Salon.com > Anwar al-Awlaki

Government can keep legal justification for drone strikes secret

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:20:00 +0000

The Obama administration does not, under law, have to provide legal justification for its targeting killings to the public, a federal judge ruled today. U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan said the government did not violate the law by refusing the New York Times' FOIA requests for such information.

As Reuters noted, however, "McMahon appeared reluctant to rule as she did, noting in her decision that disclosure could help the public understand the 'vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise in which we have been engaged for well over a decade, at great cost in lives, treasure, and (at least in the minds of some) personal liberty.'"

Richard Cohen suddenly worried about scope of presidential anti-terror powers

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:41:00 +0000

Richard Cohen, the universe's worst opinion columnist, has rather belatedly and unexpectedly grown alarmed at the size and scope of the expensive, unaccountable death machine that is our counter-terror state. Don't get alarmed -- he's still no bleeding-heart anti-American hippie crying about the "rights" of terrorists who hate us and want to destroy us for our freedom -- but the idea that an American citizen's death warrant can be secretly signed by a couple of Justice Department lawyers seems to have shaken Cohen out of his 40-year fog of elite Beltway complacency. Sort of.

This is a big leap for Richard Cohen, a writer who hates democracy and defended Dick Cheney's torture regime as recently as 2009. (2009!)

So he begins by pointing out that he cheered the death of Anwar al-Awlaki:

Execution by secret WH committee

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:07:00 +0000

(updated below)

Here is what the Democratic President has created and implemented, and what many party loyalists explicitly endorse (when there's a Democrat in the White House) -- from Reuters: