Posted on 03/09/2013 5:40:07 PM PST by Sub-Driver
How a U.S. Citizen Came to Be in America’s Cross Hairs By MARK MAZZETTI, CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — One morning in late September 2011, a group of American drones took off from an airstrip the C.I.A. had built in the remote southern expanse of Saudi Arabia. The drones crossed the border into Yemen, and were soon hovering over a group of trucks clustered in a desert patch of Jawf Province, a region of the impoverished country once renowned for breeding Arabian horses.
A group of men who had just finished breakfast scrambled to get to their trucks. One was Anwar al-Awlaki, the firebrand preacher, born in New Mexico, who had evolved from a peddler of Internet hatred to a senior operative in Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Another was Samir Khan, another American citizen who had moved to Yemen from North Carolina and was the creative force behind Inspire, the militant group’s English-language Internet magazine.
Two of the Predator drones pointed lasers on the trucks to pinpoint the targets, while the larger Reapers took aim. The Reaper pilots, operating their planes from thousands of miles away, readied for the missile shots, and fired.
It was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, intense deliberation by lawyers working for President Obama and turf fights between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., whose parallel drone wars converged on the killing grounds of Yemen. For what was apparently the first time since the Civil War, the United States government had carried out the deliberate killing of an American citizen as a wartime enemy and without a trial.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I have a problem with the hypocrisy as well.
HOW are these people being converted to radical Islam?
Did they just wake up one monrning, saying “I just HATE those moralistic, lying Christians and Jews, and the country for which they stand.”
Because Islam does truly hate all of what the United States and Israel are and stand for, nations with a heritage of being upstanding and righteous people who have founded the nations in which they live and reside on principles of belief in God and the exercise of free will in the direction of individual freedoms and a moral compass tied to belief in a just diety.
Where well publicized or not, the Islamic doctrines are being preached right now in our prisons and rehabilitation facilities, on the same basis as other religions, but not for the same reasons. Islam is raising a domestic insurrection, where the other faiths are all trying to reabsorb the erring person back into the wider society.
The NY Times gets around to covering exactly why Rand Paul’s filibuster and Cruz’s grilling of Holder over droning US citizens in a café was spot on:
“Then, on Oct. 14, a missile apparently intended for an Egyptian Qaeda operative, Ibrahim al-Banna, hit a modest outdoor eating place in Shabwa. The intelligence was bad: Mr. Banna was not there, and among about a dozen men killed was the young Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who had no connection to terrorism and would never have been deliberately targeted.
“It was a tragic error and, for the Obama administration, a public relations disaster, further muddying the moral clarity of the previous strike on his father and fueling skepticism about American assertions of drones’ surgical precision.”
Of course, NY Times give no credence to Cruz and Paul.
Meanwhile NY Times received briefings from national security officials no the contents of the secret drone-killing authorization memos and acts as an Obama-Admin excuse-making media channel by uncritically rebutting claims of hypocrisy compared to the Bush “Unitary Executive” theory:
“As they researched the rarely invoked overseas-murder statute, Mr. Barron and Mr. Lederman discovered a 1997 district court decision involving a woman who was charged with killing her child in Japan. A judge ruled that the terse overseas-killing law must be interpreted as incorporating the exceptions of its domestic-murder counterpart, writing, “Congress did not intend to criminalize justifiable or excusable killings.”
“And by arguing that it is not unlawful “murder” when the government kills an enemy leader in war or national self-defense, Mr. Barron and Mr. Lederman concluded that the foreign-killing statute would not impede a strike. They had not resorted to the Bush-style theories they had once denounced of sweeping presidential war powers to disregard Congressionally imposed limitations.
“Due to return to academia in the fall of 2010, the two lawyers finished their second Awlaki memorandum, whose reasoning was widely approved by other administration lawyers, that summer. It had ballooned to about 63 pages but remained narrowly tailored to Mr. Awlaki’s circumstances, blessing lethal force against him without addressing whether it would also be permissible to kill citizens, like low-ranking members of Al Qaeda, in other situations.
“Nearly three years later, a version of the legal analysis portions would become public in the “white paper,” which stripped out all references to Mr. Awlaki while retaining echoes, like its discussion of a generic “senior operational leader.” Divorced from its original context and misunderstood as a general statement about the scope and limits of the government’s authority to kill citizens, the free-floating reasoning would lead to widespread confusion.”
“Islam is raising a domestic insurrection....”
.
It’s up to the authorities to stop this practice but they are blind to its dangers.
Or perhaps it is all done intentionally as part of the general movement to destroy this nation first and then the Constitution next.
And do not contact your congressman to alert him to the situation because all you can expect from him/her is to receive a rediculous survey form through the mail with a request for a contribution.
I dont see the big fuss.
We Limeys used to kill British citizens (members of the IRA and INLA). If we could arrest them, great. If we had to kill them, so be it.
You turn against your country and attempt to harm it, you pay the consequences of your violent actions.
D*mn... there it is...
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but you nailed it, sir.
The only reason to use a drone is when our law enforcement is not capable of reaching the accused.
And law enforcement in our own nation, on our own soil, should be much closer to Sheriff Andy than it is to Special Forces Ninja Bob.
Well.. here we have due process. Who and what determines the purported "violent actions" and the guilt of the accused? I don't pretend to know the methodologies as to how the Brit government concludes who's a legitimate target, but over here those details need to be fleshed out. The idea of any president playing the role of judge, jury and executioner tends to rub us Americans the wrong way.
So do we. We cant go around killing UK citizens willy-nilly. But when it happened/happens, there was/is less wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The law should aid defence and security not hinder.
Don’t be too sure about that...
“”The problem is if they think they (the citizens) are not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does, the central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. So, it’s not up to the individuals. Even if they think they aren’t doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target.”
-— William Binney, National Security Agency
Also, don’t forget that Abu Brennen refers to you as a free range kafir in dar al harb...a harbi.
A little refresher:
“Know the Enemy—Sun Tsu, The Art of War
Before we start, we need the right words if we are to have the right thoughts.
Islam claims that all who do not submit are kafirs (unbelievers). A kafir is hated by Allah and Allah plots against the kafir. Over 60% of the Koran is devoted to the kafir. A kafir may be killed, robbed, raped, enslaved, tortured and mocked. Every mention of the kafir is negative, demeaning, insulting and hurtful. Unbeliever is a neutral word. Kafir is the worst word in the human language.
The second word we need is dhimmi. The original dhimmis were Christians and Jews who got to keep their religion, but lived in a totally Islamic culture. Today a dhimmi is a kafir who apologizes for Islam.”
http://www.politicalislam.com/blog/an-ethical-basis-for-war-against-political-islam-part-1-2/
The term "enemy combatants" is a horrible one that only recently came into use* and is essentially the granting of rights/privileges to the terrorist class. You see in the Geneva and Hague [conventions] there are "lawful" and "unlawful" combatants; Al Queda and the like are "unlawful combatants" [one thing is they are not uniformed soldiers] and therefore are not entitled to *any* of the the POW guarantees.
Thank you!
Thank you very much!
“So do we. We cant go around killing UK citizens willy-nilly. But when it happened/happens, there was/is less wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
On the contrary there was rather more “wailing and gnashing” in the UK over the shooting of Irish terrorists than has been evinced in the US over this Yemen incident.
You might not recall the brouhaha surrounding the killing of three IRA activists in Gibraltar in 1988 but it was pretty huge with Maggie’s Attorney General having to make statements in the House of Commons and major TV and press investigations.
Equally there were decades-long police investigations into the shootings of many IRA and INLA terrorists in the “shoot to kill” inquiries (does John Stalker’s name ring a bell?).
The controversy surrounded precisely the same legal issues that arise here, ie whether armed agents of the state can simply shoot suspected terrorists on sight.
True, but that was the usual leftist suspects. Political and esp media. There was far more support in the general public for that operation and others like Loughhall.
I am 42. I remember all the mentioned controversies well. And I didnt forget them when I answered.
I think my point is valid. Bar a few incidents over the years like 1988, there has been little public disquiet about Britain killing its own citizens. Maybe because unlike America, we have had decades of murderous terrorism in our own backyard that killed thousands.
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