed concerns that the US Justice Department is abusing provisions in the Patriot Act.


In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Mark Udall (D-Colorado) warned that the government is secretly interpreting sweeping surveillance powers in section 215 of the Patriot Act. They also warned that this "top secret intelligence operation" as the New York Times reported, is "not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained." The senators said Americans would be "stunned" to learn of the nature of this intelligence program.

The dispute is over the government's ability to obtain a secret foreign order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain business records and other items relevant to terrorism or espionage. The specifics of the program are classified.

The letter also expressed discontent over the Obama Administrations failure to establish a "regular process for reviewing, redacting and releasing significant opinions" about the Patriot Act. The senators complained that "not a single opinion has been redacted."

* * *

Democratic Senators Issue Strong Warning About Use of the The Patriot Act, The New York Times:

For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if the public — or even others in Congress — knew about it. 

On Thursday, two of those senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — went further. They said a top-secret intelligence operation that is based on that secret legal theory is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained. 

The senators, who also said that Americans would be “stunned” to know what the government thought the Patriot Act allowed it to do, made their remarks in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. after a Justice Department official last month told a judge that disclosing anything about the program “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.” 

The Justice Department has argued that disclosing information about its interpretation of the Patriot Act could alert adversaries to how the government collects certain intelligence. It is seeking the dismissal of two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits — by The New York Times and by the American Civil Liberties Union — related to how the Patriot Act has been interpreted. 

The senators wrote that it was appropriate to keep specific operations secret. But, they said, the government in a democracy must act within publicly understood law so that voters “can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf” — even if that “obligation to be transparent with the public” creates other challenges. 

“We would also note that in recent months we have grown increasingly skeptical about the actual value of the ‘intelligence collection operation,’ ” they added. “This has come as a surprise to us, as we were initially inclined to take the executive branch’s assertions about the importance of this ‘operation’ at face value.” 

The dispute centers on what the government thinks it is allowed to do under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, under which agents may obtain a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing them to get access to any “tangible things” — like business records — that are deemed “relevant” to a terrorism or espionage investigation.

* * *

Senators Demand DOJ Release Secret Spy Court Ruling, Wired.

Two Democratic senators urged the Obama administration Thursday to declassify secret court rulings that give the government far wider domestic spying powers under the Patriot Act than intended.

The 10-year-old measure, hastily adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, grants the government broad surveillance powers with little oversight that can be used domestically.

While much has been written and debated about the bill’s powers and efficacy, there’s evidently much more going on than the public knows.

A secret tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court has issued classified rulings about the Patriot Act that U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) say expand the government’s surveillance powers even more.

At issue, the lawmakers said, is section 215 of the Patriot Act. The sweeping power, one of the most controversial in the law, allows the secret FISA court to authorize broad warrants for most any type of record, including those held by banks, internet companies, libraries and doctors. The government does not have to show a connection between the items sought under a section 215 warrant and a suspected terrorist or spy: the authorities must assert the documents would be relevant to an investigation. Those who receive such an order are not allowed to tell anyone, ever, that such records were requested.

The senators, in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, wrote:

“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

The Day 'Due Process' Died

Wednesday, March 7, 2012 by Huffington Post
Obama, Holder and the End of Rights
by Peter Van Buren

Historians of the future, if they are not imprisoned for saying so, will trace the end of America's democratic experiment to the fearful days immediately after 9/11, what Bruce Springsteen called the days of the empty sky, when frightened, small men named Bush and Cheney made the first decisions to abandon the Constitution in the name of freedom and created a new version of the security state with the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, secret prisons and sanctioned torture by the U.S. government. They proceeded carefully, making sure that lawyers in their employ sanctioned each dark act, much as kings in old Europe used the church to justify their own actions.

Those same historians will remark from exile on the irony that such horrendous policies were not only upheld by Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and professor of Constitutional law, but added to until we came to the place we sadly occupy today: the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, publicly stating that the American Government may murder one of its own citizens when it wishes to do so, and that the requirements of due process enshrined in the Constitution's Fifth Amendment, itself drawn from the Magna Carta that was the first reflowering of basic human rights since the Greeks, can be satisfied simply by a decision by that same president.

Yesterday will thus be remembered as the day we gave up. No more clever wordplay (enhanced interrogations, "patriot" act, targeted killing, kinetic operations) but a simple declaration that the U.S. government will kill its own citizens when it wishes to, via a secret process we, and our victims, are not allowed to know or contest.

Brevity in Our Freedom
Like most of the Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is beautiful in its brevity and clarity. When you are saying something true, pure, clean and right, you often do not need many words: "... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

There are no footnotes in the Fifth Amendment, no caveats, no secret memos, no exceptions for war, terrorism, mass rape, creation of concentration camps, acts of genocide, child torture or any evil. Those things are unnecessary, because in the beauty of what Lincoln offered to his audience as "a government of the people, by the people, for the people," the government would be made up of us, the purpose of government was to serve us, and the government would be beholden to us. Such a government would be incapable of killing its own citizens without care and debate and open trial.

With the excuse all tyrants proclaim, protecting the nation, on or about September 30, 2011 a U.S. drone fired a missile in Yemen and killed American Citizen Anwar al Awlaki, born in the United States and tragically devoted to al Qaeda. About a week later, the U.S. murdered al Awaki's 16 year old son. The U.S. had shot at the elder al Awlaki before, on May 7, 2011 under Obama's orders, and under the Bush administration. Before the U.S. government killed his son, attorneys for al Awlaki's father tried to persuade a U.S. District Court to issue an injunction preventing the government killing of al Awlaki. A judge dismissed the case, ruling the father did not have standing to sue. This was the first time in our nation's history that a father sought to sue to prevent the government from extra-legally killing his son. The judge in the case surrendered to his post-9/11 fear and wrote that it was up to the elected branches of government, not the courts, to determine whether the United States has the authority to murder its own citizens by decree.

Fear Shaped by Lies to Compel Compliance
In his speech, Attorney General Holder said things no honest man would ever believe would be said by the highest law officer in the United States.

So while the popular media remembers ... the day Rush apologized for calling someone a slut and Republican candidates ignored the wave of history to carp about birth control, historians will look back on March 5, 2012 as the day America gave up on its experiment with unalienable rights, rights that are natural, not given, rights independent of governments, what our Declaration explained to an unsure forming nation as "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Holder said "that a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to 'due process' and that the Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against depriving a citizen of his or her life without due process of law does not mandate a 'judicial process.'"

Holder thus also declaimed that the victim also has no right to a defense, no right to speak on his behalf, no right to examine and refute the evidence against him and no right even to know his life will be taken under the decision of a few men in Washington. Indeed, Holder made clear that the government's decision to kill overshadowed the right to self-defense in saying "An individual's interest in making sure that the government does not target him erroneously could not be more significant. Yet it is imperative for the government to counter threats posed by senior operational leaders of al Qaeda, and to protect the innocent people whose lives could be lost in their attacks."

Holder said he rejected any attempt to label such operations assassinations, invoking the same airbrush of lawfulness that fueled the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials and the Holocaust. "Assassinations are unlawful killings. The U.S. government's use of lethal force in self-defense against a leader of al Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful."

Sluts All
So while the popular media remembers yesterday as the day Rush apologized for calling someone a slut and Republican candidates ignored the wave of history to carp about birth control, historians will look back on March 5, 2012 as the day America gave up on its experiment with unalienable rights, rights that are natural, not given, rights independent of governments, what our Declaration explained to an unsure forming nation as "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

And that is the saddest part of a very sad day: the majority of Americans -- the consent of the governed -- seemingly do not care what Holder said, and are even now bleating on internet forums and likely in comments below to this article about the need to kill more terrorists, adding terrified, empty justifications to Holder's clever Newspeak. 

We did not have our freedom taken from us, we gave it away.

Rights Groups, Law Experts Reject Obama's 'Assassination' Program

Wednesday, March 7, 2012 by Common Dreams

Law experts, human rights groups, and advocates for civil liberties and international law are expressing outrage and concern just days after the Obama administration's chief prosecutor, Attorney General Eric Holder, publicly outlined and defended the US government's program to target and kill, without trial, individuals who it determines are affiliated with al Qaeda or deems a threat to national security.

Speaking to law students at Northwestern University on Monday, Holder said of the program:

Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack.

In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.

Responding to the speech on Tuesday, legal scholar Jonathan Turley, wrote: 

"The choice of a law school was a curious place for discussion of authoritarian powers. Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a "trust me" pledge that Holder repeated."

In the days since, groups and individuals have responded with incredulous amazement. Though the program has been known about for some time, the public defense shocked many. Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, commented on the speech:

“While the speech is a gesture towards additional transparency, it is ultimately a defense of the government’s chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public scrutiny. Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact. Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power.”

Inter Press Service reports today:

Although the Obama administration has stated publicly that its policy to assassinate U.S. citizens and foreign nationals allegedly involved with terrorist organizations does not fall outside of legal bounds, the actual decision-making process – how, when and under what circumstances – through which authority is granted remains classified.

The debate over targeted killings reignited in December 2011 when President Obama signed into law a bill that included language reaffirming the executive’s right “to use all necessary and appropriate force” in combating terrorism.

“We have had all of these arguments since 2010. They are inadequate,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specialises in international dispute, told IPS.

“This is the global war on terror with a new name – the same global war on terror that President Obama dismissed on the campaign trail” in 2008, O’Connell added. “The U.S. has always had a policy against targeted killing for legal, moral and strategic reasons. None of these reasons have changed."

Former litigator and civil rights blogger, Glenn Greenwald, was scathing in his critique at Salon.com. However, due to his extensive previous critique of the assassination program itself, he saved most of his ire for the Democrats who have so blithely followed the lead of the President and his administration on the issue:

The willingness of Democrats to embrace and defend this power is especially reprehensible because of how completely, glaringly and obviously at odds it is with everything they loudly claimed to believe during the Bush years. Recall two of the most significant “scandals” of the Bush War on Terror: his asserted power merely to eavesdrop on and detain accused Terrorists without judicial review of any kind. Remember all that? Progressives endlessly accused Bush of Assaulting Our Values and “shredding the Constitution” simply because Bush officials wanted to listen in on and detain suspected Terrorists — not kill them, just eavesdrop on and detain them — without first going to a court and proving they did anything wrong. Yet here is a Democratic administration asserting not merely the right to surveil or detain citizens without charges or judicial review, but to kill them without any of that: a far more extreme, permanent and irreversible act. Yet, with some righteous exceptions, the silence is deafening, or worse.

Turley echoes Greenwald's criticism of most Democrats and questions the limits of such vaguely worded executive authority:

The Obama administration continues to stonewall efforts to get it to acknowledge the existence of a memo authorizing the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. Democrats previously demanded the "torture memos" of the Bush administration that revealed both poor legal analysis by Judge Jay Bybee and Professor John Yoo to justify torture. Now, however, Democrats are largely silent in the face of a president claiming the right to unilaterally kill citizens.

Holder became particularly cryptic in his assurance of caution in the use of this power, insisting that they will kill citizens only with "the consent of the nation involved or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling to deal effectively with a threat to the United States." What on earth does that mean?

Peter Van Buren, a former US diplomat, argued that Holder's defense of the program amounted to death of the Constitution's fifth amendment:

Like most of the Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is beautiful in its brevity and clarity. When you are saying something true, pure, clean and right, you often do not need many words: "... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

There are no footnotes in the Fifth Amendment, no caveats, no secret memos, no exceptions for war, terrorism, mass rape, creation of concentration camps, acts of genocide, child torture or any evil. Those things are unnecessary, because in the beauty of what Lincoln offered to his audience as "a government of the people, by the people, for the people," the government would be made up of us, the purpose of government was to serve us, and the government would be beholden to us. Such a government would be incapable of killing its own citizens without care and debate and open trial.

IPS' report focused particularly on the implication for international laws:

Holder also argued that certain legal principles “do not forbid the use of stealth or technologically advanced weapons”, such as covert operations and unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, used to kill militants and foreign nationals suspected of posing an “imminent threat” to U.S. national security.

But the use of such methods has set controversial precedents that may violate international law, Laura Pitter, a specialist on U.S. counterterrorism policy for Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“The reason it’s important to comply with international law is that there are standards that all countries use when applying lethal force so that countries like Russia and China, when they have these technologies, all apply the same standards,” Pitter explained.

While the speech provided the clearest insight to date regarding the administration’s legal framework for assassinations of U.S. citizens, Holder avoided detailing the implications of such a policy for foreign nationals.

“[The speech] deals with what would be justified for a U.S. citizen,” said Pitter. The fact that it didn’t address non-citizens leaves “little basis for determining whether the U.S. is meeting its legal obligations when it conducts these operations in regard to non-citizens,” she added.

“Each targeted killing that occurs takes place in different circumstances, and all of it is secret because it’s being conducted by the CIA…We’ve called for a long time for them to be conducted under military authority, which has greater transparency,” Pitter added.

And Charles Pierce, writing at Esquire, highlights the predictable (and troubling) path that expansive and unchecked executive authority has followed since the George W. Bush presidency.

The criteria for when a president can unilaterally decide to kill somebody is completely full of holes, regardless of what the government's pet lawyers say. And this... 

"This is an indicator of our times," Holder said, "not a departure from our laws and our values." 

"...is a monumental pile of crap that should embarrass every Democrat who ever said an unkind word about John Yoo. This policy is a vast departure from our laws and an interplanetary probe away from our values. The president should not have this power because the Constitution, which was written by smarter people than, say, Benjamin Wittes, knew full and goddamn well why the president shouldn't have this power. If you give the president the power to kill without due process, or without demonstrable probable cause, he inevitably will do so. 

"And, as a lot of us asked during the Bush years, if you give this power to President George Bush, will you also give it to President Hillary Clinton and, if you give this power to President Barack Obama, will you also give it to President Rick Santorum?"

So, Eric Holder, We Should Just Trust that the President Won't Assassinate Us?

Tuesday, March 6, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
by Jonathan Turley

Attorney General Eric Holder was at Northwestern University law school Monday explaining President Barack Obama's claimed authority to kill any American if he unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation. The choice of a law school was a curious place for discussion of authoritarian powers. Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a "trust me" pledge that Holder repeated Monday at Northwestern.

The good news is that Holder promised not to hunt citizens for sport. Holder proclaimed that:

"The president may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization with which the United States is at war – even if that individual happens to be a US citizen."

The use of the word "abroad" is interesting since senior administration officials have asserted that the president may kill an American anywhere and anytime, including in the United States. Holder's speech does not materially limit that claimed authority. He merely assures citizens that Obama will only kill those of us he finds abroad and a significant threat. Notably, Holder added, "Our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan."

The Obama administration continues to stonewall efforts to get it to acknowledge the existence of a memo authorizing the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. Democrats previously demanded the "torture memos" of the Bush administration that revealed both poor legal analysis by Judge Jay Bybee and Professor John Yoo to justify torture. Now, however, Democrats are largely silent in the face of a president claiming the right to unilaterally kill citizens.

Holder became particularly cryptic in his assurance of caution in the use of this power, insisting that they will kill citizens only with "the consent of the nation involved or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling to deal effectively with a threat to the United States." What on earth does that mean?

This is precisely why the framers of the US constitution rejected the "trust me" approach to government, as discussed in this column. Since last year, US drones have killed three Americans overseas.

US Set to Outline Justification for 'Targeted Assassination' Program

Monday, March 5, 2012 by Common Dreams
 

The Obama administration will later today explain its legal justification for its 'targeted assassination' program, which allows the government to kill U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, the Associated Press is reporting.

The Associated Press reports that Attorney General Eric Holder will explain the legal backing for the program this afternoon at Northwestern University.
 

 CNN adds:

One official familiar with the speech said it was doubtful Holder would mention by name Anwar al-Awlaki, who was targeted in a September drone attack. Another American who was active in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Samir Khan, was not the target of the strike but was with al-Awlaki and killed at the same time. [...]

Another official familiar with the speech confirmed the attorney general will discuss the legal framework on the use of lethal force. The official, who asked not to be identified because the speech is still under wraps, said the targeted-killing issue is just one aspect of a broad-ranging look at national security issues from a legal perspective.

Defense department lawyer Jeh Johnson said last month:

"Under well-settled legal principles, lethal force against a valid military objective, in an armed conflict, is consistent with the law of war and does not, by definition, constitute an assassination."

On February 1 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Depart of Justice to demand that the US government release information about the government’s targeted killing program.

Explaining its lawsuit, the ACLU wrote:

Our government’s deliberate and premeditated killing of American terrorism suspects raises profound questions that ought to be the subject of public debate. Unfortunately the Obama administration has released very little information about the practice — its official position is that the targeted killing program is a state secret — and some of the information it has released has been misleading. [...]

Some officials, including President Obama, have spoken on the record about the program. They have publicly claimed responsibility for killing al-Awlaki, and they have more generally defended the government’s right to kill citizens after a secret non-judicial process. Just last week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta acknowledged on 60 Minutes that the U.S. can and does carry out targeted killings of U.S. citizens subject to the recommendations of the CIA Director and the Secretary of Defense and pursuant to the President’s authorization. And this week, President Obama publicly defended the CIA targeted killing program in a live internet interview [starts at minute 26:30].

Glenn Greenwald wrote after the ACLU lawsuit was filed:

From a certain perspective, there’s really only one point worth making about all of this: if you think about it, it is warped beyond belief that the ACLU has to sue the U.S. Government in order to force it to disclose its claimed legal and factual bases for assassinating U.S. citizens without charges, trial or due process of any kind. It’s extraordinary enough that the Obama administration is secretly targeting citizens for execution-by-CIA; that they refuse even to account for what they are doing — even to the point of refusing to disclose their legal reasoning as to why they think the President possesses this power — is just mind-boggling. Truly: what more tyrannical power is there than for a government to target its own citizens for death — in total secrecy and with no checks — and then insist on the right to do so without even having to explain its legal and factual rationale for what it is doing? Could you even imagine what the U.S. Government and its media supporters would be saying about any other non-client-state country that asserted and exercised this power?