Earlier this week, the government sent a summary of its legal memos on presidential use of drones to kill persons overseas — even Americans — to an NBC newsroom. This was done after more than a year of stonewalling federal judges and ordinary citizens who sought the revelation of the government’s secret legal research justifying the president’s use of drones. The administration claimed the research was so sensitive and so secret that it could not be revealed without serious consequences.
This revelation will come as a great surprise, and not a little annoyance, to U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon, who heard many hours of oral argument during which the government predicted gloom and doom if its legal research were subjected to public scrutiny. She very reluctantly agreed with the feds, but told them she felt caught in “a veritable Catch-22,” because the feds have created “a thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.”
She was writing about President Obama killing Americans and refusing to divulge the legal basis for claiming the right to do so. Now we know that basis.
The undated and unsigned 16-page document leaked to NBC refers to itself as a Department of Justice white paper. Its logic is flawed, its premises are bereft of any appreciation for the values of the Declaration of Independence and the supremacy of the Constitution, and its rationale could be used to justify any breaking of any law by any “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government.”
Read more: http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/7/obama-demands-unquestioning-acceptance-of-his-abil/#ixzz2KGX5rFZI
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