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Obama's favorite murder weapon? Drones!!!!

 

Obama's favorite murder weapon? Drones!!!!

 
OBOMBA - President Barak Obama favorite murder weapons are drones
 


Liberal in domestic issues, Obama hawk on terror

Obama is pretty much a clone of George W. Bush or John McCain.

Remember John McCain's "Bomb, Bomb, Iran"??? Obama has pretty much been singing that tune since he got elected.

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Liberal in domestic issues, Obama hawk on terror

By Lara Jakes Associated Press Sat Feb 9, 2013 9:26 AM

WASHINGTON — For all of his liberal positions on the environment, taxes and health care, President Barack Obama is a hawk when it comes to the war on terror. From deadly drones to secret interrogations to withholding evidence in terror lawsuits, Obama’s Democratic White House has followed the path of his predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush. The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, remains open, despite Obama’s pledge to close it, and his administration has pursued leaks of classified information to reporters even more aggressively than Bush’s.

“They have maintained momentum in a lot of important areas that we were focused on, and they’ve continued to build in those areas,” said Ken Wainstein, the White House homeland security adviser and a top Justice Department lawyer under Bush. “You can see an appreciation for the severity of the threat, the need to stand up to it, and the need to go on offense at times.” John Brennan’s confirmation hearing this week to be CIA director showed just how much Washington — and especially Democrats — has come to accept the same counterterrorism policies that drew such furor in the first years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Brennan refused to call waterboarding a form of torture but called it “reprehensible” and, if CIA director, said he would not allow it. He also said he didn’t know whether any valuable information was gleaned as a result. His more than three hours of testimony was received by a mostly friendly panel of senators, and his confirmation is expected to move forward soon.

In October 2007, by contrast, Bush’s attorney general nominee, Judge Michael Mukasey, called waterboarding “repugnant” but also refused to say whether it was torture. His confirmation was delayed for three weeks and nearly derailed. No one expects Brennan not to be confirmed.

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama has stopped or softened a number of Bush’s security tactics, including ending harsh interrogations, closing secret prisons and, overall, trying to be more transparent about counterterror policy. But he noted that Obama has delivered on his campaign promises to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, take the battle to al-Qaida in Pakistan in Yemen before its members can attack the U.S., and to end the war in Iraq.

“Yes, we’re still fighting al-Qaida, but I think there are very few people who would take issue with that,” Vietor said Friday. “This president does what he says he’s going to do, and I think that’s noticed around the world.”

Obama’s embrace of many of Bush’s counterterror policies did not hurt him in his re-election bid last year. In one key rejection of Bush’s legacy, Obama repeatedly has said he believes waterboarding — the interrogation tactic that simulates drowning — is torture and illegal and that it will not be used under his watch. But Brennan, a career CIA officer who has served as Obama’s top counterterrorism official since 2009, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday that because he was not a lawyer he could not answer whether he personally believes waterboarding is torture. The CIA waterboarded at least three al-Qaida detainees before the tactic was banned in 2006.

The parallels between Obama’s and Bush’s security policies were on sharp display in the run-up to Brennan’s hearing over the use of deadly drones to kill suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, overseas.

A newly surfaced Justice Department memo from 2012 outlined the Obama administration’s decision to kill al-Qaida suspects without evidence that specific and imminent plots were being planned against the United States. At Thursday’s hearing, Brennan defended the missile strikes by the unmanned drones, saying they are used only against people who are considered active threats to the U.S. — and never as retribution for earlier attacks.

In a way that Bush did not, Obama has sought congressional approval of laws that he then uses as the basis of many of the counterterror policies he has carried over from his Republican predecessor. He successfully lobbied Congress three times to renew the controversial USA Patriot Act, the 2001 law that lets the government put roving wiretaps on U.S. citizens’ phones with a secret court order and obtain other personal and financial records with no judicial approval at all.

White House spokesman Jay Carney defended the deadly strikes as legal under a 2001 law authorizing the use of military force against al-Qaida. CIA drones also have been used in attacks, including the 2011 killing in Yemen of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric with suspected ties to at least three attacks planned or carried out on U.S. soil: the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting that claimed 13 lives in 2009, a failed attempt to down a Detroit-bound airliner the same year and a thwarted plot to bomb cargo planes in 2010.

But Congress has grown increasingly uneasy with at least some of the authorities. Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California, a staunch Obama supporter, calls the military force law “overly broad” and has been seeking to overturn it for years.

“He’s got to end that,” Lee said. She described a “huge difference in policies” between Obama and Bush but added: “I respectfully disagree on some, including the use of that (use of force) resolution, and that would not matter who was president. That resolution is there until we repeal it, and I want it repealed if we’re going to end this state of perpetual war.”

Lee is among the dovish Democrats who also are displeased with Obama’s decisions to surge U.S. troops to Afghanistan in 2009 and lead NATO military airstrikes at the height of the Libyan crisis in 2011. But, in a testament to his case-by-case deliberations on foreign policy and national security, Obama refused to similarly intervene or arm rebels in Syria and opposes a near-term military strike on Iran. He also ended the U.S. war in Iraq by withdrawing all Americans troops by the end of 2011 as promised.

Still, Obama’s hawkish counterterror bona fides are undeniable. Determined to not bring any terror detainees to Guantanamo Bay, the government has begun interrogating suspects on Navy warships before they are given a chance to speak to a lawyer. The information gleaned from those interrogations, including in the case of al-Shabab operative Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, is not allowed to be used in court but it can be used to pursue others. And the FBI can later question the terror suspects. Al-Shabab is a Somali-based terror group that has been linked to al-Qaida.

The Obama administration also has fought for, and won, the right to withhold evidence in terror lawsuits that it says could threaten U.S. security. The use of the so-called state secrets privilege gives the president limitless power to keep information from becoming public and hampers court oversight in cases that could be embarrassing to the government.

Critics say Obama’s use of the state secrets privilege represents a surprising reversal by the constitutional lawyer-turned-president and threatens American civil liberties. Last month, a federal judge in New York chided the Obama administration for refusing to turn over documents in a case relating to al-Alwaki’s killing but said she had no authority to order them disclosed.

More than any other president in U.S. history, Obama has invoked the Espionage Act to prosecute government officials accused of leaking classified information to reporters. His administration has used the law six times in leak investigations since 2009 — compared with three since it was enacted in 1917.

“There has been a disturbing amount of continuity between this administration and the former one,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. The center is a civil liberties program at the New York University law school.

“There’s been way more continuity than I think anyone expected, and certainly than candidate Obama had led anyone to expect,” Goitein said. “I just think he put his tail between his legs — the national security establishment has become so huge and powerful that he’s probably gotten somewhat co-opted despite himself and despite his better judgments and inclinations.”

She noted that some of the most powerful players in Obama’s national security circle were holdovers from Bush’s administration, including Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller and Brennan, who was a top CIA official until he retired in 2005. In his closing remarks at Thursday’s hearing, Brennan somewhat emotionally described himself as someone who is neither Republican nor Democrat — but “who really understands that the value of intelligence, the importance of this intelligence, is not to tell the president what he wants to hear, not to tell this committee what it wants to hear, but to tell the policymakers, the congressional overseers what they need to hear.”

“It would be my intention to make sure I did everything possible to live up to the trust, confidence that this Congress, this Senate and this president might place in me,” Brennan said.


Barack Obama has become the killer drone president

Barack Obama has become the killer drone president

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John Brennan's killer drones are new symbol of America in the world

Barack Obama has become the drone president

By David Horsey

February 8, 2013, 5:00 a.m.

It is certainly not what he hoped or intended, but one of President Obama’s biggest legacies in foreign affairs may prove to be the proliferation of drones as tools of war, assassination and terror.

Obama is not the first to use drones to strike enemy targets, but the 300 attacks that have occurred on his watch are six times the number carried out under President George W. Bush. A new set of guidelines that give the president broad discretion in approving execution by drones, coupled with the current congressional hearings on the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director, have brought the drone debate front and center.

Civil libertarians and activists on the left see the use of missile-firing drones to take out suspected terrorists as a threat to the rule of law. They are particularly concerned that American citizens, such as Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar Awlaki, have been killed in drone strikes without a finding of guilt and sentencing in a U.S. court. At the opening of his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Brennan -- who, as Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, has managed the deadly drone missions for four years -- was met by protesters shouting, “Assassination is against the Constitution! You are betraying democracy!”

Opponents of the drone attacks are making a principled point. A government free to kill citizens at will is truly the worst kind of Big Government nightmare. But few of the usual anti-government folks on the right are concerned about the drone hits. They consider the remote control killing of Al Qaeda operatives as completely justified, the equivalent of doing battle in a declared war, and any American who has joined the other side is merely getting what he deserves.

About 80% of Americans agree with that view and plenty of them are liberals and Democrats. Many see drone attacks as an improvement over commando raids and bombing runs. Drones do not put American soldiers directly at risk and they are far more precise than big bombs dropped from the sky, thus minimizing the collateral deaths of innocent bystanders. Those are pretty good debating points -- probably winning points.

It is easy to see how this will play out. Concerned parties in Congress -- such as Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has threatened to filibuster Brennan’s confirmation unless the Obama administration provides more information about the drone program -- will demand more limits on who can be targeted and who can approve the killings. Promises will be made, guidelines will be revised and safeguards made a little safer, but the United States will not stop using unmanned drones to deal with perceived threats. In a twilight war with no front lines and elusive enemies who hide themselves amid the flow of unsuspecting humanity, drones are an unusually effective and politically popular weapon. What president could resist pulling such an appealing trigger?

A wise president would know, however, that there will be blowback. Drones may be precise, but intelligence agencies are fallible. There will be mistakes that lead to the death of innocent people and those who survive will have good reason to hate America. The question may be, can we kill terrorists as fast as we create them? In some parts of the world, the symbol of America is no longer the Statue of Liberty, it is the killer drone.

A wise president would also anticipate the day when this technologically marvelous weapon is turned against us. A decade ago, the United States had a near monopoly on drones; now they are in the hands of dozens of countries. It is likely that some enterprising terrorist is, even now, thinking there is no reason to pack a bomb in the underpants of some aspiring martyr when it would be simpler to get hold of a cheap hobbyist’s drone, wire it up with explosives and send it on a short flight to the nearest airport. This genie is out of the bottle. Drones are in our world to stay. Presidents, both wise and foolish, will employ them -- probably too easily and often -- and America’s enemies will find a way to reciprocate.

Original source: John Brennan's killer drones are new symbol of America in the world on Los Angeles Times Exclusive


Lawmakers test legal waters for regulating drones

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Lawmakers test legal waters for regulating drones

KIMBERLY DOZIER

AP Intelligence Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Lawmakers are considering whether Congress should set up a special court to decide when drones can kill American al-Qaida suspects overseas, much as a secret court now grants permission for surveillance. The effort, after CIA Director-designate John Brennan's vigorous defense of a drone attack that killed U.S. citizens, reflects a philosophical struggle in government over remote warfare.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein of California, spelled it out at the start of Brennan's confirmation hearing on Thursday. She declared that she intended to review proposals for "legislation to ensure that drone strikes are carried out in a manner consistent with our values and the proposal to create an analogue of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the conduct of such strikes."

And Sen. Angus King Jr., in a letter Friday to senior leaders of the panel, suggested an "independent process - similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - to provide an appropriate check on the executive branch's procedure for determining whether using lethal force in a foreign country against a U.S. citizen would be lawful."

In FISA proceedings, 11 federal judges review wiretap applications that enable the FBI and other agencies to gather evidence to build cases. Suspects have no lawyers present, as they would in other U.S. courts, and the proceedings are secret. The government presents its case to a judge, who issues a warrant or not.

The notion of something similar for drone strikes drew immediate criticism from human rights and legal groups, which contend that such a court must allow the accused to mount a defense.

"It's not about evidence gathering, it's about punishment to the point of execution," said Mary Ellen O'Connell, professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame and a critic of the government's drone program. "We have never thought people could be executed without some kind of trial."

A former CIA official reacted coolly, too, but from the opposite direction.

"I think it is reasonable to ask the question under what circumstances the president can use lethal force against a U.S. citizen overseas," said Jeff Smith, former general counsel of the CIA. "It's a frightening power, and I think we need to think very, very carefully about how that power is used and whether some judicial review is warranted."

"But I certainly don't think judicial review or congressional review is needed to strike al-Qaida or other terrorists organizations," he said.

The idea is also so preliminary that lawmakers can't yet say exactly how a new process would work. In fact, most of those interviewed said the current system run by the White House works well. Brennan pioneered the current process to determine which targets are dangerous enough to be placed on one of two hit lists for killing or capture -- one held by the CIA and the other by the military's Joint Special Operations Command. Many of the names on the lists overlap, and the agency that goes after the target depends on where the suspect appears. That process was described in a legal memo made public this week, and the White House shared classified details with select lawmakers.

The new notion is drawing concern from some in Congress who fear special courts would slow down the drone strikes -- considered by some, including Brennan, as one of the most effective weapons in the war against al-Qaida.

But many lawmakers say an update is needed in the law, passed in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks, that gives the president sweeping powers to pursue al-Qaida. They say that al-Qaida has grown far beyond the war zones and technology has improved, too, enabling a Predator drone operator in the United States to track and kill a target thousands of miles away with great accuracy.

Drone strikes have expanded dramatically in the Obama administration. Fewer than 50 took place during the Bush administration, while more than 360 strikes have been launched under Obama, according to the website The Long War Journal, which tracks the operations. The strikes have been credited with killing more than 70 senior al-Qaida and Taliban commanders in Pakistan alone since they began in 2004.

In Thursday's hearing, Brennan defended strikes as necessary, saying they are taken only as a "last resort," but he said he had no qualms about the strike that killed U.S. born cleric Anwar al- Awlaki, because of his roles in several terror attacks.

"The decisions that are made are to take action so that we prevent a future action, so we protect American lives," Brennan said. "That is an inherently executive branch function to determine, and the commander in chief ... has the responsibility to protect the welfare, wellbeing of American citizens.

Still, he said the White House, too, had considered the concept of the special courts, and he said he would be open to discussing it because "American citizens by definition are due much greater due process than anybody else by dint of their citizenship."

The White House did not offer further comment Friday, and the CIA declined to comment. Brennan said people are never killed by CIA or military strikes if there is a way to capture them. Feinstein said at Thursday's hearing that she believed the CIA was open with lawmakers about its part of the program.

"We have provided a lot of oversight over the Predator," she said. "There's a staff team goes out regularly that is at Langley that does look at the intelligence on a regular basis," making more than 30 visits to review strikes and the intelligence leading up to them.

But she said she and senators including Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois and Pat Leahy of Vermont and Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa are all looking at the concept of how to regulate the strikes.

On Friday, Republicans were circumspect, with prominent members such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan declining to comment, or reserving judgment until they can see more details.

"I don't know that we can take that exact model and apply it to every tough policy decision that confronts the federal government," said Mac Thornberry of Texas, a member of the House committee.

"If someone is shooting at you, you can't go to a court and ask them to shoot back," he said. Many Democrats were more comfortable with the notion.

"A layer of judicial review could ensure additional checks on the designation of targeted individuals and determine whether sufficient evidence has been produced," said Sen. Mark Udall, D- Colo.

Said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.: "I don't have in mind to redefine the circumstances in the memo" describing the legal rationale behind the strikes "but rather set up a process for prospective or retrospective analysis of how drone strikes are made,"

The White House allowed lawmakers on the Senate and House intelligence committees to see the classified advice to the president describing the legal rationale behind drone strikes ahead of the Brennan confirmation hearing -- a pre-emptive effort meant to answer increasing questions from lawmakers about the program, and also to head off threatened holds on the Brennan nomination.

But that release has produced further demands for access and information. The intelligence committee members want their staff to read the documents, and the congressional Judiciary committees are also demanding access.

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Follow Dozier on Twitter: http://twitter.com/KimberlyDozier


President Obama, did or did you not kill Anwar al-Awlaki?

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President Obama, did or did you not kill Anwar al-Awlaki?

By David Cole, Published: February 8

David Cole teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University and is the legal affairs correspondent for the Nation. He is the author of “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable.”

There are plenty of problems with President Obama’s targeted killings in the war against terrorism: The policy remains secret in most aspects, involves no judicial review, has resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, has been employed far from any battlefield and has sparked deep anti-

American resentment in countries where we can ill afford it. But when it comes to the particular legal issue raised in a recently leaked “white paper” from the Justice Department — namely, whether it is legal to kill Americans with drones — one problem looms largest: The policy permits the government to kill its citizens in secret while refusing to acknowledge, even after the fact, that it has done so.

There may be extraordinary occasions when killing a citizen is permissible, but it should never be acceptable for the government to refuse to acknowledge the act. How can we be free if our government has the power to kill us in secret? And how can a sovereign authority be accountable to the people if the sovereign can refuse to own up to its actions?

When Argentina’s military junta secretly abducted and killed its citizens during that country’s “dirty war” in the 1970s, the world labeled these acts “disappearances” and condemned them as violations of human rights. A disappearance is not just an abduction or killing, but an unacknowledged abduction or killing. To “disappear” citizens not only deprives them of their liberty or life without fair process but is deeply corrosive of democratic politics, casting a shadow of fear over all.

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that if he had to choose between a country with the right to vote but no habeas corpus, or a country that had habeas corpus but no right to vote, he’d choose the country with habeas corpus every time. His point was that if the government has the power to lock up its citizens without having to justify its actions to a court, as habeas corpus requires, all other rights are meaningless. If that’s true of detention without judicial review, it is even more true with respect to unacknowledged executive killing. We may think we are free to say what we want, exercise our religion and enjoy the protections of privacy, but none of those guarantees really exists if the president can order us killed in secret.

Killing is not like torture. Torture is never justified, even in wartime. But killing is an integral, if unfortunate, aspect of war. Targeted killing is therefore not inherently illegal; after all, it beats the tragically untargeted killing used in the World War II bombings of Dresden,

London and Hiroshima.

Nor is it always forbidden to kill an American. If a U.S. citizen were fighting alongside al-Qaeda on an Afghan battlefield, would anyone question the right of U.S. troops to shoot and kill him? And

President Abraham Lincoln violated no constitutional guarantee by authorizing Union troops to fire on American citizens fighting for the Confederacy.

The government can also legally kill Americans in some non-wartime circumstances. The Supreme Court has held, for example, that the Fourth Amendment permits a police officer to use deadly force against a fleeing felon if the felon poses “a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The FBI team that on Monday killed an Alabama man who had held a 5-year-old boy hostage for nearly a week certainly did not act unconstitutionally.

But since when is it constitutional for the president to deliberately kill an American while refusing to admit that he has done so? Due process forbids the taking of life or liberty without fair procedures and prohibits any official action that “shocks the conscience,” as the Supreme Court has stated. If secret killing does not shock the conscience, then nothing does.

Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed by a drone strike in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011. Awlaki is reported to have been an operational leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an organization the administration considers an “associated force” of al-Qaeda. White House officials reportedly say he was involved in planning at least two failed terrorist attacks against the United States.

I say “reportedly” because the Obama administration never charged Awlaki with any crime and has never even acknowledged that it sent the drone that killed him. There is no doubt that the man was killed by a drone. That fact has been reported on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Obama himself held a news conference to announce that Awlaki “was killed,” but he very consciously used the passive voice, not admitting any U.S. responsibility.

The administration initially treated the drone killing program as covert, refusing to speak about it. Over time, various Obama administration officials have given public speeches defending the legality of targeted killing in general. But the administration has not admitted killing anyone specific outside Afghanistan with a drone.

The unacknowledged killing of foreign nationals during wartime is disturbing enough, though there may be circumstances in which it is warranted. But in our democracy, it can never be permissible for the president to identify an American citizen for extinction, place him on a “kill list,” authorize a CIA agent or military officer to kill him — and then refuse to admit that it was done.

Whether the killing is legal or not, accountability is impossible absent a public statement of responsibility for the act.

Indeed, the Obama administration is opposing lawsuits that challenge Awlaki’s killing and seek disclosure of the documents related to it, in part on the grounds that its role in the killing has never been, and cannot be, acknowledged. If a government of the people and under law means anything, it must mean that the government cannot kill its people in secret and then avoid legal scrutiny by disavowing responsibility.

Administration insiders have hinted that Washington cannot admit that it is directing the drones, even if the world knows it is doing so, because other countries have consented to drone strikes in their territory only on the condition that they go officially unacknowledged. Using lethal force inside another nation’s borders, absent that nation’s consent, is generally a violation of international law, so there is good reason to seek consent. But can an agreement with a foreign country override the president’s constitutional obligation to take American lives only in a publicly acknowledged and legally accountable way?

Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan, has put it well: “I think the rule should be that if we’re going to take actions overseas that result in the deaths of people, the United States should take responsibility for that,” he said last fall.

So, President Obama, did you or did you not kill Anwar al-Awlaki?


Debating a Court to Vet Drone Strikes

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Debating a Court to Vet Drone Strikes

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: February 8, 2013

WASHINGTON — Since 1978, a secret court in Washington has approved national security eavesdropping on American soil — operations that for decades had been conducted based on presidential authority alone.

Now, in response to broad dissatisfaction with the hidden bureaucracy directing lethal drone strikes, there is an interest in applying the model of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court — created by Congress so that surveillance had to be justified to a federal judge — to the targeted killing of suspected terrorists, or at least of American suspects.

“We’ve gone from people scoffing at this to it becoming a fit subject for polite conversation,” said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas. He said court approval for adding names to a counterterrorism kill list — at least for American citizens abroad — “is no longer beyond the realm of political possibility.”

A drone court would face constitutional, political and practical obstacles, and might well prove unworkable, according to several legal scholars and terrorism experts. But with the war in Afghanistan winding down, Al Qaeda fragmenting into hard-to-read offshoots and the 2001 terrorist attacks receding into the past, they said, it is time to consider how to forge a new, trustworthy and transparent system to govern lethal counterterrorism operations.

“People in Washington need to wake up and realize the legal foundations are crumbling by the day,” Mr. Chesney said. That realization seemed evident at Thursday’s confirmation hearing for John O. Brennan as C.I.A. director, which became a raucous forum for complaints about the expansion of counterterrorist strikes and the procedures for deciding who should die.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, was one of those who complained that he could not get the administration to even list the countries where lethal strikes had been carried out. Among Republicans, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said he thought that killing had become a dubious substitute for capture. A program that began in the shadows was dragged for the first time into the spotlight of Congressional debate.

Today, with Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan hugely diminished and Osama bin Laden dead, the terrorist threat is far more diffuse than it was a decade ago. Most drone-fired missiles now kill not high- level terrorists plotting to attack the United States, but a mixed bag of midlevel militants and foot soldiers whose focus is often more on the Pakistani or Yemeni authorities than on the United States. And since a September 2011 drone strike deliberately killed an American citizen, Anwar al- Awlaki, who had joined Al Qaeda in Yemen, the legal and moral rationale for such strikes has been hotly debated.

Even if they are glad Mr. Awlaki is dead, many Americans are uneasy that a president can use secret evidence to label a citizen a terrorist and order his execution without a trial or judge’s ruling. Hence the idea of court oversight for targeted killing, which on Thursday, unexpectedly, got serious discussion from senators and Mr. Brennan.

First, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she would review proposals for establishing such a court. Her remark got a strong second from Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent.

“Having the executive being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner all in one is very contrary to the traditions and the laws of this country,” he said.

Mr. Brennan then made a striking disclosure: The Obama administration had held internal talks on the feasibility of such a court. “I think it’s certainly worthy of discussion,” Mr. Brennan said.

“What’s that appropriate balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branch responsibilities in this area?”

An administration official who spoke of the White House deliberations on the condition of anonymity said President Obama had asked his security and legal advisers a year ago “to see how you could have an independent review” of planned strikes. “That includes possible judicial review.”

“People on the national security staff and the legal side took a hard look at it, and the discussions are still going on,” the official said. “There are a lot of complexities. You’d need legislation and probably a new judicial body.”

The FISA court was created by Congress in 1978 after revelations of widespread eavesdropping on Americans by the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation convinced Congress that the executive branch had proved incapable of properly policing itself.

Eleven judges from around the country sit on the court, but one is on duty at a time, hearing cases in a special high-security courtroom added to Washington’s federal courthouse in 2009. In 2011, according to the most recent statistics, the court approved 1,745 orders for electronic surveillance or physical searches, rejecting none outright but altering 30.

A drone court would have the same appeal, bringing in an independent arbiter. But it is likely there would be serious limitations to its jurisdiction. Most experts say judges do not have the alacrity or expertise to rule on a frantic call from the C.I.A. every time a terrorism suspect is in its sights. A better approach would be to have the court rule on whether the government had enough evidence against a suspect to place him on the kill list.

But if the court’s jurisdiction extended to every foreign terrorism suspect, even some proponents believe, it might infringe on the president’s constitutional role as commander in chief. Senator King, for instance, said he thought the court would pass constitutional muster only if it were limited to cases involving American citizens.

With such limits, however, a drone court would not address many of the most pressing concerns, including decisions on which foreign militants should be targeted; how to avoid civilian deaths; and how to provide more public information about strike rules and procedures. “In terms of the politics and the optics, aren’t you in the same position that you are now?” said William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University. “It’s still secret. The target wouldn’t be represented. It’s a mechanism that wouldn’t satisfy critics or advance the due process cause much.”

Indeed, Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project, said that a drone court would be a step backward, and that extradition and criminal prosecution of suspected terrorists was a better answer. “I strongly agree that judicial review is crucial,” she said. “But judicial review in a new secret court is both unnecessary and un-American.”

Nor are judges clamoring to take up the challenge. At an American Bar Association meeting in November, a retired FISA judge, James Robertson, rejected the idea that judges should approve “death warrants.”

“My answer is, that’s not the business of judges,” Mr. Robertson said, “to decide without an adversary party to sign a death warrant for somebody.”

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.


Drones Kill

Here is a cool cartoon on Obama's killer drones.


President Obama lies in his State of Union speech

It's not a lie if the President says it???

OK, it's still a lie, but most people never find out the President is a liar!!!!

Source

FACT CHECK: Overreaching in State of Union speech

By CALVIN WOODWARD | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama did some cherry-picking Tuesday night in defense of his record on jobs and laid out a conditional path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that may be less onerous than he made it sound.

A look at some of the claims in his State of the Union speech, a glance at the Republican counterargument and how they fit with the facts:

OBAMA: "After years of grueling recession, our businesses have created over 6 million new jobs."

THE FACTS: That's in the ballpark, as far as it goes. But Obama starts his count not when he took office, but from the point in his first term when job losses were the highest. In doing so, he ignores the 5 million or so jobs that were lost on his watch, up to that point.

Private sector jobs have grown by 6.1 million since February 2010. But since he became president, the gain is a more modest 1.9 million.

And when losses in public sector employment are added to the mix, his overall jobs record is a gain of 1.2 million.

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OBAMA: "We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas."

THE FACTS: Not so fast.

That's expected to happen in 12 more years.

Under a deal the Obama administration reached with automakers in 2011, vehicles will have a corporate average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, twice the 27 miles per gallon, on average, that cars and trucks get today. Automobile manufacturers won't start making changes to achieve the new fuel economy standards until model year 2017. Not all cars will double their gas mileage, since the standard is based on an average of a manufacturers' fleet.

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OBAMA: "Already the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce the growth of health care costs."

THE FACTS: The jury is still out on whether Obama's health care overhaul will reduce the growth of health care costs. It's true that cost increases have eased, but many experts say that's due to the sluggish economy, not to the health care law, whose main provisions are not yet fully in effect.

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OBAMA: "Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship — a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally."

THE FACTS: The seemingly stern admonition that illegal immigrants must go to the back of the line, often heard from the president, doesn't appear to have much practical effect except in the most obvious sense. Everyone who joins a line, whether for a movie, a coffee or citizenship, starts at the back of that particular line. It's not clear he is saying anything more than that illegal immigrants won't get to cut in line for citizenship once they've obtained provisional legal status.

Like those living abroad who have applied to come to the U.S. legally, illegal immigrants who qualify for Obama's proposed path to citizenship will surely face long waits to be processed. But during that time, they are already in the U.S. and will get to stay, work and travel in the country under their new status as provisional immigrants, while those outside the U.S. simply have to wait.

Sending illegal immigrants to the "back of the line" is something of a distinction without a difference for some legal immigrants who dutifully followed all the rules before coming to the United States.

For instance, some legal immigrants who are in the U.S. on an employer-sponsored visa can't easily change jobs, or in some cases take a promotion, without jeopardizing their place in line to get a green card. In other cases, would-be legal immigrants in other countries wait for years to be able to settle in the U.S.

Obama is using "back of the line" somewhat figuratively, because there are multiple lines depending on the applicant's relationship with family already in the U.S. or with an employer. Generally, a foreign-born spouse of a U.S. citizen or someone with needed skills and a job offer will be accepted more quickly than many others.

But even as a figurative point, his assertion may cloak the fact that people who came to the U.S. illegally and win provisional status have the great advantage over applicants abroad of already being where they all want to go.

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OBAMA: "Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. ... And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. ... Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than $7 later on — by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime."

THE FACTS: Dozens of studies have shown Head Start graduates are more likely to complete high school than their at-risk peers who don't participate in the program. But a study last year by the Department of Health and Human Services that found big vocabulary and social development gains for at-risk students in pre-kindergarten programs also found those effects largely faded by the time pupils reached third grade. The report didn't explain why the kids saw a drop-off in performance or predict how they would fare as they aged.

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OBAMA: "I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy."

THE FACTS: Obama failed to get a global warming bill through Congress when both Houses were controlled by Democrats in 2010. With Republicans in control of the House, the chances of a bill to limit the gases blamed for global warming and to create a market for businesses to trade pollution credits are close to zero. The Obama administration has already acted to control greenhouse gases through existing law. It has boosted fuel-efficiency standards and proposed rules to control heat-trapping emissions from new power plants. And while there are still other ways to address climate change without Congress, it's questionable regulation alone can achieve the reductions needed to start curbing global warming.

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FLORIDA SEN. MARCO RUBIO, in the Republican response: "The real cause of our debt is that our government has been spending $1 trillion more than it takes in every year. That's why we need a balanced-budget amendment."

THE FACTS: That statement may reflect the math behind recent debt, but it doesn't get directly to the cause — the worst recession since the Depression and its aftereffects. The deficit is not only caused by spending, but by reduced tax revenues. And during the recession, revenues from both individual and corporate taxes fell markedly.

The steep increases in debt and the measures that should be taken to ease the burden are central to the debate in Washington. But there is no serious move afoot to amend the Constitution to prohibit deficit spending.

The ability to take on debt has been used by governments worldwide and through U.S. history to shelter people from the ravages of a down economy, wage war and achieve many other ends. An effort to amend the Constitution for any purpose faces daunting odds; this would be no exception. Most state constitutions demand a balanced budget, but states lack some big obligations of the federal government, including national defense. And Washington's ability to go deeper into debt provides states with at least a minimal safety net in times of high unemployment.

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Associated Press writers Tom Raum, Dina Cappiello, Andrew Taylor, Christopher S. Rugaber, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Alicia A. Caldwell and Philip Elliott contributed to this report.

EDITOR'S NOTE _ An occasional look at political claims that take shortcuts with the facts or don't tell the full story.

 
Homeless in Arizona

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