Tag Archives: Obama administration

Obama claims right to kill Americans in America

Posted on by at 8:46 am
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This is truly an outrage. Attorney General Eric Holder, in response to a question from Senator Rand Paul, confirms that the Obama administration claims the right to militarily target Americans on US soil:

As members of this administration have previously indicated, the US government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat. We have a long history of using the criminal justice system to incapacitate individuals located in our country who pose a threat to the United States and its interests abroad. Hundreds of individuals have been arrested and convicted of terrorism-related offenses in our federal courts.

The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.

DOJ white paper on killing citizens without trial leaks

Posted on by at 8:16 am

NBC has revealed a 16-page leaked memo, unsigned and undated, that describes the analysis used by the US Government to support killing US ctizens without trial.

Here is a brief summary from the New York Times:

It adopts an elastic definition of an “imminent” threat, saying it is not necessary for a specific attack to be in process when a target is found if the target is generally engaged in terrorist activities aimed at the United States. And it asserts that courts should not play a role in reviewing or restraining such decisions.

The white paper states that “judicial enforcement of such orders would require the court to supervise inherently predictive judgments by the president and his national security advisers as to when and how to use force against a member of an enemy force against which Congress has authorized the use of force.”

It also fills in many blanks in a series of speeches by members of the Obama legal team about the use of force in targeted killings, including remarks by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. at Northwestern’s law school in March. He asserted that the Constitution’s guarantee of “due process” before the government takes a life does not necessarily mean “judicial process” in national security situations, but offered little specific legal analysis.

And here is a preliminary take from the ACLU.

Of course, there is no way that this is legal. The damage done to the Constitution that began in the Bush Administration continues under the supervision of a Constitutional lawyer.

Yet another bank regulation failure

Posted on by at 8:24 am

The Federal government again botches an effort to hold banks to account for faulty mortgages and foreclosures. Read the whole mess here.

Excerpt:

Federal banking regulators are trumpeting an $8.5 billion settlement this week with 10 banks as quick justice for aggrieved homeowners, but the deal is actually a way to quietly paper over a deeply flawed review of foreclosed loans across America, according to current and former regulators and consultants.

To avoid criticism as the review stalled and consultants collected more than $1 billion in fees, the regulators, led by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, abandoned the effort after examining a sliver of nearly four million loans in foreclosure, the regulators and consultants said.

Because they have no idea how many borrowers were harmed, the regulators are spreading the cash payments over all 3.8 million borrowers — whether there was evidence of harm or not. As a result, many victims of foreclosure abuses like bungled loan modifications, deficient paperwork, excessive fees and wrongful evictions will most likely get less money.

The banks have been (and continue to be) given enormous aid (directly and indirectly) by the Federal government including the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, homeowners were lured into abusive mortgages and are facing abusive and destructive foreclosure actions. As usual, under both republican and democratic presidents recently, real aid flows to the wealthy.

As another example, consider the bank-favorable rules promulgated this week to regulate new mortgages.

An attack on locational privacy (updated)

Posted on by at 1:11 pm

The Obama administration’s Justice Department is arguing that American citizens have no right to keep their locations private. Law enforcement, it argues, is perfectly correct in seeking detailed locational histories of private cellphone locations, without any need for a warrant.

The Obama administration will tell federal judges in New Orleans today that warrantless tracking of the location of Americans’ mobile devices is perfectly legal.

Federal prosecutors are planning to argue that they should be able to obtain stored records revealing the minute-by-minute movements of mobile users over a 60-day period — in this case, T-Mobile and MetroPCS customers — without having to ask a judge to approve a warrant first.

The case highlights how valuable location data is for police, especially when it’s tied to devices that millions of people carry with them almost all the time. Records kept by wireless carriers can hint at or reveal medical treatments, political associations, religious convictions, and even whether someone is cheating on his or her spouse.

Cellphone location data is sufficient to track a person’s location and activities in extreme detail and certainly it is unreasonable to assume that citizens has no expectation that law enforcement can “follow them” without the minimum requirement of a warrant. Outrageous.

Update: Now this…

California Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed legislation that would have required the state’s authorities to get a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge to obtain location information from electronic devices such as tablets, mobile phones and laptops.

Political quote of the day 2

Posted on by at 9:06 am

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The Government has already exercised this broad, unimpeded discretionary power [to restrict access of counsel]; it informed petitioners’ counsel that ‘it anticipates limiting the number of attorneys who may have continued access to a detainee under the [Memorandum of Understanding] MOU to two and one translator… A document so one-sided that it gives one party the power to unilaterally modify its provisions renders any rights provided by such a document meaningless and illusory…

The Government wants to place itself as the sole arbiter of when a habeas petitioner is ‘seeking’ to challenge their own detention and when a habeas case is ‘impending,’ and thus when they can have access to counsel. But access to the Court means nothing without access to counsel. The MOU actually gives the Government final, unreviewable power to delay, hinder, or prevent access to the courts. Moreover, the Government actions thus far demonstrate that it cannot be trusted with such power.

– Judge Royce Lamberth, striking down the Obama Administration’s scheme to restrict access to counsel for prisoners at Guantánamo through a “memorandum of understanding” which habeas lawyers were being coerced to sign.

SOPA tweets of the day (updated)

Posted on by at 7:55 am
So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.-
January 14, 2012 6:42 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite
@rupertmurdoch
Rupert Murdoch
Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.
January 14, 2012 6:54 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite
@rupertmurdoch
Rupert Murdoch

In terms of lobbying money contributed to the SOPA/PIPA battle, the copyright owners have spent far more on lobbying than the tech industry.  News Corporation believes in strong copyright protection at all costs, but doesn’t feel that personal voice-mails are private.

In addition, the copyright owners are actively suppressing any discussion of these bills on their own media properties. For example, NBC News has had virtually no coverage of the bills but actively supports their enactment.

Update: Google’s official response to Murdoch’s claims:

This is just nonsense. Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads…We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day.

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Secret laws, secret memos

Posted on by at 6:20 am

Laws in the United States should not be secret. Laws should be subject to judicial review. Operational details of military actions need not be disclosed but the law and rules governing the military, the Department of Justice or any other part of the government should be publicly open.

Neither is occurring under Barack Obama, any more than under George W. Bush.

The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.

It is important to note that, not only is this memorandum kept secret, it wasn’t even completed until months after Obama had ordered al-Awlaki killed.

This isn’t American justice.

And the secrecy isn’t limited to international settings. From today’s Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Sonic said it fought the government’s order and lost, and was forced to turn over information. Challenging the order was “rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do,” said Sonic’s chief executive, Dane Jasper. The government’s request included the email addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two years, but not the full emails.

Both Google and Sonic pressed for the right to inform Mr. Appelbaum of the secret court orders, according to people familiar with the investigation. Google declined to comment. Mr. Appelbaum, 28 years old, hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing.

The court clashes in the WikiLeaks case provide a rare public window into the growing debate over a federal law that lets the government secretly obtain information from people’s email and cellphones without a search warrant. Several court decisions have questioned whether the law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

And note, that the government was seeking to forbid the ISP and Google from even telling the individual that the government was seeking his information. This is like something from the Soviet Union, not our “democracy.”  More the second story from Boing Boing.

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America assassinates its own citizens

Posted on by at 7:12 am

The United States says it has killed American-born Anwar al-Awlaki and another man, Samir Kahn, in Yemen. Both were American citizens.

These killings were not on any battlefield. In a face-to-face battle, the government clearly does not have to check IDs before shooting those on attack.  But painstakingly seeking out known citizens for killing via remote control would not be hampered by some type of basic due process hearing by outside the executive branch.

The standards applied the Obama Administration for determining whether this action was justified and legal have not been provided to the public, let alone reviewed by any court.  Nor have any facts regarding the actions of these two men been determined by any court. Secret laws and secret memos should not be part of US law. Shameful.

Glenn Greenwald reacts:

Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”  They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

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Only an expert

Posted on by at 5:39 pm

Laurie Anderson explains the (non-)solution to our problems: only an expert can do it. This is one song that addresses Oprah, Iraq, torture, and Wall Street financial crimes, while being kick-ass msuically.  The version below is live, but the version on the album, Homeland, is even more terrific.

The studio version is available on iTunes for those who like her work.

Chronicle of an assult on the Constitution

Posted on by at 9:54 am

It seems that whenever Americans feel insecure the first actions are to jettison long held Constitutional protections that were created only by revolution and bloodshed. The latest such action, of course, was what happened after the 9/11 attacks, 10 years ago next week.

David Shipler, writing in The American Prospect, outlines chapter and verse of this sad time for the US Constitution. The entire article is worth a read.  The litany of civil liberties abuses is long and should be sufficient to illuminate the very real risks to freedom that fear has generated even in the US.

Here is an excerpt:

… the Patriot Act of 2001 emasculated an array of privacy statutes that had been enacted in the last quarter of the 20th century. In 2008, Congress further amended one of those laws, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to legalize the extensive surveillance that Bush had clandestinely authorized during the weeks following the attacks. At the time, while legislators and civil-liberties groups were arguing over the Patriot Act’s changes to FISA, Bush was evading FISA by ordering the National Security Agency to monitor Internet and phone communications without judicial oversight. Bush’s program sparked outrage in Congress when The New York Times reported it in 2005, but in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, Congress “gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications” than the president had given himself, according to a joint report by the inspectors general of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice and Defense departments, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The inspectors general did not credit the program with many successes. While it “had value in some counterterrorism investigations,” they found, “it generally played a limited role in the FBI’s overall counterterrorism efforts.” Most officials interviewed for the report “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the monitoring had contributed to counterterrorism. A senior CIA official told the investigators that the surveillance “was rarely the sole basis for an intelligence success, but that it frequently played a supporting role.” Other CIA officials discounted the intelligence as “vague or without context.”

Safety’s threat to liberty

Posted on by at 5:21 pm

Read this. It provides a nice summary of the six times that Americans gutted their Constitution wrongfully. The first five largely have been corrected. The sixth time remains an open question.

Excerpt:

The Patriot Act, amending those privacy statutes, passed overwhelmingly with little debate six weeks after the attacks. It broadened FISA, which regulates domestic intelligence gathering through a secret court that issues clandestine warrants that don’t require probable cause and particularity, as the Fourth Amendment demands. The law originally authorized this shadow system exclusively to collect intelligence, but the Patriot Act frees investigators to use it for criminal cases as well.

Even that permissive FISA system wasn’t permissive enough for President Bush, who secretly ordered the NSA to intercept Americans’ communications by phone and Internet. The suspicionless sweeps, effectively legalized by Congress in 2008, continue.

Further, by expanding administrative subpoenas known as national security letters (NSLs), the Patriot Act shot holes through three laws that had guarded the privacy of Americans’ credit, banking and communications records. Without suspicion of a crime and with no judicial oversight, NSLs can now be issued by the head of any FBI field office to librarians, Internet providers and financial institutions, among others. Each of the 50,000 NSLs being served annually comes with a lifetime gag order.

One measure that could change the country if fully implemented is the executive branch’s power to subject civilians to military trial. Under the Military Commissions Act, passed in 2006 and revised in 2009, the president may unilaterally designate anyone an enemy combatant—even inside the United States—and try non-citizens before military officers, with no judicial involvement except on appeal. Applied only to Guantanamo detainees so far, this mechanism has no geographical restrictions. Nothing in the law prevents its employment in Alabama as well as Afghanistan.

These six deviations show that rights cannot rely on officials’ benevolence. They rely on an ingenious constitutional system that has pulled us back from our periodic wanderings. Let’s hope it does this time, and soon, before counterterrorism’s shortcuts through our rights become the new normal.

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Making unemployment worse

Posted on by at 7:06 am

 There is plenty of evidence, in fact, that the spending cuts already imposed by Republican intransigence are responsible for a great deal of joblessness. Although the private sector added 57,000 jobs in June, that tiny progress was reduced by the 39,000 jobs shed by federal, state and local governments, much of which came from education. As David Leonhardt noted in The Times on Friday, cutbacks in state and local spending have cost the economy about a million public-sector jobs over the last two years, in part because the federal stimulus program, bitterly opposed by Republicans, ended too soon.

That has led to the bizarre spectacle of Republicans condemning the crisis that they helped to create and are refusing to fix. Speaker John Boehner said the poor job numbers were actually the result of the stimulus, regulations and the debt. Mr. Romney, who has been waffling over whether Mr. Obama has made the economy worse or has failed to make it better, chose to say on Friday that the White House was indifferent to high unemployment.

* * *

There is still time for the president to insist that the debt talks include a substantial program to put people to work now, while reducing the deficit over a longer period. To do otherwise is to ignore Friday’s ugly reality.

– New York Times editorial

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New info on pornoscanners

Posted on by at 7:36 am

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a law suit challenging the safety of the x-ray pornoscanners at airport security checkpoints. They have also file numerous Freedom of Information Act requests seeking DHS and TSA documents relating thereto.

Now they have discovered this:

Another document indicates that the DHS mischaracterized the findings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, stating that NIST “affirmed the safety” of full body scanners. The documents obtained by EPIC reveal that NIST disputed that characterization and stated that the Institute did not, in fact, test the devices. Also, a Johns Hopkins University study revealed that radiation zones around body scanners could exceed the “General Public Dose Limit.”

So NIST has some doubts about the “safety” of the devices. That makes me feel a lot better.

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