9/4/2010 Reply By Solutions

.
We will focus on two lawsuits filed last August challenging the U.S. Government's right to assassinate U.S. citizens far from any battlefield, so long as the U.S. Executive Branch deems them to be terrorists who are a threat to the U.S.

The suits were brought by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights in the name of Dr. Nasser Al-Aulaqi on behalf of his son, Anwar Al-Aulaqi. The father has spent his entire career as a Yemeni Government Minister or as President of two different Yemeni Universities. His son is a U.S. citizen because he was born in the U.S. in 1966 when the father was here during his student days on a Fulbright scholarship. The U.S. government believes the son is a member of Al Qaeda in Yemen. The father disputes that.

The key legal issues from reading quite a few of the materials (including court papers) are whether the entire world is a battleground against terrorism or, alternatively, whether the target is an imminent threat to the U.S. -- in either of which cases our Commander In Chief has the right to impose capital punishment by drone upon U.S. citizens without a trial.

An interesting question in the event that the courts hold that the entire world is a battleground against terrorism = what is the difference between sending drones over Yemen and sending drones over, say, Britain, France or Germany???

And would we want other countries to begin flying their drones over the U.S. in order to implement assassinations here, including assassinations of U.S. citizens deemed by the other countries to be a threat to them??? After all, our drones have assassinated in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan at least 3 German citizens and more than a dozen citizens of other Western European allies.

Are these questions really governed by "might makes right" tempered only by discretion in the case of friends and allies??? In other words, since Russia for example is not normally considered a friend or ally, would we consider flying drones into their air space in order to conduct assassinations within their borders since our drones, if provided stealth technology, might be difficult to bring down (and how much does a drone cost anyway???)???

The practical problems, as we have discussed in the past, are (1) Osama bin Laden issued long ago a Fatwa to nuke 10 million Americans (the number of Arabs he calculated had been killed by the U.S. or its allies), (2) the Founding Dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government wrote a book on how to deal with Osama's Fatwa by controlling nuclear material, (3) it has often been pointed out that this approach is wishful thinking because, for example, the old Soviet Union's missing 178 suitcase-size nuclear weapons contained a considerable amount of recycle-able nuclear material and have long since been universally agreed by experts to be in the hands of terrorists, and (4) this issue has been the subject of intense concern for every recent Chair of the Sen Fgn Rel or Sen Armed Services Committees with, indeed, Sen Fgn Rel Chair Joe Biden writing an Op Ed piece for the Wall St. Journal during the 2008 Presidential campaign arguing that all nuclear material has "DNA" indicating where it was produced and the U.S. should announce to the world that if it is ever subject to a nuclear attack from terrorists, the U.S. will annihilate with nuclear weapons the country of origin of the nuclear material used against the U.S. (causing some wags to point out that if the U.S. itself is the country of origin, the Biden Doctrine would obligate us to commit nuclear suicide!!!).

A companion problem, as we have also discussed in the past, is that if there is a nuclear attack by terrorists on the United States and President Obama is not seen to have done everything in his power to protect America, that will probably be the end of the Democratic Party.
Post Reply
solutions
Site Admin
Posts: 215
Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:38 pm

9/4/2010 Reply By Solutions

Post by solutions »

.
Bagram v. Guantanamo & Abu Graib
by solutions » Sat Sep 04, 2010 4:16 am

.
On 6/3/2010, I proposed as a topic for one our monthly meetings “Bagram v. Guantanamo & Abu Graib” because, during the 2008 US Presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain said they would like to close the detention facility at Guantanamo BECAUSE IT WAS AN EFFECTIVE RECRUITING TOOL FOR TERRORIST GROUPS SUCH AS AL QAEDA.

However, the pictures of abuse by the US night-shift guards at the US detention facility at Abu Graib in Iraq were a more effective recruiting tool than Guantanamo ever was.

And the Obama Administration won in the US Circuit Court of Appeal for the DC Circuit on 5/21/2010 a decision that unlike the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba which is viewed as U.S. soil, foreign prisoners at the U.S. air base at Bagram Afghanistan are NOT entitled to habeas corpus review by US courts.

**********
The reason for mentioning all this is that on 6/15/2010, John Karls posted a reply which noted that approximately half of the remaining 200 prisoners at Guantanamo were from Yemen and the Obama Administration had just decided NOT to release back to Yemen those prisoners.

He posted a 5/26/2010 decision of the US District Court for the District of Columbia (Mahmoud Abdah vs. Barack H. Obama) that stated that although the Obama Administration had decided in June 2009 to release the Yemeni citizens back to Yemen, the Obama Administration reversed its decision on 1/8/2010.

John requested volunteers to “chase the rabbit” of what happened to make the Obama Administration change its mind, since the change had a big impact on closing Guantanamo.

On 6/17/2010, I answered John’s call and posted the 1/6/2010 MacNeil-Lehrer transcript indicating that the unsuccessful 12/25/2009 Christmas-Day Shoe Bombing of a US airliner had been a project of Al Qaeda in Yemen, and that had been the reason for the Obama Administration’s reversal of its decision to release the approximately 100 Yemenis from Guantanamo who were half of the approximately 200 prisoners still remaining there.

It would appear that the unsuccessful 12/25/2010 Christmas-Day Shoe Bombing was also the reason why the Obama Administration also took action in January 2010 to draw up its “kill list” for Yemen that includes the US citizen who is the subject of the August 2010 ACLU lawsuits.
Top
Post Reply

Return to “Original Proposal - The US Gov's "Kill List" To Assassinate US Citizens in Yemen - Dec 15th”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests