A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The president's men drib and drab out their rationale for how President Obama decides which Earthlings live or die. A newly leaked “white paper” claims the president can transfer his killing authority to unnamed, unranked “informed, high level” officials. Thus, the people-killing process “is whatever the president or the nearest 'informed, high-level official of the U.S. government' says it is.
Obama and Co. Make Up the Law as They Kill
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“The white paper empowers Obama to delegate the kill-at-will authority.”
Unlike the bombast that characterized the Bush administration’s assaults on U.S. and international law, the Obama regime tends to dribble out its rationales for gutting the Bill of Rights and every notion of global legality. This president prefers to create a fog – let’s call it the fog of his war against human rights – as he arrogates to himself the power to perpetually imprison or to summarily execute anyone, at any time, anywhere in the world. Obama assures us such authority is constitutionally rooted – it’s in there, believe me, he tells us – but he never produces legal chapter and verse to prove that presidential dictatorship is lawful. Instead, we get dribs and drabs of the administration’s position from lawyers defending Obama’s preventive detention law in the courts, or from informal statements by the attorney general, or even little tidbits gleaned from an Obama conversation with comedian Jon Stewart.
The latest hors d'oeuvre to be dished out comes in the form of a leak. I say “dished out” because leaked documents are commonly placed in public view by the administration in power, to test the political waters. This leaked Justice Department “white paper
“It justifies the killing of anyone occupying a position of status in al-Qaida.” Eleven U.S. senators are asking for further clarification of the administration’s legal position. But that is just more fog, since the Congress overwhelmingly passed Obama’s preventive detention law – twice!! – a law based on the same assumption that due process of law does not apply when the president says it’s wartime. Therefore, the commander-in-chief can lock up any American, without charge or trial, forever, or until he declares peace. The U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, has made the administration’s position clear enough. Due process, he says, does not necessarily mean this administration. It bends towards fascism, with a Black presidential face. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .
Cop City is the culmination of years of "Atlanta Way" neo-liberalism intended to advantage corporate interests and affluent white people. Black people have been pushed out and those that remain live…
The catastrophe for the Palestinian people began 75 years ago and their struggle against the apartheid state continues.
The United States deploys naval warships and drones after creating the conditions for destabilization in Sudan. AFRICOM's presence is expanding under the guise of protecting US nationals.
Anthony Blinken has refused to hand over cables in which US embassy officials warned of an imminent Taliban victory weeks before Washington's botched withdrawal.
Protest in France, gentrification in Philadelphia, and school safety and achievement.
