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 .
The U.S. relocation of MQ-9 Reaper drones from Africa to Latin America is not a drawdown of imperial aggression but a strategic reallocation, with the drones likely to be used against Cuba, Venezuela…
Race is a sociopolitical construct, not a biological truth. The real determinants of health are structural factors such as zip code, environmental pollution, and access to resources.
A photograph of Delcy Rodríguez smiling with Donald Trump after the U.S. kidnapped Nicolás Maduro is evidence of subordination to the United States. These images cannot be reconciled with the dignity…
Imperialist competition and wars that facilitate extractivism have long shaped the use of seaports for access to resources, markets, and devalued labor. In the last decade, countries in the chain of…
Iraqi Kurdish leaders say the US withdrawal will leave their region, long a CIA and Mossad hub, vulnerable to Iranian attacks.
