XPost: alt.radio.talk.dr-laura, seattle.politics, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   XPost: alt.california, talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.republicans   
   XPost: alt.impeach.bush, alt.rush-limbaugh, alt.society.liberalism   
   XPost: alt.politics.liberalism, alt.culture.alaska, tx.politics   
   From: ONE@Bush.net   
      
   Obama's Real Death Panels   
   NEW YORK--Shortly after 9/11, George W. Bush secretly signed two executive   
   orders. Both violated basic constitutional protections as well as U.S.   
   obligations under international treaties, yet both carried the force of law.   
      
   They still do.   
      
   The first order grants the president (and other officials, including the   
   secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security and presumably   
   certain postal clerks) the right to declare anyone--including an American   
   citizen--an "unlawful enemy combatant." A person so declared has no redress,   
   no way to appeal, no ability to challenge that designation. Once a person   
   has been named an enemy combatant, according to the Bush Administration--and   
   now to the Obama Administration--he has no rights. He can be held without   
   charges forever, tortured, you name it--well, actually, the president or the   
   secretary of defense names it.   
      
   In the second covert executive order, Bush authorized the CIA to target and   
   assassinate said "enemy combatants"--again, including American citizens.   
      
   These two documents first came into play on November 3, 2002, when a   
   CIA-operated Predator drone plane violating Yemeni airspace fired a Hellfire   
   missile at a car containing Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, supposedly Al   
   Qaeda's #1 man in Yemen at the time.   
      
   U.S. officials didn't know that an American citizen, Kamal Derwish, was   
   riding along. (You know what they say about hitchhiking.) "The Bush   
   administration said the killing of an American in this fashion was   
   legal...this is legal because the president and his lawyers say so--it's not   
   much more complicated than that," CBS News reported at the time. "I can   
   assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here," said Bush's   
   national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, after the CIA assassinations.   
   "He's well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his   
   constitutional authority."   
      
   It's right there in the Constitution between the right to tax and the repeal   
   of Prohibition.   
      
   Anyway, Congress tried to clarify matters in the Military Commissions Act of   
   2006, part of which--the section that eliminated the writ of habeas   
   corpus--got struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. But the rest of   
   the MCA remains in force, including a passage that defines an enemy   
   combatant as anyone who provides "material support" to the "enemy." And who   
   is the enemy? The enemy is anyone the president says it/he/she/they is.   
      
   Again, there is no distinction between foreigners and U.S. citizens.   
      
   Jose Padilla, the so-called would-be "dirty bomber" held in a Navy brig   
   since 2002, was tried and convicted of such "material support" charges in   
   2007. (The government couldn't prosecute Padilla for their original dirty   
   bomb charges because they had tortured him so severely that he had been   
   reduced to mental mush.)   
      
   Now that times have supposedly changed, it's time to ask: why hasn't   
   President Obama abrogated Bush's controversial executive orders? If Obama   
   truly seeks a break with the lawlessness of the prior administration, what   
   better way to enact it?   
      
   Simply put, no one man--not even a nice, articulate, charismatic one--ought   
   to claim the right to suspend a person's constitutional rights. Not in   
   America. Certainly no one man--not even a young, handsome, likeable   
   one--should be able to have anyone he wants whacked. Even in dictatorships,   
   the right of life and death is reserved for judges and juries operating   
   under a system purportedly designed to support impartiality and a search for   
   the truth.   
      
   But that's not the case here in the United States. In 2002 Scott Silliman,   
   director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke   
   University asked: "Could you put a Hellfire missile into a car in   
   Washington, D.C., under [the Bush] theory? The answer is yes, you could."   
      
   Nothing much has changed since then. Obama has eliminated the use of the   
   phrase "enemy combatant," but The New York Times reported that the change is   
   merely meant to "symbolically separate the new administration from Bush   
   detention policies." The words may have changed, but Obama attorney general   
   Eric Holder's definition of who can and cannot be held, said the Times, is   
   "not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration."   
      
   These days, Obama has ramped up the assassination of political opponents of   
   the U.S. and the U.S.-aligned authoritarian regime in Pakistan, deploying   
   more Predator drone plane attacks than Bush. But that's just for now. Obama   
   could still personally order a government agency to murder you, by laws Bush   
   signed.   
      
   Which is weird. But not nearly as weird as the fact that you probably don't   
   care enough to do something about it.   
   _______   
   Ted Rall Online: www.rall.com   
      
      
    You have no rights. Cheney and a previous congress almost unanimously said   
   so.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)