The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.
Here are 10 problems with this:
1. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't cease to be crimes because you cross a border.
2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently. Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.*
3. Killing people has nothing whatsoever to do with gathering so-called intelligence.
4. Even in this age in which senators and house members petition and write public letters to the president imploring him to obey laws, rather than introducing legislation, issuing subpoenas, holding impeachment hearings, or defunding agencies, the fact remains that Congress, above all, IS the government, and it is just not the place of the director of national thuggery to come in and dictate what the law will or will not be.
5. Having made the globe a battlefield and sanctioned crimes including lawless imprisonment, torture, warrantless spying, indiscriminant bombings, and the use of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and other sickening weapons, on the grounds that all is fair and legal in war, preventing Americans from becoming the innocent victims of the war is becoming harder and harder. If active military can be on duty here, if we can be spied on, kidnapped, and imprisoned here. If our most prominent foreign death camp can be relocated here, by what logic -- and for how long -- can government assassinations of Americans (without trial) be confined to elsewhere?
6. Typically when we assassinate people abroad, a lot of other innocent people are killed in the process. Those are all murders. That too will come home if there is not resistance soon, major resistance to this madness.
7. We are being asked to trust extrajudicial decisions on whether or not to murder, not just to allegedly wise judges who are in too big a hurry or find it logistically unfeasible to hold a trial, but to the very people who lied us into the wars that are motivating most of the international hostility toward our country and draining most of the resources Americans need at home.
8. No republic has ever survived putting this kind of power in the hands of a single ruler, with no independent legislature, no independent press, and no independent popular resistance. And we're almost there.
9. These people usually only admit to believing they have the barbaric "right" to do things that they have already done.
10. What are the chances the Director of Intelligence will never consider a president a threat to national security?
* Ron: For some reason the fact that government(s) are not sovereign living beings and consequently have NO RIGHTS because they are merely inert fictional legal entities conjured out of thin air by lawyers for the convenience of sovereign humans, seems to escape the attention of everyone. What the director of U.S. national intelligence is actually saying is that unidentified human individuals and robotoids who claim to work for some corporate legal fictional entity called a government, in this case Corp US, have some unilateral right, because of their "employment'' or agency relationship to that inert fictional entity, to kill sovereign human beings. That is nonsense. They have no such right and alleging that they are acting as servants or agents of the fictional US corporation doesn't improve their situation morally or in any other way.
Of itself, merely being a corporate "government" agent or employee cannot give anyone the lawful right to judicially execute a human being. If a human society or community (however described) undertakes due, proper and lawful consideration of all issues and aspects of a case against a human person and then collectively decides, as a group of sovereign human beings, that the death penalty is appropriate because of the culpable behaviour of that particular, properly identified individual member of human society, then and only then might taking that individual's life be considered lawful. All else is unlawful murder and claims of "national interest" and/or some "government" right to kill people is specious.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17430
