I heard this piece by Krauthammer, but I think he partly missed the point. The loudest objection I know of is to the president arrogating to himself the ability to execute Americans abroad who, he thinks, are terrorists. No trial, no questions. The way Krauthammer phrases it, he assumes that the “people who have taken up arms against the U.S.” are proven to have done so. In fact, I’ve seen no evidence that this will be the case. The Nazis on D-Day are a straw argument, because there was no doubt they had taken up arms against us.
Krauthammer was right when he said the memo seemed to have been written by someone in the fifth quintile of their law class. As he analyzed it, “suspects are fair game for assassination when they are posing an imminent threat” + Al Qaeda members are a threat 24/7 = suspects can always be assassinated, making any conditional statements farcical.
What’s to stop a dictator from declaring that anyone who opposes him has “taken up arms against the US”? The libs have already laid the groundwork by declaring that Christians, conservatives, and other non-leftists are enemies of the state.
My biggest issue is that we’re talking about suspects here. We aren’t talking about guys like Bin Laden who have been convicted (in absentia).
This is shoot first, worry about evidence later.