Bill Cosby and Abortion

An interesting point. Excerpt:

... Notre Dame is set to award the Laetare Medal to Vice President Joe Biden, a man whose record on abortion could hardly be worse. He is not slightly in favor it; he has often been one of abortion’s strongest supporters in the Senate. When you award a man with this record your highest honor, what do you say about yourself? At least these three things.

First, you show that don’t really take the evil of abortion all that seriously—certainly not as seriously as other forms of sexual assault against women, which is precisely what abortion is, since you would never consider awarding any honor at this point to Bill Cosby. ... 

Catholics in the Heart of the Land of Islam, and Other Surprising Facts of Global Catholicism

John Allen lays out some interesting points in his recent piece, including the following starkly true statement. Excerpts:

...The typical Christian in the world today isn’t a middle-class white male in Dubuque pulling up to church in his Lincoln Continental. She is an impoverished black mother of four in Nigeria, or a Dalit grandmother in India, or an exploited Filipina maid in Saudi Arabia. They often face hardships that are hard for most American Christians, accustomed to material comfort and lacking any real experience of religious persecution, to fathom.

Until you get that, you won’t see the full story of Christianity in this era...

Click and read.

What's His Line? The Miraculous

Archbishop Fulton Sheen may well have his beatification miracle! Excerpts:

...The reputed miracle involves the unexplained recovery of James Fulton Engstrom, a boy born apparently stillborn in September 2010 to Bonnie and Travis Engstrom of the Peoria-area town of Goodfield. He showed no signs of life as medical professionals tried to revive him. The child’s mother and father prayed to Archbishop Sheen to heal their son.

Although the baby showed no pulse for an hour after his birth, his heart started beating again and he escaped serious medical problems.

The Vatican’s medical advisory panel ruled that there is no medical explanation for the healing of the baby. The ruling means that a board of theologians will now review the case. If they approve the case, its consideration could pass to the cardinals and bishops who advise Pope Francis on beatifications.

If the case reaches Pope Francis, his approval would recognize Archbishop Sheen as “blessed,” the final stage before possible canonization as a saint...

Want to see him in person?.

Syria, Peace, and Prayer

Elizabeth Scalia, as always, is awesome.  Excerpts:

...When I read that we weren’t even looking at accurate images coming from Syria, I must admit to getting chills. We don’t know what’s real, anymore, and if the Secretary of State is using bad images, that’s bad enough; if he doesn’t even know he’s using them, that’s even worse, because it suggests a level of systemic incompetence that is terrifying to contemplate. It feels like no one actually has a good handle on any of our steering mechanisms, anywhere — like gyres are widening and centers are not holding. And what rough beast is slouching forward while our wheels are spinning?

But back to my original question: is the president being publicly goaded into attacking, by Assad? And if so, to what purpose? If “precise” US bombs are flying in Syria, does it give cover to Assad and “justify” a destructive responsive action? How big is this damned thing going to get? If we learned nothing from Iraq, we should have learned that strategies and tactics in the twenty-first century are not what they were in the twentieth; predictability has diminished, particularly in that region, and I’m not sure how many war historians and tacticians even get a full and thoughtful hearing in Obama’s very protective, very insulated, very politicized White House...

She ends with a call to prayer, reiterated by other sources.

...Feel helpless in the face of so much violence and hatred around the world? Don't know how to respond to such information? There's no time for that! Those who love Mary have been given a special role to play in bringing peace to the world.

"At Fatima, Our Lady didn't ask us to go to Mass daily," said Fr. Dan. "She didn't ask us to make pilgrimages. She didn't ask us to read a lot of books. She asked us to do something that was easy and accessible to everyone — to children; to the educated; to the uneducated; each of us in our own way: to pray the Rosary for peace in the world."

Our Lady said to the three shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal, on July 13, 1917, "Continue to say the Rosary every day in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary, to obtain the peace of the world and the end of the war, because only she can obtain it."

She reiterated that call throughout her apparitions there, saying in May 1917, "Say the Rosary every day, to bring peace to the world and an end to the war [World War I]," and in September, "Continue the Rosary, my children. Say it every day that the war may end."...In these days when people are using chemical weapons against each other, Christians across the world are being savagely persecuted, and wars and rumors of wars abound every day, let all Marian Helpers live up to their name — help Mary bring peace to the world! Pray the rosary for peace in the world and spread devotion to Mary's Immaculate Heart...

And the Pope has spoken. Excerpts:

...Speaking ahead of the traditional Angelus prayer with pilgrims gathered in St Peter’s Square this Sunday, Pope Francis said, “On [Saturday] the 7^th of September, here [in St Peter’s Square], from 7 PM until midnight, we will gather together in prayer, in a spirit of penitence, to ask from God this great gift [of peace] for the beloved Syrian nation and for all the situations of conflict and violence in the world.” The Holy Father also invited non-Catholic Christians and non-Christian believers to participate in ways they feel are appropriate. “Never again war!” said Pope Francis. “We want a peaceful world,” he said, “we want to be men and women of peace...."

Infrastructure of Tyranny--A Citizenry That Excuses or Ignores These Things

In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny,"  we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear.  In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to.  In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands.  In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial.  In the fifth part, we looked at assassination without trial.  In the sixth installment, we looked at the goal of Total Information Awareness.  In the seventh installment, we examined the repeated enactment of legal decisions secretly without public knowledge or review.  In the eighth installment, we took a look at the seemingly innocuous spread of political correctness throughout the Western world.  In this ninth post, we'll examine perhaps the most dangerous and deadly part of the infrastructure of tyranny out of all of them: a citizenry that excuses or ignores these things.

Let us begin by observing what should be obvious by now: what once was unthinkably crazy, the realm of the mentally ill and irrationally paranoid, is far from impossible or unthinkable today. Go back through the series, and recognize that I have not touched up all the bits and bobs of the infrastructure of tyranny. Perhaps I'll add more to the series before too long and discuss civil forfeiture, the dangers of eminent domain, or the peculiarities of the Bilderberg gatherings. But I think I've gathered enough information on enough troubling realities to point out that something has gone badly wrong with the way the West works.

The question is whether anyone cares enough to change the direction in which the country is going.  Consider, for instance, the following:

There are columnists reassuring us that Big Brother isn't watching.  Note also the way in which the left vociferously criticized President Bush's Patriot Act and other policies which pursued an "anything in the name of National Security" course, but have remained astoundingly silent in the face of President Obama's expansion of Bush era policies.  The right embraced the notion of anything in the name of National Security under President Bush and are having a hard time doing anything differently under President Obama.  Opposition to these policies, then, are unlikely to come from the institutional right or left.

h/t George W. Obama

To whom, then, shall we go?

There are signs of rising opposition from the USCCB to certain of the government's policies when it comes to religious liberty.  Add to that the religious witness against abortion, the consistent opposition to torture across administrations, and the triumphant religious stances against slavery and for civil rights, and I think the best hope for a renewal of civil liberties and freedoms in this country lies with a religious or at least philosophically motivated defense of human rights and freedoms against the potential for abuse in so many of the structures discussed throughout this series.

Remember a society will either have a citizenry with highly honed consciences or it will have a high level of cops.  But we live in an age which claims for conscience the right to decree good and evil, not merely the responsibility of recognizing right and wrong.  We live in a rising tide of the dictatorship of relativism, identified by Pope Benedict XVI when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger.  As Mussolini purportedly put it:

...Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition.
If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth ... then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable. --Diuturna [The Lasting] (1921) as quoted in Rational Man : A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962) by H. B. Veatch

So it may be increasingly difficult to defend human rights when the citizenry doesn't believe in the existence of human nature or the natural law.  It may be impossible to defend that antiquated notion which resides in so quintessentially modern a document as the Declaration of Independence:

...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are 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, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. ..

The texture of the moment may be seen more clearly when one takes a look at the dystopias of the past and discovers how closely they resemble our daily news, our daily realities.  See, for instance, the following, and mark which moment you finally realize what year it supposedly is referring to:

...It is impossible at this time to determine their whereabouts, due primarily to a policy of total media blackout regarding the more extreme government activities (illegal arrests, incarceration without due process of law, torture and grotesque executions—most of which are carried out in secret). Add to this the media disinformation about the more visible government activities which the public can hardly fail to notice (forced closure of churches and schools, arrests on unsubstantiated charges of treason, and the more socially acceptable forms of execution — all of which are apparently “legal” under the new statutes). It is widely believed that our people are being held in “civilian internment camps”, the euphemistic term for concentration camps used in the president’s Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act of March, 2108.

How has this come to pass? How has the unthinkable become the ordinary? Although Americans are very different from us, they are human after all, and thus quite susceptible to the psychology of perception. The average citizen strolling down an average street in a totalitarian state does not experience his world in terms of continuous absolute madness. However distressed it may be, the passage of months and years gives to even the most extreme of situations a certain semblance of normality. The image Americans once had of their society was a mental construct. And when more than a century ago it began to mutate, they found it extremely difficult to believe that the land of the brave and the home of the free was becoming a landscape of secret nightmare where millions of children were murdered annually, discreetly, hygienically in the clinics and hospitals of their land. Legalized murder, loss of the transcendent vision, and the death of authentic culture should have been sufficient warning to them, for each is a key symptom of a society’s collapse into totalitarianism. But democracies are not immune from self-delusion, although they tend to forms of oppression which are not overtly violent. Democracies in the final stages of decline, however, will degenerate into overt oppression, but they will do so in the name of freedom. That Americans began to realize this fact only when it was far too late, played no small part in the development of outright tyranny...--Michael O'Brien, "Three Views of the Future: The Church in A.D. 2109"

Still far fetched, thank God.  Still far future speculation, and perhaps a nightmare never to come.  But the powers that have been turned against Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists could well some day be turned against other international religious organizations.  The infrastructure exists.  It has been used against American citizens without trial.  Why are we safe, if these others weren't?  Why should we assume that we have done no wrong, that we will never trigger a datamining operation, never be flagged on a no fly list or a kill list, never be indefinitely detained on suspicion of being suspicious, never be disappeared and judged too dangerous to ever be released?  What safeguards do you have against this apparatus?  Innocence?  Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was innocent of anything other than being the son of an extremist cleric who exhorted other men to violence.  Abdulrahman was innocent.  It did nothing to protect him from sudden death from the sky.  No arrest.  No trial.  No Miranda rights.  No chance to prove innocence in court.  No protection of any kind.  Why should you be any different?  Why should I?

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.--attributed to Martin Niemöller

No. We must respond--and that response is the subject of the last post in the series.

Infrastructure of Tyranny--Political Correctness

In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny,"  we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear.  In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to.  In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands.  In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial.  In the fifth part, we looked at assassination without trial.  In the sixth installment, we looked at the goal of Total Information Awareness.  In the seventh installment, we examined the repeated enactment of legal decisions secretly without public knowledge or review.  In this eighth installment, we'll take a look at the seemingly innocuous spread of political correctness throughout the Western world, also known in certain circles as "newspeak."

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men”--George Orwell

From a remarkable piece, we hear something of the origins of the term. Excerpts:

...I first heard the phrase "politically correct" in the late 1940s and early 1950s in reference to the political debates between Socialists and members of the United States Communist Party (CP). These debates were an everyday occurrence in my neighborhood in the Bronx until the McCarthy committee and HUAC silenced political talk on the streets. Members of the CP talked about current party doctrine as the "correct" line for the moment. During World War II, the Hitler-Stalin pact caused many CP members considerable pain and often disgrace on my block, which was all Jewish and mostly Socialist. The "correct" position on Stalin's alliance with Hitler was considered to be ridiculous, a betrayal of European Jewry as well as Socialist ideas. The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in equalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.

Given that history, it was surprising to hear right-wing intellectuals in the 1990s using the phrase "politically correct" to disparage students and professors who advocate multiculturalism and are willing to confront racism, sexism, or homophobia at the university. Yet it is not uncommon, for example, for right-wing critics to accuse students (or other professors) who insist that women's voices or the voices of people of color be included in the curriculum of making rigid, oppressive demands that infringe upon academic freedom. The implication of these accusations is that people calling for compliance with antisexist and antiracist education today are similar to the Communist party hard-liners who insisted on compliance with the "correct" line on the Hitler-Stalin pact. It is a clever ploy on the part of neoconservatives, a number of whom were former CP members and know how the phrase "politically correct" was used in the past, to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox, and Communist-influenced when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic. The accusation of being "politically correct" is a weapon used by right-wing professors, and publicized by conservative media critics, to protect themselves against criticisms of their own biases by students or other, usually younger, professors. It is a way of diverting the issue of bias within the university to issues of freedom of speech without acknowledging that the right to question professorial authority is also a free speech matter...--Herbert Kohl, “Uncommon Differences: On Political Correctness, Core Curriculum and Democracy in Education”, The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 16, Number 1, June 1992, pp. 1–16 | 10.1353/uni.0.0216

From the above, we can see that political correctness in its original form meant literally to be correct according to the standards of a certain political group with a particular ideology--that is, to toe the party line.  In states with a single party, as in the Russia of Stalin, Lenin, and Khrushchev, all citizens would be expected to do so.  In states with many parties, or at least two major parties, wouldn't you expect a certain freedom when it comes to what you say?  And yet, behold what until very recently was the law in Canada. Excerpts:

...The effect of killing Section 13 will be debated for years among anti-racist groups and civil libertarians. But it is undoubtedly a turning point. Since 1999, Canadians who felt aggrieved by material transmitted online have been encouraged to seek redress under federal human rights law, which targeted material “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” based on grounds of discrimination like race, religion or sexual orientation. Storseth’s bill repeals the provision outright, leaving the Criminal Code as the primary bulwark against the dissemination of hate propaganda by electronic means.

With it will go one of the most divisive disputes to grip the country since the introduction of the Charter of Rights itself—a contest of values that over the past five years has pitted Canadians’ desire to protect minorities from discrimination against the bedrock principle of free speech. Mainstream media outlets, most notably Maclean’s, have been hauled before commissions to answer for their published content. The commissions themselves have come under fire for allowing their processes to be used as a bludgeon against legitimate expression, tailored as they are to encourage complainants to come forward. Meantime, a Saskatchewan law similar to Section 13 has become the subject of a Supreme Court challenge that could invalidate hate-speech provisions in most provincial human rights codes. By year’s end, it is conceivable that no human rights commission in the country will be in the business of adjudicating published material...

Who was impacted while that law was on the books? A number of folks.  Ezra Levant, one of the most widely known targets of the Human Rights Commissions in Canada, sums up what the system meant (and, in some provinces, still means). Excerpts:

...It is not the Canadian way to criminalize hard feelings. We criminalize violence or other crimes. Not Section 13. It criminalized the feelings itself, without any proof of any harm coming from it.

It is no surprise that, for the first 32 years in that law’s existence, not a single person who was prosecuted under it was acquitted.

It had a 100% conviction rate — usually a laughable statistic from a dictatorship’s legal system. But that’s the thing — the enforcers of Section 13 had more in common with those countries’ sham trials than with Canada’s tradition of impartial and professional courts.

Canada’s human rights commissions and tribunals — there is one in each province and territory, in addition to the federal one — are not run by real judges. Most of them aren’t even run by lawyers.

They’re political appointees, usually activists who specialize in newfangled human rights. That is, the booming industry of hurt feelings.

Unlike real judges, these rulers are not required to be neutral; are not required to abide by legal precedent; do not have the same rules of evidence as real courts; allow hearsay; do not have the same standard of proof as a court; have powers of warrantless searches and seizures; and do not have legal aid for poor people who are accused.

On the other hand, complainants — people who claim their feelings were hurt — usually have the case prosecuted for them by government-funded lawyers.

And there has never been a case of a frivolous hate speech complaint being rejected with a cost order against the complainer.

No wonder the laws attracted bullies, eager to use what was initially meant as a human rights “shield” instead as a political “sword” to skewer enemies who have “hurt” their “feelings.”

Astoundingly, more than half of all Section 13 prosecutions in the past decade were filed by one man, Richard Warman. He is not gay or black or Jewish; he’s a privileged white man, a lawyer, a government bureaucrat and a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

He actually filed complaints to the CHRC while he worked there.

And he won, again and again, and was awarded tens of thousands of dollars from the people he complained against — though they were usually on trial for being rude to gays or blacks or Jews.

After 36 years, this un-Canadian star chamber is now finally shut down. But similar laws against hurt feelings still exist provincially in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan...

In several cases, Catholic clergy and other ministers have been defendants.  Macleans magazine, something of a Canadian institution, was not exempt from being investigated and brought before a commission.

There are also the rising tide of consequences for failing to be politically correct when it comes to gay marriage.  Excerpts:

...We are all well aware that even if Parliament tells us that two men — or three or whatever daft thing they next try to enforce — can marry each other, this would have no validity whatever in the Catholic Church. We can’t and won’t attempt to “marry” two people of the same sex.

But the issues at stake do not essentially relate to this. They relate to things that are already happening: a teacher reprimanded for saying that true marriage can only be between a man and a woman; an office worker disciplined for giving his views on the subject in a private email.

We are seeing the enforcement of something horrible, something which, in fact, does not have the true backing of the law but is simply being accepted as standard practice: the crushing of opposition to same-sex “marriage” and the attempt to impose a standard view on the subject on everyone.

Essentially, the position is this: If I am a firefighter, a social worker, a teacher, a policeman, an office worker for a local authority — or if I hold any sort of public position, such as that of magistrate or borough councillor, I may face dismissal, serious penalties and massive public humiliation simply because I disagree publicly with the government’s policy in this area.

This has not been spelled out in law, but it is happening; and, over the next months and years, there will be endless legal cases relating to this as people struggle to assert a right to free speech that current practice denies them.

I can announce my opposition to the government’s policy on Afghanistan or Europe or the building of the new high-speed railway, and all this is — at present — recognized as freedom of speech.

But if I announce, for example in a letter to a local newspaper or on Twitter, that it is absurd and gravely wrong to impose on Britain the notion that two men can marry each other, then I may face serious penalties.

The Coalition for Marriage — an excellent campaigning organization fighting to defend true male/female marriage — has publicized some truly shocking cases where people have been disciplined for sharing an opinion supportive of marriage between a man and a woman...

Let's move from Canada to the United States, now, and examine a cause which has recently rallied the US Catholic Bishops as almost nothing else in a very long time: religious liberty.  Questions have been raised regarding the administration's party line on religious liberty--or rather, on freedom of worship. Excerpts:

...Knox Thames, director of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom -- a Congress-controlled body tasked with monitoring religious freedom abroad - spoke at a recent briefing about the worry, reportedly saying he sees a change in lingo and that it's not an accident. Well-known religious freedom advocate and Georgetown University professor Thomas Farr reportedly agreed.

The whole subject of what the United States means by the term "religious freedom" may be up for a more full public debate soon, with the new administration and USCIRF scheduled to go out of business next year. Folks like Thames and Farr say limits on religious liberty are often indicators of human rights problems in countries generally, and that health of religious freedom correlates with economic growth. But some American advocates say the United States needs to clarify what it means by "religious freedom" in a post-9/11 world, and what are its priorities? A decade ago the term implied fighting limits on persecuted communities, often Christian, but today religion is discussed differently in foreign policy, with a special emphasis on violence by Muslim extremists.

-----------
Here is the full quote of Knox Thames, the USCIRF director. It's what he said at the Feb. 3 public staff briefing about the future of U.S. religious freedom policy sponsored by the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on International Operations, Human Rights and Oversight:

"I have noticed a change in terminology by President Obama and Secretary Clinton over the past months. Starting during the President's trip to Asia, he referred to 'freedom of worship' on several occasions, but never once mentioned 'freedom of religion.' This trend has continued with Secretary Clinton. In her speech at Georgetown University and her more recent Internet freedom speech, both times she only referred to 'freedom of worship.'"

"Religious freedom is one of those unique rights that, to be fully enjoyed, other rights like association and speech must also be protected. Words matter, and so it's unclear whether this new phraseology represents a change in policy. Hopefully this language only reflects speech writers trying to create good prose and not a shift in policy, as it would mean a much narrower view of the right. It will be interesting to hear what language the President uses at the Prayer Breakfast, if he talks about religious freedom issues."...

There's plenty more where all this came from--Ayaan Hirsi Ali's remarkable life story; Theo Van Gogh's death; and more.

Infrastructure of Tyranny--Secret Legal Decisions without Public Review

In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny,"  we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear.  In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to.  In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands.  In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial.  In the fifth part, we looked at assassination without trial.  In the sixth installment, we looked at the goal of Total Information Awareness.  In this seventh installment, we'll examine the repeated enactment of legal decisions secretly without public knowledge or review, also known as "When the rules are secret, how do you know when you've done something wrong?"

An overview of the problem of a government enacting secret law.  Excerpts:

...President Obama is still not committing to full disclosure — which is especially disappointing since he released four detailed torture memos from the Bush years after he took office. Through his actions, or rather inaction, he is betraying a promise of his 2008 campaign as well as a fundamental element of American democracy: Openness between the government and the people it represents. Without that, there is no reliable basis for accountability.

Democracy works best when the government minimizes secrecy, including by recognizing that while the mechanics of national security operations must of course remain covert, there’s no reason not to openly explain the legal basis for these operations.

America re-learned this lesson six years ago, when the public realized that the Bush administration had secretly made law within the executive branch, allowing for the torture of prisoners taken in its war on terror.

Until then, as I’ve written about elsewhere in more detail, the Bush administration had acted in this area outside the bounds of democracy and accountability. When its legal memo about torture surfaced, it became clear that it expressed a political view, not a legally defensible one, and wide agreement developed among experts that the case for torture was unsupported by American or international law...

Here is a timeline of the Bush administration's series of secret legal memos and findings by which they justified the use of torture against their detainees. Some of the tactics described are firmly in the realm of the novel 1984. Excerpts:

The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted.

In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.

The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program...

The executive branch of the federal government has been justifying a number of their surveillance operations by secret interpretations of the Patriot Act.  Excerpts:

...On May 26, [2011] on the floor of the Senate, before the Patriot Act was extended, Sen. Ron Wyden said: “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”

Backing Wyden was another committee member, Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado: “Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.” (New York Times, “Senators Say Patriot Act Is Being Misinterpreted,” May 27.)

Wyden, after he helped to file an amendment (which I will expand upon below), added this: “The fact is anyone can read the plain text of the Patriot Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified.”

This patriotic amendment (and James Madison would agree with that description) requires Attorney General Eric Holder to “make public the U.S. government’s official interpretation of the Patriot Act.” The immediate focus as I’ll show is on Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

As he explained to me, and in other statements, Wyden (as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee) does know some of this secret law, but cannot yet reveal it publicly because these hidden interpretations are classified.

Now dig this: Wyden’s amendment was never voted on during the debate before the Act’s extension. This tells us that what is being done to our constitutional liberties and rights has become yet another Obama administration “state secret.” As if We the People were the enemy...”

A more recent story on the same sorts of issues with many of the same players (links in the original). Excerpts:

Eight U.S. senators today seized on leaks from the National Security Agency to call for an end to a "secret law" that governs how intelligence agencies electronically spy on Americans.

Secret laws may seem like Kafkaesque jurisprudence borrowed from Soviet Russia, but last week's leak of a secret court order revealed the Obama administration has a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that allows it to vacuum up logs of all domestic phone calls on a daily basis.

"It is impossible for the American people to have an informed public debate about laws that are interpreted, enforced, and adjudicated in complete secrecy," Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence committee, said in a statement. "When talking about the laws governing intelligence operations, the process has little to no transparency." Sen. Patrick Leahy, the head of the Judiciary committee, also signed on to today's request.

Wyden, along with senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have warned for years of the problems with secret interpretations of the Patriot Act. A CNET article from 2011 quoted him as saying at the time: "I believe that the American people would be absolutely stunned" if they knew what was actually going on...

From The Guardian. Excerpts:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers...

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself...

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized...

Among the most dramatic secret enactments are the presidential kill or capture orders. Excerpts:

...Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve...

When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers...

The targeted killing of American citizens is covered more thoroughly in a previous post in this series. The Washington Post discusses. Excerpts:

...The problem isn’t the leaks, it’s the policy. It’s the assertion of a presidential prerogative that the administration can target for death people it decides are terrorists — even American citizens — anywhere in the world, at any time, on secret evidence with no review...Over the last three years, the Obama administration has carried out at least 239 covert drone strikes, more than five times the 44 approved under George W. Bush...The administration is at pains to suggest that no one is targeted for death until after extensive review, internal checks and balances and administrative “due process” of a sort. But this rationale is refuted by what we know from the administration’s own limited releases of information. Officials distinguish between “personality strikes” — which are targeted at named operatives — and “signature strikes” — which are triggered by evidence of allegedly threatening activity by unidentified persons. Not surprisingly, the latter have been notorious for the “collateral damage” — innocent civilians — who have been casualties...

Most Americans support the drones — after all they’re going after terrorists. But the administration is claiming the right to charge, try and execute an American citizen without a hearing or a trial and conviction. The Constitution, Attorney General Holder argues, “guarantees due process, not judicial process.” But once more, this tramples the entire framework of the Bill of Rights, which was devised to limit the power of the state to lock up political dissenters without an independent tribunal.

It is vital that Congress reassert its constitutional authority. In the 1952 Steel Seizure case, Justice Felix Frankfurter argued that “a systematic, unbroken, executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of Congress and never before questioned . . . may be treated as a gloss on the executive power” vested in the president by the Constitution. The practice doesn’t just become legal, it becomes part of the Constitution, and Congress cannot thereafter challenge the authority that has been ceded.

Over twenty legislators led by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) have written formally to the president asking that he explain openly “the process by which signature strikes are authorized and executed; the mechanisms used to “ensure such killings are legal;” and the mechanisms to track civilian casualties. The Congress should also insist that the Justice Department memo detailing the legal arguments relied on by the president be made public. And then Congress needs to hold a grand inquest on presidential war powers and the rights of both the Congress and American citizens...

As noted above, the legal justifications used by the executive branch to permit themselves to exercise such power have been kept secret even from Congress until recently. Excerpts:

President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to share with Congress a classified memo that explains the legal rationale that justifies the targeted killing of Americans suspected of being members of al Qaida.

The decision came after years of refusing to make the memo available and two days after a Justice Department "white paper" that described the memo’s contents was made public. The memo provides the legal framework for U.S. drone attacks that have killed at least three American citizens and as many as 3,500 others...A further explanation provided by the White House said Obama made the decision in an effort to include Congress in discussion of the country’s counterterrorism policies. The explanation called the decision "an extraordinary action."...

The Obama administration repeatedly has denied requests that the memo justifying the program be released and has fought in court to keep it secret. In December, a federal judge in Manhattan rejected a request that the memo be made public under the country’s Freedom of Information Act.

A bipartisan coalition in Congress that includes both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans nevertheless have demanded that the memo be made public, most recently on Monday when three Republican and eight Democratic senators wrote the president asking that he share the memo.

Obama’s decision to allow members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to see the memo came after the publication of a so-called "white paper" that described the reasoning behind the Justice Department memo. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the 16-page white paper had been provided to her committee last June and had provided the background the committee needed to oversee the drone program. The memo leaked to NBC News, which published it Monday...

More. Excerpts:

...Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has been among the most vocal of lawmakers demanding to know details of how the administration interprets its power to take out US citizens who are waging war against their own nation.

He said lawmakers needed to see the information to ensure that such power was subject to the appropriate safeguards and limitations.

"Every American has the right to know when their government believes that it is allowed to kill them," Wyden said Tuesday.

"I will continue to press the administration to provide Congress with any and all legal opinions that outline the president's authority to use lethal force against Americans.

"I will not be satisfied until I have received them."...

And more. Excerpts:

...Mr. Wyden has repeatedly called on the administration to release its legal memorandums laying out what the executive branch believes it has the power to do in national security matters, including the targeted killing of a citizen. Earlier on Wednesday, at a Democratic retreat in Annapolis, Md., he had hinted at a potential filibuster of Mr. Brennan’s nomination by vowing to “pull out all the stops to get the actual legal analysis, because without it, in effect, the administration is, in effect, practicing secret law.”

Mr. Wyden said that committee members would have immediate access to the material, and that there would be a process for other senators to read it eventually. It was not clear whether lawmakers’ legal aides would also be allowed to read it.

He said the administration’s decision to allow lawmakers “to finally see the legal opinions” was an “encouraging first step, and what I want to see is a bipartisan effort to build on it, particularly right now, when the lines are blurring between intelligence agencies and the military.”

The Congressional Intelligence Committees were created in the late 1970s to exercise oversight after a series of scandals at the spy agencies. The law requires that the committees be kept informed of intelligence activities. But most administrations withhold at least some legal opinions, treating them as confidential legal advice to the president and agency officials...

And more. Excerpts:

...Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, called the paper “a profoundly disturbing document,” and said: “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.”

The release of the white paper comes as President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser and nominee as C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, awaits a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Pressure has been growing on the administration to make the secret legal documents public, or at least to provide the Intelligence Committees with more of them.

On Tuesday, eight Democratic and three Republican senators, including some Intelligence Committee members, wrote to Mr. Obama asking for the legal opinions authorizing the killing of Americans. The letter followed one sent by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, a member of the Intelligence Committee who has long sought access to the legal opinions.

The senators wrote that they needed the legal opinions to judge “whether the president’s power to deliberately kill American citizens is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards.”...

Sit and ponder for a moment with me the specter of this America in which we live. The federal government writes up secret legal memos and gets determinations from secret courts permitting the collection of massive amounts of data on its citizenry, the torture of people judged to be enemies of the state, and the assassination even of American citizens without trial. Oh, yes, right now most of these actions are taken against foreign nationals, perhaps even enemies of the human race. But not always. Consider again the case of the son of Anwar al-Awlaki. Excerpts:

He was just a boy.

Let's start there. He was an American boy, born in America. Though he'd lived in Yemen since he was about seven, he was still an American citizen, which should have made it harder for the United States to kill him.

It didn't.

It should at the very least have made it necessary for the United States to say why it killed him.

It didn't.

His name was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and he was 16 years old when he died — when he was killed by a drone strike in Yemen, by the light of the moon. He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their country — they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs against America and Americans: the rare man of words who could be said to have a body count...

But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list. Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone "operational," as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests.

He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all...

If him, why not others? If we've turned this machinery against Al Qaeda, why not other organizations? Indeed, why not domestic organizations? Why not?

Infrastructure of Tyranny--Assassination without Trial

In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny,"  we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear.  In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to.  In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands.  In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial.  In this fifth part, we'll take a look at assassination without trial.

Drone strikes have been a significant tool in the global war on terror since shortly after 9/11.  Many terror leaders have been taken out, and they've seriously degraded the capability of terrorist groups to operate without fear of death from the skies.  Excerpts:

The dire impact of CIA drone missile strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan certainly did not go unnoticed by Osama bin Laden, prompting the al Qaeda leader to repeatedly warn associates to take appropriate security measures, according to documents seized during the raid on the al Qaeda leader's Pakistan compound last year...

Drones had primarily been used for surveillance purposes in Pakistan, but in 2004, the CIA upped the ante by firing the first missile from a drone at a terrorist target in Waziristan. Hundreds of attacks have been launched since then.

In a May 2010 message to Rahman, bin Laden wrote, "I had mentioned in several previous messages ... the importance of the exit from Waziristan of the brother leaders, especially the ones that have media exposure. I stress this matter to you and that you choose distant locations to which to move them, away from aircraft, photography and bombardment while taking all security precautions."

From the New York Times.  Excerpts:

A stepped-up campaign of American drone strikes over the past three months has battered Al Qaeda and its Pakistani and Afghan brethren in the tribal area of North Waziristan, according to a mid-ranking militant and supporters of the government there.

The strikes have cast a pall of fear over an area that was once a free zone for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, forcing militants to abandon satellite phones and large gatherings in favor of communicating by courier and moving stealthily in small groups, they said.

The drones, operated by the C.I.A., fly overhead sometimes four at a time, emitting a beelike hum virtually 24 hours a day, observing and tracking targets, then unleashing missiles on their quarry, they said.

The strikes have sharpened tensions between the local tribesmen and the militants, who have dumped bodies with signs accusing the victims of being American spies in Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, they said...

Huffington Post.  Excerpts:

Should you ever find yourself under heavy drone fire, fear not: al Qaeda has put together a handy guide on how to avoid unmanned aircrafts.

The 22-step handbook was left behind by Islamist militants as they fled Timbuktu amid heavy resistance by the French and Malian armies. According to the Associated Press, which found a copy of the document in a building that had been occupied by al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb, the tipsheet was originally penned by Abdallah bin Muhammad, a senior commander of Yemen's al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and published on a jihadist forum a month after Osama bin Laden was killed two years ago.

For all their effectiveness, they persist in causing significant civilian casualties.  Excerpts:

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed far more people than the United States has acknowledged, have traumatized innocent residents and largely been ineffective, according to a new study released Tuesday.

The study by Stanford Law School and New York University's School of Law calls for a re-evaluation of the practice, saying the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low -- about 2%.

The report accuses Washington of misrepresenting drone strikes as "a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the U.S. safer," saying that in reality, "there is significant evidence that U.S. drone strikes have injured and killed civilians."

It also casts doubts on Washington's claims that drone strikes produce zero to few civilian casualties and alleges that the United States makes "efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability."

...In contrast to more conservative U.S. statements, the Stanford/NYU report -- titled "Living Under Drones" -- offers starker figures published by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent organization based at City University in London.

"TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562 - 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 - 881 were civilians, including 176 children. TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228 - 1,362 individuals," according to the Stanford/NYU study.

Based on interviews with witnesses, victims and experts, the report accuses the CIA of "double-striking" a target, moments after the initial hit, thereby killing first responders...

The US disputes these figures.  Excerpts:

...The official called the report's methodology into question, calling the information "indirect input from a loose network of Pakistani government and tribal contacts… far from authoritative."

The U.S. government has previously acknowledged accidentally killing civilians in its drone program since 2004, but put the total number at closer to 50. U.S. officials made that admission in 2011 when the BIJ published their own data on drone strikes, alleging 385 civilians had been killed in Pakistan since 2004 and that 168 of those were children. As with the new report, the U.S. officials called into question the methodology that led to those findings.

"We see the battlefield in real time; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism doesn't," a U.S. official said in 2011. "This group's allegations about individual strikes are, in every case, divorced from the facts on the ground."

The new Pakistani government report alleges that most of the children killed between 2006 and 2009 died in a single strike on a religious school in October 2006. The Pakistani report put the dead at 80 children, according to the BIJ. Local news reports at the time put the figure at 69.

In 2011, the U.S. official estimated that American drone strikes had taken out approximately 2,000 suspected militants, including high-level terror leaders, and this February, following criticism over the deaths of four Americans by drone strike – only one of whom was actually targeted -- the White House defended the kill program.

"We conduct these strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing, actual threats, to stop plots, to prevent further attacks and, again, to save American lives," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said then. "These strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise."

The whole notion of persistent methods of warfare which generate civilian casualties should be shocking to anyone who takes seriously the idea that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life.  The idea that we're manipulating those casualty counts to make our drone program less problematic ought to give us all good reason to think we need to scale it down dramatically.  Excerpts:

Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.

This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of “militant” is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: “Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen”)...[I] want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

...

But I think the most problematic part of the whole program is that which is least talked about: this power has been used against American citizens.  There is no evidence that the administration intends never to do this again. Allow Glenn Greenwald to introduce the issue.  Excerpts:

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki's 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama's top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president's power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title "disposition matrix".

When the New York Times back in April, 2010 first confirmed the existence of Obama's hit list, it made clear just what an extremist power this is, noting: "It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing." The NYT quoted a Bush intelligence official as saying "he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president". When the existence of Obama's hit list was first reported several months earlier by the Washington Post's Dana Priest, she wrote that the "list includes three Americans".

What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch - with no checks or oversight of any kind - but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president's underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president - at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as "Terror Tuesday" - then chooses from "baseball cards" and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark.

In fact, The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power...

More, from a piece written around the time the targeting of Awlaki.  Excerpts:

I wrote at length about the extreme dangers and lawlessness of allowing the Executive Branch the power to murder U.S. citizens far away from a battlefield (i.e., while they’re sleeping, at home, with their children, etc.) and with no due process of any kind.  I won’t repeat those arguments — they’re here and here — but I do want to highlight how unbelievably Orwellian and tyrannical this is in light of these new articles today.

No due process is accorded.  No charges or trials are necessary.  No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family).  None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist.  He then dispatches his aides to run to America’s newspapers — cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they’re granted — to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist.  It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist ”involved in plots.”  These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth.  And the punishment is thus decreed:  this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done.  What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?

Just to get a sense for how extreme this behavior is, consider — as the NYT reported — that not even George Bush targeted American citizens for this type of extra-judicial killing (though a 2002 drone attack in Yemen did result in the death of an American citizen).  Even more strikingly, Antonin Scalia, in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, wrote an Opinion (joined by Justice Stevens) arguing that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. Government merely to imprison (let alone kill) American citizens as “enemy combatants”; instead, they argued, the Constitution required that Americans be charged with crimes (such as treason) and be given a trial before being punished.  The full Hamdi Court held that at least some due process was required before Americans could be imprisoned as “enemy combatants.”  Yet now, Barack Obama is claiming the right not merely to imprison, but to assassinate far from any battlefield, American citizens with no due process of any kind.  Even GOP Congressman Pete Hoekstra, when questioning Adm. Blair, recognized the severe dangers raised by this asserted power.

And what about all the progressives who screamed for years about the Bush administration’s tyrannical treatment of Jose Padilla?  Bush merely imprisoned Padilla for years without a trial.  If that’s a vicious, tyrannical assault on the Constitution — and it was — what should they be saying about the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s assassination of American citizens without any due process?...

Mark Steyn commented at the time of Rand Paul's epic filibuster on the question of whether or not the President could use drones to kill American citizens within the United States. Excerpts:

...Al-Awlaki Senior was an al-Qaida ideologue and a supposed "spiritual mentor" to everyone from the 9/11 murderers to the Fort Hood killer and the thwarted Pantybomber. On the other hand, after September 11th, he was invited to lunch at the Pentagon, became the first imam to conduct a prayer service at the U.S. Congress, and was hailed by NPR as an exemplar of an American "Muslim leader who could help build bridges between Islam and the West." The precise point at which he changed from American bridge-builder to Yemeni restaurant takeout is hard to determine.

His public utterances when he was being feted by the New York Times are far more benign than those of, say, Samira Ibrahim, who was scheduled to receive a "Woman of Courage" award from Michelle Obama and John Kerry on Friday until an unfortunate flap erupted over some ill-phrased Tweets from the courageous lass rejoicing on the anniversary of 9/11 that she loved to see "America burning."

The same bureaucracy that booked Samira Ibrahim for an audience with the First Lady and Anwar al-Awlaki to host prayers at the Capitol now assures you that it's entirely capable of determining who needs to be zapped by a drone between the sea bass and the tiramisu at Ahmed's Bar and Grill. But it's precisely because the government is too craven to stray beyond technological warfare and take on its enemies ideologically that it winds up booking the First Lady to hand out awards to a Jew-loathing, Hitler-quoting, terrorist-supporting America-hater...

We have advanced from the paramilitarization of the police to the paramilitarization of the Bureau of Form-Filling. Two years ago in this space, I noted that the Secretary of Education, who doesn't employ a single teacher, is the only education minister in the developed world with his own SWAT team: He used it to send 15 officers to kick down a door in Stockton, Calif., drag Kenneth Wright out on to the front lawn, and put him in handcuffs for six hours. Erroneously, as it turned out. But it was in connection with his estranged wife's suspected fraudulent student-loan application, so you can't be too careful. That the education bureaucracy of the Brokest Nation in History has its own SEAL Team Six is ridiculous and offensive. Yet the citizenry don't find it so: they accept it...

The filibuster begins at 2:17:43 below.