Thursday, February 2, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Dictator Hussein Obama Has License To Legally Murder Millions
In an interview with CBS 60 Minutes‘ Scott Pelley, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed more about the secret process the Obama administration uses to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial.
According to Panetta, the president himself approves the decision based on recommendations from top national security officials.
“[The] President of the United States obviously reviews these cases, reviews the legal justification, and in the end says, go or no go,” Panetta said.
“So it’s the requirement of the administration under the current legal understanding that the president has to make that declaration, not you?” Pelley asked. Panetta replied, “That is correct.”
The process by which national security officials determine whether or not American citizens suspected of terrorism can be killed remains opaque.
The administration has leaked information about certain targets, but it has never released the legal justification for doing so, nor has it explained the system by which members of the National Security Council reportedly decide to put an American citizen on a so-called “kill list.”
Reuters’ Mark Hosenball wrote that the president doesn’t necessarily explicitly approve strikes—instead, the attacks go forward unless the president objects.
Panetta’s explanation of why he believes killing an American citizen without due process is legal wasn’t exactly comforting.
Here’s the exchange:
PANETTA: Without getting into the specifics of the operation, if someone is a citizen of the United States, and is a terrorist who wants to attack our people and kill Americans, in my book that person is a terrorist. And the reality is that under our laws, that person is a terrorist. And we’re required under a process of law, to be able to justify, that despite the fact that person may be a citizen, he is first and foremost a terrorist who threatens our people, and for that reason, we can establish a legal basis on which we oughta go after that individual, just as we go after bin Laden, just as we go after other terrorists. Why? Because their goal is to kill our people, and for that reason we have to defend ourselves.
PELLEY: They’re not entitled to due process of law under the Constitution of the United States? They lose their citizenship if this administration decides they’re a terrorist?
PANETTA: If this person wanted to suddenly raise questions about whether or not they’re a terrorist, and they were to return to the United States, of course they would be entitled to due process. That’s something we provide any US citizen. And for that matter frankly any terrorist who is arrested; we provide due process to that individual as well. But if a terrorist is out there on the battlefield, and the terrorist is threatening this country, that person is an enemy combatant, and when an enemy combatant holds a gun at your head, you fire back.
Panetta’s explanation isn’t much more complex than “when we say someone is a terrorist, then we can kill them, because they’re a terrorist.” The entire point of due process, however, is to determine whether or not someone is actually guilty.
The defense secretary’s metaphor—that you can fire back when someone “holds a gun to your head”—might justify killing an American citizen who is fighting on an actual battlefield, like Afghanistan.
But it suggests violence as an appropriate response to an imminent threat, rather than the actual circumstances under which say, radical cleric and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki appears to have been killed.
President Obama just signed a bill that, if not for its many administrative loopholes, would “mandate” military detention for non-citizen terror suspects apprehended on American soil, so it’s not accurate for Panetta to state that “any” suspected terrorist apprehended by the US receives due process.
The vast majority of the nearly two hundred detainees at Gitmo have never been charged with anything, let alone tried and convicted.
Osama bin Laden was the admitted leader of a group engaged in an armed conflict against US troops in Afghanistan; concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was more than a front for extremist propaganda has never been aired.
There’s also an Orwellian element to Panetta’s argument that anyone on the US kill list should simply turn themselves in and get a fair trial. As Glenn Greenwald reminds us, we only know that al-Awlaki was on the kill list because his name was leaked to the press.
Any other Americans who might be on the list have no way of knowing they’ve been targeted absent leaks from administration officials or the sound they hear right before they’re annihilated by a Hellfire missile.
Even calling friends, family, or a lawyer to turn yourself in could be the act that gets you killed.
If such an individual did know he was on the list, how exactly is he supposed to believe he’d have due process after giving himself up, given that he’s already been sentenced to death by the administration? Is a fair trial even possible under those circumstances?
Muslim Hussein Obama Did Not Lie About Housing Just Kept Mum
The unemployment rate drifted down.
But housing?
When it comes to the value of what many Americans consider their biggest financial asset, no such return appears in sight.
Data released Tuesday showed that seasonally adjusted housing prices have reached a post-bubble low, as the minor surge that began in 2009 fizzled, to be followed by the almost continuous slide of the past 18 months.
The housing bust, in other words, appears to be even worse than it was at the nadir of the recession.
USA Has Been In Bed With Major Drug Peddlers From Start
The son of a convicted notorious mobster, John Gotti Jr, when asked in court if the family still dealt drugs cracked, “No, we can’t compete with the government.”
In Afghanistan, American troops have been seen guarding poppy fields used to make heroin.
Those fields were all but wiped out by 2001 when the Taliban destroyed them and forbade that agricultural pursuit. Now they’re flourishing again after the American occupation.
This doesn’t make sense despite all the mainstream reports that American troops are protecting the poppy farmers from the bad guys. Internet sites such as Prison Planet, Info Wars, The Political Coffeehouse and others report otherwise.
They connect the CIA and US military to restarting the poppy fields in Afghanistan in 2002, increasing poppy growth by over 650 percent. Who’s telling it like it is?
The CIA’s secret operations to influence journalism started in the 1950s by infiltrating the media and bribing journalists to be operatives and assets for the CIA.
By 1976, then CIA director William Colby reportedly bragged that the CIA owned the press. Supposedly, this too secret to name operation was coined “Operation Mockingbird” by Deborah Davis in her book Katherine the Great.
Operation Mockingbird worked well against prize winning journalist Gary Webb when his newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, ran his in depth series on CIA drug trafficking that flooded the USA to help finance the CIA backed Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s.
Journalists all over the USA jumped on the series, claiming Webb’s journalism was shoddy. The newspaper had to recant and fire him, and Gary Webb was black listed from mainstream journalism completely.
Webb retaliated by having his book Dark Alliance published and making the NY Times best seller list, forcing some of his critics to privately eat crow after the fact.
Despite the CIA’s control of the press, a few Mexico and Central America cocaine busts of plane cargoes and discoveries of large cocaine stashes on crashed planes with CIA hired pilots flying them for front companies did hit the mainstream news, albeit briefly.
Remember the movie “Air America?” It was based on an actual CIA owned front company transporting tons of heroin from Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle” poppy fields during and after the Vietnam conflicts. Now Afghanistan and the “Golden Crescent” are the featured opium/heroin conduit sources.
When the U.S. government made deals with the Cosa Nostra mafia to help police ports and harbors during WW II, they breathed life into the heroin trade. Eventually, Marseilles, France was set up by the Corsican mafia to become the “French Connection” for heroin traffic.
But opium trade history goes back further, to colonial times and early America. That’s when American shipping magnates used their fast Clipper Ships to compete with England’s monarch sanctioned dope running East India Company for transporting opium to China.
A few key players created family fortunes from the China opium trade that exist today within some northeast America’s “old money” families.
Among the familiar family names, according to Wikipedia is Forbes. Another source mentions Astor, a prominently wealthy philanthropic family around New York. In those days, trafficking dope was a legitimate business endeavor, immoral but not illegal.
Now it is illegal as well. Ironically, this allows the biggest illicit drug providers to financially benefit the CIA and international banking.
USA Secret Ops Responsible For China Civil Unrest
China will boost police forces in its western Xinjiang region, state media said, in an effort to tackle unsanctioned religious activities in the region, which has been beset by ethnic strife and sometimes violent unrest.
Authorities will recruit 8,000 new police officers.
“Security patrols, management of the migrant population and cracking down on illegal religious activities” will be among their main duties, Xinhua said, citing an unnamed Communist Party spokesman in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is home to the Uighur ethnic group, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who account for just over 40 percent of the region’s more than 21 million population.
The government blamed the incidents in Kashgar and Hotan — both in the majority Uighur southern part of Xinjiang — on religious hardliners and separatists who want to establish an independent state called East Turkestan for their people.
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