Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.

February 5, 2010 |
The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.


Here are 10 problems with this:


1. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't cease to be crimes because you cross a border.

2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently. Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.

3. Killing people has nothing whatsoever to do with gathering so-called intelligence.

4. Even in this age in which senators and house members petition and write public letters to the president imploring him to obey laws, rather than introducing legislation, issuing subpoenas, holding impeachment hearings, or defunding agencies, the fact remains that Congress, above all, IS the government, and it is just not the place of the director of national thuggery to come in and dictate what the law will or will not be.

5. Having made the globe a battlefield and sanctioned crimes including lawless imprisonment, torture, warrantless spying, indiscriminant bombings, and the use of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and other sickening weapons, on the grounds that all is fair and legal in war, preventing Americans from becoming the innocent victims of the war is becoming harder and harder. If active military can be on duty here, if we can be spied on, kidnapped, and imprisoned here. If our most prominent foreign death camp can be relocated here, by what logic -- and for how long -- can government assassinations of Americans (without trial) be confined to elsewhere?

6. Typically when we assassinate people abroad, a lot of other innocent people are killed in the process. Those are all murders. That too will come home if there is not resistance soon, major resistance to this madness.

7. We are being asked to trust extrajudicial decisions on whether or not to murder, not just to allegedly wise judges who are in too big a hurry or find it logistically unfeasible to hold a trial, but to the very people who lied us into the wars that are motivating most of the international hostility toward our country and draining most of the resources Americans need at home.

8. No republic has ever survived putting this kind of power in the hands of a single ruler, with no independent legislature, no independent press, and no independent popular resistance. And we're almost there.

9. These people usually only admit to believing they have the barbaric "right" to do things that they have already done.

10. What are the chances the Director of Intelligence will never consider a president a threat to national security?

http://www.alternet.org/rights/145556/t ... n_citizens




Yeeeeeeeeeeeah.......remind me to never......ever...ever, ever, ever, ever leave the country.

This just brings out in the open what the CIA has been doing for years and years and years.

One day another Philip Agee will go public with another peek behind the bloody curtain.

The gap between what Americans believe about our foreign policy and what actually unfolds instead is nothing short of breathtaking. Both in terms of what motivates it and how it is carried out. It’s all done behind closed doors.

From piloting drones by remote control to sticking the knives in bellies, murder is committed in the name of American imperialism day after day after day.

But then the reactionaries do own our foreign policy, don’t they? No less so than they do our economy.

Progressives point this out over and again of course. But nothing changes. And since 9/11 it’s ever more a Blackwater world.

We are left only to suck it up and take it. What a shame.