CBS News‘ Scott Pelley appears to be one of the very few American journalists bothered by, or even interested in, the fact that President Obama has asserted and exercised the power to target U.S. citizens for execution-by-CIA without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield. It was Pelley who deftly interrogated the GOP presidential candidates at a November debate about the propriety of due-process-free assassinations, prompting Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Michele Bachmann to applaud President Obama for assassinating U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki (just as Rick Perry, Dick and Liz Cheney, and Bill Kristol had done). Last night, Pelley did the same when he interviewed Defense Secretary and former CIA chief Leon Panetta on 60 Minutes. It’s well worth watching this three-minute clip because, although Panetta doesn’t say much that is new (he simply asserts the standard slogans and unproven assertions that Obama defenders on this topic always assert), watching a top Obama official, under decent questioning, defend the power to target U.S. citizens for assassination viscerally conveys the rigidly authoritarian mindset driving all of this:
Condemnation of President Obama is intense, and growing, as a result of his announced intent to sign into law the indefinite detention bill embedded in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The White House announced on December 15, 2011 that Obama would not veto the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. The NDAA mandates the military to arrest and indefinitely detain any person, including American citizens, anywhere in the world, including on US soil, who is accused by authorities as a terrorist or alleged to be providing support to terrorists and organizations designated as terrorist.
It is now enough - de facto and de jure - to be merely accused, for the sentence to be pronounced upon you by virtue of the accusation, as if Lewis Carroll's Red Queen was now in charge: "First the sentence, then the trial!"
Two significant events happened on Thursday: (1) the Democratic-led Senate rejuvenated and expanded the War on Terror by, among other things, passing a law authorizing military detention on U.S. soil and expanding the formal scope of the War; and (2) Obama lawyers, for the first time, publicly justified the President’s asserted (and seized) power to target U.S. citizens for assassination without any transparency or due process. I wrote extensively about the first episode on Thursday, and now have a question for those supporting the assassination theories just offered by the President’s lawyers.
To pose that question, I’d like to harken back for a moment to the controversy over the Guantanamo detention system. Democrats universally purported to be appalled that the Bush administration was indefinitely imprisoning people without any charges or due process. Barack Obama, as a Senator from Illinois, denounced “the Bush Administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo” — i.e., that people would be put in cages, possibly forever,with no charges. But Bush lawyers offered a theory for why due-process-free imprisonment was justifiable.
When the Center for American Progress’ Think Progress blog recently compiled all of the inspiring foreign policy successes of our nation’s strong and resolute Commander-in-Chief, they listed — alongside the assassination of a U.S. citizen without due process and increased deference to Israel — what they hailed as the President’s having “supported democratic transition in Egypt.”
President Obama apparently deserves credit for this notwithstanding the fact that his administration supported President Mubarak up to the very last minute; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in 2009, proclaimed: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family”; and Obama, once Mubarak’s fall became inevitable, tried to engineer the empowerment of Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s long-time trusted lieutenant most responsible for its torture, brutality and domestic repression. If that’s supporting democracy in Egypt, I would hate to see what opposition entails.
First, the good news! After the 30 years, the state of Pennsylvania is ceasing its efforts to kill Mumia Abu-Jamal via legally-ordered execution. Hundreds of marches and events over the years demanded "STOP Mumia's Execution," demanded a new trial, and many around the world said "Free Mumia."
Decades of challenges in the court fiinally won a re-sentencing order, although we have not been able to get any court to deeply investigate the injustice of Mumia's original trial. It's cause for celebration that the state won't legally kill him. Now let's get him some justice, and get him off death row and out of prison right now!
Just days before the thirtieth anniversary of his conviction, Mumia Abu-Jamal is being spared the death penalty after the district attorney in Philadelphia announced Wednesday that prosecutors will no longer be pursuing that sentence.
Abu-Jamal, rallied world-wide as a victim of an unjust American legal system, has been on death row since being sentenced to execution in the summer of 1982. The previous December he was convicted of murdering a police officer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, though the case and the subsequent sentencing has been of great debate across the globe in the decades that followed.
On Wednesday morning, District Attorney Seth Williams announced that prosecutors will no longer be going after the death penalty, instead accepting a term of life in prison without parole.
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