Rule of Law

Consider what David Swanson wrote:

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President Obama has ordered the murder of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Like the innocent but tortured Abu Zubayda (innocent at least of any of the crimes he was accused of), Awlaki is now the mastermind terrorist of the universe. And once he's dead, who's to say he wasn't? Who can demand a trail or access to documents? He'll be dead. See the beauty of it?

When the government makes an exception to the rule of law, then there is no law, because now anything is possible. And certainly foregoing any of the legal “niceties” for a particular case is making an exception I would say.

One might be tempted to believe that as the U.S. moves closer and closer to that ideal police state, so beloved of the corporate world, that the rule of law becomes stronger but what really is happening is your rights as a human being are evaporating. After all, if the president declares your death sentence without an accusation, no reading of your rights, no lawyer, no trial, what rights do you have remaining? The answer is none of course.

Using their wartime powers presidents have usurped civil law all through recent history. In other words, as they claim more power under the umbrella of war our rights diminish. When President Nixon stepped down from the office in order to avoid impeachment a lot of people at the time thought that Nixon had seriously damaged the office of the president, in fact weakening it, if only that had been true. Or, if it had been true the effects were ephemeral for certainly the power of the president has grown since those days under Nixon culminating today in the form of Obama who rather than dispensing with the expanded powers of the president he inherited from Bush is now expanding them further which is being ignored for the most part.

For example there is the drone war being conducted by the CIA under orders from President Obama. The CIA is the personal and private army of whoever is president. In this case the use of drones by the CIA in places like Pakistan was initiated by President George W. Bush and is now being expanded by Obama. Thus the powers of the president grow with each successor and the rule of law becomes expendable and diminishes.

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The U.S. government runs two drone programs. The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of U.S. troops stationed there. As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare. The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops are not based. It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel. The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.

Murder is nothing new in the history of the U.S. who has assassinated foreign leaders with impunity not to mention the victims of Obama’s drone war in Pakistan where targets are chosen from highly questionable sources accompanied by highly questionable results, mostly the deaths of innocent villagers or farmers. What is, among other things, disturbing from the above quote is the secrecy that accompanies this, for lack of a better term, murder incorporated. And now this same den of killers are being aimed at Americans, which is not to say that it is any more horrific than targeting the people of Pakistan, but that Americans no longer have any rights what-so-ever as long as Obama, or any president, reserves the right to murder anyone on his say-so alone. We have reached the point where the rule of law no longer exists.