Obama’s secret DOJ memo on killing US citizens

A secret Obama regime memo, detailing the circumstances and legal justification in which a US government may order the killing of an American citizen who is a high-ranking member of al-Qaida, has just been leaked.

Titled “Department of Justice White Paper,” a copy of the 16-page memo was obtained by NBC.

The memo gives a very wide latitude and flexibility to the Executive Branch of the U.S. government to decide whether an individual is “a senior al-Qaida member” and when and how that individual poses “an imminent threat” to U.S. national security. Add to all this the fact that the memo insists the President needs not consult or obtain the court’s approval.

Peter Beaumont reports for the UK’s Guardian, Feb. 5, 2013, that the document, dating from 2011, lays out for the first time the precise rationale for carrying out targeted killings of senior al-Qaida members who are US citizens, and who are believed to pose an “imminent threat of violent attack” against Amercia.

Although the white paper deals specifically with the issue of when and how the president can order the killing of a US citizen who is a member of al-Qaida, it also provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of the wider international legal framework the US believes supports its controversial drones policy.

Although the paper does not specify the “minimum legal requirements” for launching such an operation, it insists that the killing would be constitutionally justified as the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict”, as defined by international law and authorized by Congress, with al-Qaida and its affiliates.

In a key passage in the document – which is unsigned – it argues that for a US citizen who has rights under the due process clause and the fourth amendment, “that individual’s citizenship would not immunize from a lethal operation”.

The paper concludes: “Where certain circumstances are met, a lethal operation against a US citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaida … and who himself poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, would not violate the constitution.”

The leaking of the documents came as eight Democratic and three Republican senators wrote to Barack Obama requesting the disclosure of all the legal opinions drawn up at his request authorizing the killing of Americans.

The question of the constitutionality of such operations emerged after the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born radical Muslim cleric, in a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Although the leaked paper is not understood to be the legal determination that authorized that killing, it is understood to mirror it.

The paper argues that the operation must be consistent with the laws of war, and that capture of the individual must have be found to be unfeasible. But in a number of areas, it controversially appears to give considerable flexibility to administration officials to define key issues.

Those include defining the imminence of the specific threat and the operational seniority of the target, considerations outside of the overview of the US courts. The paper insists the decision to authorize a lethal operation may be made by an “informed, high-level official of the US government”, rather than by the courts.

On the issue of imminence, the justification is particularly wide-reaching: as attacks are “continually” being planned by al-Qaida, it is argued, “imminence must incorporate considerations of the relevant window of opportunity.”

The paper justifies the exclusion of the courts by arguing that “judicial enforcement of such orders would require the court to supervise inherently predictive judgments by the president and his national security advisers as to when and how to use force against a member of an enemy force against which Congress has authorized the use of force.”

The leaking of the document, with its dense legal argument justifying the targeted killings of US citizens, is certain to escalate the arguments that have been swirling around the issue.

Speaking to the New York Times, Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project, denounced the memorandum as “a profoundly disturbing document”, adding: “It’s hard to believe that it was produced in a democracy built on a system of checks and balances. It summarizes in cold legal terms a stunning overreach of executive authority: the claimed power to declare Americans a threat and kill them, far from a recognized battlefield and without any judicial involvement.”

Here’s the URL of the 16-page memo, “Department of Justice White Paper”:

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf

If that URL doesn’t work, I’ve saved the pdf document to FOTM’s Media Library. Click here: DOJ_White_Paper

Now do you see what 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror spawned? We have gone from George W. Bush’s troubling Patriot Act to this monstrosity of Obama’s kill memo.

~Eowyn

Need A Job? Just Email Al-Qaeda

Via rte.ie/news:

Al-Qaeda advertising for suicide bombers on internet

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has begun posting Internet advertisements offering training for suicide bombers to target the US, Israel and France.

Updated: 15:19, Thursday, 7 June 2012

The advertisements ask for volunteers to get in touch via e-mail with details about their own experience and proposed targets, and were posted on a variety of jihadist forums, including Al-Fidaa, Shmoukh al-Islam and Honein.

Al-Qaeda and its regional offshoots often use jihadist Internet forums to post statements claiming responsibility for attacks, and to communicate with followers.

“The aim of this training is to continue with our brothers who are seeking to carry out operations that make for great killing and slaughtering of the enemies of Islam,” said the advertisement attributed to Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

“It is clear now that the individual jihad, or what is called the lone wolf, has become more widespread and its features have started showing — in summary, it is a complete jihadist operation to be carried out by a single bomber.”

It said the targets of the attacks were “those who are fighting the Muslims and Islam” and specifically pointed to “economic, military and media interests of the enemy.”

“Their identity must be, according to priority, American, Israeli, French and British.”

-End 

It would definitely put a dent in the unemployment numbers.

-Dave 

(h/t: michaelsavage.wnd.com)

First It Was Bowing To Our Enemies, Now Obama Surrenders To Them

Can Obama Safely Embrace Islamists?

By Michael Hirsh April 23, 2012 | 11:44 AM 207 115

In an article in the current National Journal called “The Post Al Qaida Era,” I write that the Obama administration is taking a new view of Islamist radicalism. The president realizes he has no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other relatively “moderate” Islamist groups emerging as lead political players out of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. (The Muslim Brotherhood officially renounced violence decades ago, leading then-dissident radicals such as Ayman al-Zawahiri to join al Qaida.)

It is no longer the case, in other words, that every Islamist is seen as a potential accessory to terrorists. “The war on terror is over,” one senior State Department official who works on Mideast issues told me. “Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.”

The new approach is made possible by the double impact of the Arab Spring, which supplies a new means of empowerment to young Arabs other than violent jihad, and Obama’s savagely successful military drone campaign against the worst of the violent jihadists, al Qaida.

Some of the smarter hardliners on the Right, like Reuel Marc Gerecht, are coming to realize that the Arab world may find another route to democracy–through Islamism. The question is, how will this play politically at a time when Obama’s GOP rival, Mitt Romney, is painting the president as a weak accommodationist?

According to a senior advisor to Romney, the campaign is still formulating how to approach the new cuddle-up approach to Islamists. But the spectacle of an administration that is desperately trying to catch up to the fast-evolving new world of the Mideast fits into the Romney narrative of a president who “has been outmatched by events,” the adviser said. “Obama came to power with a view of the region that would make progress in the Arab world and get the Iranians back to the table. He would deal with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the key to that was dealing with settlements. Instead it’s been chaos.”

The president may have no choice but to preside over chaos at this point–a chaos that may not be the disaster that critics say and may in fact be the Arab world’s only path to modernity — but it won’t play well in the seven months between now and election day.

What’s next, kissing their ass?

Tom in NC

Why Obama Wants to Veto S.1867

UPDATES: 

On December 31, 2011, Obama signed this effective martial-law bill into law.

Our concerns about Sec. 1031 are ignored. The reconcile conference committee has produced a final version of NDAA, which Obama says he will not veto. US citizens are NOT exempted from being arrested and detained without charge or trial. See my post of Dec. 14, 2011: “”U.S. Citizens Still Subject to Detention w/out Trial in Final Version of Defense Bill.”

See also, “There Really Are FEMA Camps.”

+++

Some among us are puzzled as to why Obama has made known he plans to veto the recently passed Senate bill 1867, that will give him (and future Presidents) immense power.

The now infamous Section 1031 of S. 1867 does not exclude U.S. citizens from those “covered persons” whom the President can have the military arrest and detain without charge or trial. In effect, S. 1867 suspends and  removes the protection of the U.S. Constitution from American citizens if they/we are deemed to be “at war” with the United States, whatever “at war” means.

Obama’s opposition to S. 1867 is not due to his passion to preserve our civil liberties.

Matt Apuzzo of the AP reports that on Dec. 1, 2011, “top national security lawyers” in the Obama administration said exactly what S. 1867′s Sec. 1031 says — that “U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida.”

The Obama administration’s CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson, were asked at a national security conference about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure who died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen. The two lawyers did not directly address the al-Awlaki case, but they did say U.S. citizens do not have immunity when they are at war with the United States. Echoing S. 1867′s Sec. 1031, Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

So why is Obama opposed to S. 1867?

It is not for reasons of protecting U.S. citizens, but because Obama opposes S. 1867′s “military detention” of those “covered persons.” Military detention means those “covered persons” become prisoners of war (POWs), and POWs are covered by the Geneva Convention, which forbids the torture of POWs.

In other words, Obama wants to continue to be able to use torture on “covered persons” — a category that, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein says in her e-mail, includes U.S. citizens.

As former Wall Street Journal editor and columnist Paul Craig Roberts explains:

“The Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war.[...]

Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. [Yes, Obama is still apparently allowing "extraordinary renditions" to torture people abroad.] This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”

The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but “enemy combatants,” “terrorists,” or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.

By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.

A careful reading of the Obama regime’s objections to military detention supports this conclusion. (See http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/112/saps1867s_20111117.pdf)”

Update (12.11.2011):

More than 2 years ago, Obama had proposed the creation of “a legal basis” for the preventive and indefinite detention of American citizens. Go here.

~Eowyn

FBI Does Not Believe Islam is a Religion of Peace

Since 9/11, beginning with the Bush administration and continuing in Skippy’s, the U.S. government insists that the number-one terrorist threat America faces comes from al-Qaida.

Yet an FBI agent who conducts counter-terrorism training, William Gawthrop, teaches FBI affiliates in law enforcement the – HORRORS! – very politically incorrect notion that it is the ideology of Islam that is the root problem.

Below are excerpts from an interesting article by Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman, “Video: FBI Trainer Says Forget ‘Irrelevant’ al-Qaida, Target Islam,” Wired, September 20, 2011:

The FBI has publicly declared that its counterterrorism training seminars linking “mainstream” Muslims to terrorists was a “one time only” affair that began and ended in April 2011. But two months later, the Bureau employee who delivered those controversial briefings gave a similar lecture to a gathering of dozens of law enforcement officials at an FBI-sponsored public-private partnership in New York City.

And during that June presentation, the FBI’s William Gawthrop told his audience that the fight against al-Qaida is a “waste,” compared to the threat presented by the ideology of Islam itself.

“At the operational level, you have groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaida. Like teeth in a shark, it is irrelevant if you take one group out,” Gawthrop said during his lecture to the New York Metro Infragard at the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan.

Since Danger Room published the contents of Gawthrop’s April lecture, top Senators and representatives from Arab- and Muslim-American groups have blasted the FBI for the training documents, which compare Mohammed to a “cult leader.”

This June 8 lecture is controversial in a different way. In Gawthrop’s worldview, the struggle against al-Qaida is really just an afterthought in a broader war. The group that knocked down the World Trade Center and rammed a jet into the Pentagon is a mere distraction. These are the professional assessments of a representative from the nation’s top domestic counterterrorism agency — a man considered so expert in understanding militant strategy that the FBI had him training agents on the subject.

“We waste a lot of analytic effort talking about the type of weapon, the timing, the tactics. All of that is irrelevant … if you have an Islamic motivation for actions,” Gawthrop said. Even taking down hostile states like Iran is futile, since “there are still internal forces that will seek to exert Islamic rule again.”

The best strategy for undermining militants, Gawthrop suggested, is to go after Islam itself. To undermine the validity of key Islamic scriptures and key Muslim leaders.

“If you remember Star Wars, that ventilation shaft that goes down to into the depths of the Death Star, they shot a torpedo down there. That’s a critical vulnerability,” Gawthrop told his audience. Then he waved a laser pointer at his projected PowerPoint slide, calling attention to the words “Holy Texts” and “Clerics.”

Since Danger Room published the contents of Gawthrop’s April lecture, top Senators and representatives from Arab- and Muslim-American groups have blasted the FBI for the training documents, which compare Mohammed to a “cult leader.”

Outside counterterrorists disagree — strongly — with Gawthrop’s take. “This is mind-numbingly stupid and dangerous,” says Aki Peritz, a former intelligence analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center, now with the Third Way think-tank in Washington. “If we were to follow his idea to a logical extension, that means we have individuals in every single government agency, at top levels, from CIA to the Defense Department to members of Congress, that are part of this cabal to destroy Western civilization. If you truly believe that, then this is McCarthyism on steroids.”

Gawthrop delivered the presentation at the New York City chapter of Infragard. Infragard is a public-private partnership between the FBI and the private sector with chapters around the country “dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States.”

The president and CEO of New York Metro Infragard, Joseph Concannon, told Danger Room that Gawthrop spoke in front of “60, 70 people,” mostly from law enforcement. Concannon says an organization affiliated with Gawthrop, the American Military University, recommended the analyst to New York Metro Infragard after vouching for his expertise.

[...] Videos of the presentation, publicly posted to YouTube, were made private immediately after Danger Room contacted the FBI and New York Metro Infragard, one of a series of partnerships between the FBI and the private sector “dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States.” However, Wired’s video team was able to recover one of the clips before it vanished completely from public sight. While the video recovery effort progressed on Friday, the FBI amended its press release, noting that Gawthrop continued to “provid[e] training on behalf of the FBI” until “August, 2011.”

At the start of his lecture, Gawthrop told his audience that he was speaking in his capacity as a private citizen, not as an FBI analyst. His lecture featured an army.mil e-mail address, not one from the FBI. Gawthrop also said that he was discussing Islam and the Prophet Mohammed “as an ideology, not as a religion,” in order to stay in-bounds of the First Amendment.

Gawthrop compared that Islamic “ideology” and its adherents to a “paper with iron filings on the top,” brought into contact with a “very powerful magnet,” which moves the iron filings back and forth. The iron filings “for the purposes of this discussion” are Muslims.

“We are not discussing Muslims. What we are interested in is the magnetic force, the radiating force of the ideology,” Gawthrop said. “That it animates these iron filings, or these people, is one thing. But we are not talking about the goodness or the badness of the iron filings. We are only interested in the force that this ideology exerts on its surroundings. That force is also exerted against you.”

[...] Gawthrop instructed his audience that the contents of the Koran and the other Islamic holy texts are best understood as only “17 percent religious.” The other 83 percent comprises Islamic law and other means of governing the relationship “between Islam and the non-Islamic world.” And that 83 percent amounts to an “expansive doctrine with a single agenda: world imperium. Controlling the world.”

[...] In a statement issued to reporters Thursday, the FBI said very delicately that “this particular training segment” occurred “one time only, at Quantico and was quickly discontinued.” That might be literally true — for the briefings that Gawthrop delivered to FBI counterterrorism agents at Quantico.

But that doesn’t mean that Gawthrop’s presentation was a one-off. The Infragard briefing proves Gawthrop presented his material to at least one FBI-affiliated security organization afterward. And previous Bureau training materials claimed that Islam “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.”

[...] outside counterterrorism experts believe Gawthrop’s message is harmful to those people who are actually trying to stop militants — instead of going around lecturing about them. [...]

“The single worst thing we’ve done since 9/11, the one thing that’s harmed us the most in interrogations, is these types of stereotypes,” said Matthew Alexander, the pseudonymous former senior military interrogator who helped take down the leader al-Qaida in Iraq. “It’s harmed us more than anything else, because we end up skipping the first step of any interrogation, which is analysis.”

“Gawthrop’s talk is a total nightmare,” added Jarret Brachman, who closely monitors online Islamist radicalization. “This kind of vitriolic snake oil is not only wrong but it serves to inflame the relations between Muslims and law enforcement, making both communities more suspicious of one another’s real intentions. Gawthrop and others ironically undermine years of my own work to convince online Islamists that the kind of training being provided to the U.S. government is objective and not against Islam. Gawthrop’s approach to training is indefensible and makes my job trying to simmer a bunch of online hotheads down a lot harder.”

[Go to URL link for the video of Gawker which Wired retrieved before it was scrubbed from YouTube.]

~Eowyn

Osama Bin Laden Dead, Big Deal

Excuse me if I sound cynical, but two and a half years under the regime of an habitual liar, thief and con man has made me that way. While I am happy that bin Laden is now fish food and that the SEAL Team expedited him on his way to Hell. I am sickened by Obama taking so much credit and the MSM fawning over him like he is suddenly some kind of hero. Obama did nothing except give the order, the SEAL team took all the risks, it was their lives on the line, not his.

You want to know what Obama has killed recently, no it wasn’t Osama Bin Laden, Obama has killed our economy, practically single-handed and the evidence is all around us:

Skyrocketing gas prices…

Trillions of dollars in debt…

High unemployment…

Bank closures…

and a crashing dollar.

Meanwhile this peabrain continues down the same destructive path:

Now I’m sorry, with the economy in the tank I find it hard to get excited about a single terrorist half a world away getting his head blown open. Now that Obama refuses to release the evidence of Bin Laden’s death and he’s already at the bottom of the sea and the versions of what happened at that compound in Pakistan change almost hourly I’m not inclined to believe anything the Liar-in-Chief says.

As Obama has completely politicized the killing of Bin Laden by making a trip to ground zero, something he couldn’t be bothered to do on the last two anniversaries of 9/11. He sees the opportunity to use the deaths of over 3000 Americans to bump up his sagging poll numbers and give the impression that he is a strong decisive leader and that he actually cares about the victims of Bin Laden’s master plan. I don’t believe any of that BS for a moment, Obama is nothing more than a political opportunist and a narcissist, everything that has taken place this week is about him and only him. You can hear it in his speeches, his interviews and see it in his manner.

There is one thing though, I think we have found the only thing that he doesn’t blame George W. Bush for. 

Tom in NC