Life & Death in Academia

Accuracy in Academia ^ | December 7, 2011 | Malcolm A. Kline

[Academiadotorg]

Putting the power of life and death in anyone’s hands is a dubious undertaking, to put it mildly. Giving such responsibility to a pair of academics is questionable, at best.

“Senior Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki and another America-born militant were killed in Yemen early Friday morning by a CIA-led U.S. drone strike, marking the highest-profile takedown of terror leaders since the raid on Usama bin Laden’s compound,” Jennifer Griffin & Justin Fishel reported on Fox News.com on September 30, 2011.

“Sensing they were on sensitive ground, officials of the Obama Administration illegally leaked information to The New York Times about the policy, indicating that Obama relied on a 50-page Department of Justice memo for justification to kill al-Awlaki,” Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media reported last month. “It was principally drafted by David Barron and Martin Lederman, who were both lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the time, and was signed by Mr. Barron,” the Times claimed.

“But these are the Obama lawyers who were supposed to stop this kind of thing in the executive branch,” Kincaid points out.

“One of the more interesting storylines unfolding right now is President Obama’s ongoing appointment to the Office of Legal Counsel of lawyers who strongly opposed George W. Bush’s use of the war on terror to justify dramatic expansions of executive power,” liberal blogger Greg Sargent of The Washington Post said in January of 2009.

These lawyers included Martin Lederman and David Barron.

“A veteran of the Clinton administration OLC [Office of Legal Counsel], Barron spent ten years teaching law at Harvard University,” a Washington Post political profile of Barron said. “During that time, he was critical of the George W. Bush administration, claiming that the White House used the war on terror to justify increasing executive power.”