DOJ Justifies Drone Strikes Against Americans

OOPS!!

 

This simply highlights the typical liberal hypocrisy....when Bush ordered drone attacks, the democraps were up in arms yet when BO takes on the program (and expands it to include US citizens & domestic targets) they go silent.
We should be celebrating Paul's courage as he took both parties to task.

 

That's probably just all the shit in your ears.

 

Speaking of hypocrisy! None of this seemed to bother you Right-wing hypocrites when it was going on under the Bush/Cheney Administration AND drone strikes with no policy at all. But for some reason, now they are all hot and bothered by drones. The Party of torture, illegal detentions, extraordinary rendition, and CIA black sites suddenly has their panties in a bunch because...? Oh yeah, now there is a black guy in charge of the drone program. Hypocrites!!!

20 Facts About Extraordinary Rendition, Torture, and Secret Detention
Feb 5th, 2013 @ 07:23 am › John Glaser
The top officials in the Bush administration were not ones to let the law get in their way. If they wanted to torture and detain people beyond what any conceivable interpretation of US law, even in Guantanamo, could allow, they were going to do it.
The solution, they found, was extraordinary rendition, a program where individuals were sent to other countries with unscrupulous governments so they could do the dirty work of tormenting detainees and depriving them of due process.
According to a new report by the Open Society Justice Initiative, the CIA rendered at least 136 individuals and at least 54 governments around the world participated in the program. Many of these people were completely innocent, something the CIA’s Office of Inspector General called “erroneous renditions” in their investigation of the program.
Read of the report in the New York Times here. Read it in full here.
Below are 20 findings covered in the report, provided by Open Society:
1. At least 136 individuals were reportedly extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the CIA and at least 54 governments reportedly participated in the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition program; classified government documents may reveal many more.
2. A series of Department of Justice memoranda authorized torture methods that the CIA applied on detainees. The Bush Administration referred to these methods as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” “Enhanced interrogation techniques” included “walling” (quickly pulling the detainee forward and then thrusting him against a flexible false wall), “water dousing,” “waterboarding,” “stress positions” (forcing the detainee to remain in body positions designed to induce physical discomfort), “wall standing” (forcing the detainee to remain standing with his arms outstretched in front of him so that his fingers touch a wall five four to five feet away and support his entire body weight), “cramped confinement” in a box, “insult slaps,” (slapping the detainee on the face with fingers spread), “facial hold” (holding a detainee’s head temporarily immobile during interrogation with palms on either side of the face), “attention grasp” (grasping the detainee with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, and quickly drawing him toward the interrogator), forced nudity, sleep deprivation while being vertically shackled, and dietary manipulation.
3. President Bush has stated that about a hundred detainees were held under the CIA secret detention program, about a third of whom were questioned using “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
4. The CIA’s Office of Inspector General has reportedly investigated a number of “erroneous renditions” in which the CIA had abducted and detained the wrong people. A CIA officer told the Washington Post: “They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism.
5. German national Khaled El-Masri was seized in Macedonia because he had been mistaken for an Al Qaeda suspect with a similar name. He was held incommunicado and abused in Macedonia and in secret CIA detention in Afghanistan. On December 13, 2012, the European Court of Human Rights held that Macedonia had violated El-Masri’s rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, and found that his ill-treatment by the CIA at Skopje airport in Macedonia amounted to torture.
6. Wesam Abdulrahman Ahmed al-Deemawi was seized in Iran and held for 77 days in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan. He was later held in Bagram for 40 days and subjected to sleep deprivation, hung from the ceiling by his arms in the “strappado” position, threatened by dogs, made to watch torture videos, and subjected to sounds of electric sawing accompanied by cries of pain.
7. Several former interrogators and counterterrorism experts have confirmed that “coercive interrogation” is ineffective. Col. Steven Kleinman, Jack Cloonan, and Matthew Alexander stated in a letter to Congress that that U.S. interrogation policy “came with heavy costs” and that “[k]ey allies, in some instances, refused to share needed intelligence, terrorists attacks increased world wide, and Al Qaeda and like-minded groups recruited a new generation of Jihadists.”
8. After being extraordinarily rendered by the United States to Egypt in 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under threat of torture at the hands of Egyptian officials, fabricated information relating to Iraq’s provision of chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda. In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on this fabricated information in his speech to the United Nations that made the case for war against Iraq.
9. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times by the CIA. FBI interrogator Ali Soufan testified before Congress that he elicited “actionable intelligence” from Zubaydah using rapport-building techniques but that Zubaydah “shut down” after he was waterboarded.
10. Torture is prohibited in all circumstances under international law and allegations of torture must be investigated and criminally punished. The United States prosecuted Japanese interrogators for “waterboarding” U.S. prisoners during World War II.
11. On November 20, 2002, Gul Rahman froze to death in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan called the “Salt Pit,” after a CIA case officer ordered guards to strip him naked, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight without blankets.
12. Fatima Bouchar was abused by the CIA, and by persons believed to be Thai authorities, for several days in the Bangkok airport. Bouchar reported she was chained to a wall and not fed for five days, at a time when she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. After that she was extraordinarily rendered to Libya.
13. Syria was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects,” as were Egypt and Jordan. One Syrian prison facility contained individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins. Detainees report incidents of torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine (the “German chair”) and beatings.
14. Muhammed al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza, while seeking asylum in Sweden, were extraordinarily rendered to Egypt where they were tortured with shocks to their genitals. Al-Zery was also forced to lie on an electrified bed frame.
15. Abu Omar, an Italian resident, was abducted from the streets of Milan, extraordinarily rendered to Egypt, and secretly detained for fourteen months while Egyptian agents interrogated and tortured him by subjecting him to electric shocks. An Italian court convicted in absentia 22 CIA agents and one Air Force pilot for their roles in the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar.
16. Known black sites—secret prisons run by the CIA on foreign soil—existed in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand.
17. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was secretly detained in various black sites. While secretly detained in Poland, U.S. interrogators subjected al Nashiri to a mock execution with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded; racked a semi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them; held him in “standing stress positions;” and threatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.
18. President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order repudiating torture does not repudiate the CIA extraordinary rendition program. It was specifically crafted to preserve the CIA’s authority to detain terrorist suspects on a short-term, transitory basis prior to rendering them to another country for interrogation or trial.
19. President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order also established an interagency task force to review interrogation and transfer policies and issue recommendations on “the practices of transferring individuals to other nations.” The interagency task force report was issued in 2009, but continues to be withheld from the public. It appears that the U.S. intends to continue to rely on anti-torture diplomatic assurances from recipient countries and post-transfer monitoring of detainee treatment, but those methods were not effective safeguards against torture for Maher Arar, who was tortured in Syria, or Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who were tortured in Egypt.
20. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee has completed a 6,000 page report that further details the CIA detention and interrogation operations with access to classified sources. However, the report itself remains classified.

YOUR ASSUMED MORAL AUTHORITY TO LECTURE ANYONE DISAPPEARED A LONG TIME AGO.

 

Let's see, what were your views on torture?

HYPOCRITES!!!!

 

How can you compare so-called "torture" to the target killing of American citizens in violation of their right to due process? Apples and oranges, Little Joe. Apple and oranges.

 

I dare you to find a single person anywhere in the world who would prefer to be droned rather than waterboarded. Yet somehow you get all bend out of shape because someone was waterboarded but condone droning people. WOWOWOW!!! Now there is hypocrisy to the max for you!!

BTW, my comment that you cited above was in direct response to another of your lies;

 

RLM, you have to realize that Little Joe is on the wrong side of this issue, but he wouldn't dream of deviating from the liberal talking points. So... conflicted as he is, he will remain partisan even though he's wrong. That's the definition of a partisan hack of which you will find his picture in the dictionary under that term. You can also find his picture under HYPOCRITE, OBAMUNIST, LEFT-WING LOON and VILLAGE IDIOT.

 

Really? And which "talking points" exactly did I parrot? Please, show me even one.

 

You sound exactly like the left-wing drones (no pun intended) on this issue.

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TORTURE AND OBAMA’S DRONE PROGRAM

Last week, John Yoo, the Bush Administration lawyer who authored the infamous “torture memos,” which offered a legal rationale for waterboarding and other forms of prisoner abuse, leapt at what he saw as an opportunity to castigate Obama for worse behavior. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley, denounced Obama’s remote-controlled targeted killing of terror suspects by unmanned aerial drones as a far greater assault on human rights than anything he had ever facilitated.​

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“Rather than capture terrorists—which produces the most valuable intelligence on al Qaeda—Mr. Obama has relied almost exclusively on drone attacks, and he has thereby been able to dodge difficult questions over detention. But those deaths from the sky violate personal liberty far more than the waterboarding of three al Qaeda leaders ever did,” he wrote.​

Yoo is not alone. Several people have argued that partisanship, not principle, is the only reason that members of the mainstream press haven’t treated the disclosure of a Justice Department white paper on the targeted killing of Americans, obtained by NBC, with the same outrage as it did the torture memos. Andrew C. McCarthy, writing on the National Review’s Web site, declared, “My, how the worm has turned.” He went on to assert, “The breathtaking hypocrisy of the Obama Democrats is what screams off the pages of the ‘white paper’ ” on drones. He ridiculed Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, for arguing previously that terror suspects should be tried, when possible, in the criminal-justice system while simultaneously supporting their death by drone. “Ah, but arbitrary power to kill citizens—now, that’s a different story,” McCarthy wrote.

At Reason, the libertarian outpost, Nick Gillespie suggested that liberals’ lesser outrage at Obama’s drones than Bush’s “enhanced interrogations” amounted to a kind of intellectual corruption. “This isn’t ultimately about ideological hypocrisy—of liberals changing their tune once their guy is in office—but something much more basic and much more disturbing. It reveals that for all their crowing about being watchdogs of all that is good and decent in society, when push comes to shove, too many journalists are ready and willing handmaidens to power—including the power to kill.”​

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/02/torture-and-obamas-drone-program.html#ixzz2MtdSS9SK​

 

So are you trying to tell me you wrote all 20 of those "facts" in post #104? Somehow my guess is you "parroted" them from some one else's "talking points".

 

Also, he hasn't condemned Obama's program of targeting Americans for death (an egregious violation of due process). Such lack of condemnation also "parrots" the left-wing media tactic of failing to criticize Obama regardless of how much he violates the Constitution.

I believe he gets his talking point memos in daily e-mails; he sounds exactly like the looney left-wing pundits who don't know what they're talking about.

 

In order to show that someone is parroting someone else, you have to show BOTH their comments and the same comments by someone else. I don't see that in your example. You only show my comments. That doesn't prove I'm parroting someone else. Try again.

 

Are you parroting FOX and other Right-wing news sources???? Oh yeah! Do you think that accusing others of doing exactly what you're doing is a very smart tactic? Sounds kind of like a stupid tactic to me.

 

So, Little Joe, are you FOR or AGAINST Obama's policy of "targeted killing" of American citizens in violation of their constitutional right to due process?

It's a straightforward question even you should be able to answer. FOR or AGAINST?

 

So this is what you call a straightforward question? Obama doesn't have a policy of targeting American citizens. That is your hyper-partisan interpretation. So in other words, "No" I have not stopped beating my wife nor have I ever done so.

 

Yes, he does. In fact, his policy has already been used to target and kill American citizens. Read the DOJ's justification of the policy for yourself. It's entitled LAWFULNESS OF A LETHAL OPERATION DIRECTED AGAINST A U.S. CITIZEN WHO IS A SENIOR OPERATIONAL LEADER OF AL-QA'IDA OR AN ASSOCIATED FORCE.

Here is the 16-page memo outlining the DOJ's justification of Obama's policy of targeting American citizens:

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

Now, all I'm asking is whether or not you are FOR or AGAINST the policy.

 

Given that your link doesn't work and given the title, "LAWFULNESS OF A LETHAL OPERATION DIRECTED AGAINST A U.S. CITIZEN WHO IS A SENIOR OPERATIONAL LEADER OF AL-QA'IDA OR AN ASSOCIATED FORCE.", seems pretty specific to the type of person the government is will to take out, I'd agree with the policy. Does that translate into killing you and I if the government decides to for some other reason? Of course not! But that is the specious argument you are trying to make isn't it? If I or you decided to join a terrorist organization that has already killed well over 3000 Americans on American soil alone, I would hope that the government of this country would try and kill either one of us. Wouldn't you?
What really is the difference here between a covert assassination and killing someone with a drone? Our government probably covertly kills both Americans and foreign citizens on a daily basis without you or I even knowing it. How is a drone killing substantively any different?

 

So let me ask you the same (or very similar question. Are there any circumstances can kill an American citizen without due process? I will even limit that to being within the USA.

 

You need to check your equipment. The link works fine for me.