No Trial Assassination of Americans Abroad

Allegedly the U.S. has created an illegal “hit list” of  Fellow Americans abroad marked for murder.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a House Intelligence Committee hearing February 3rd the U.S. may, with executive approval, target and kill American terrorist suspects, Inter Press News Service of Rome reported. ”We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community,” he said.

Blair’s statement recalls the policies of Soviet Russia’s secret police, who often murdered those who fled Stalin’s tyranny. Red Army founder Leon Trotsky, for example, was tracked to Mexico by a Soviet agent who killed him with an ice pick.

Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said, ”It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified ‘threat.’”

Blair’s remarks followed a Washington Post article reporting President Barack Obama had embraced President George W. Bush’s policy of authorizing the killing of U.S. citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.

The Post reported: “After the Sep. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for example, has to pose ‘a continuing and imminent threat’ to U.S. persons and interests.”

Attorney George Brent Mickum, an American lawyer who has defended a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, told Inter Press, ”I guess my sense is that it’s just more fear mongering. They kill somebody and don’t need to offer any justification.”

”We have killed thousands of innocent civilians while attempting to target alleged operatives,” Mickum said. “And let us not forget how frequently our intelligence has been wrong about alleged operatives,” he added.

“My clients Bisher al Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, abu Zubaydah, and Shaker Aamer all are alleged to have been operatives based on intel. In every case that intel was incorrect,” Mickum told Inter Press. “I don’t have any expectation that our intel with respect to alleged American operatives is likely to be any better.”

“This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949,” said Francis Boyle, University of Illinois professor of international law at Champaign.

“In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Boyle said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad  akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships  during their so-called ‘dirty wars.’”

He claimed President Bush “reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a ‘dirty war’ around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.  It is only a matter of time before the United States government will establish a similar ‘death list’ targeting U.S. citizens living here at home.” He added that, “As someone who used to teach Constitutional law, President Obama knows better.”

Boyle, a leading U.S. authority in international law, drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 for the U.S. He is the author of a number of books in his field, including “Destroying World Order”(Clarity).

Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First, told Inter Press, ”The short answer is that combatants can be targeted and civilians cannot under international law. Their citizenship isn’t relevant. But just being a ’suspected terrorist’ doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a combatant.”

She added, ”The key question, and where there may be serious disagreement, is whether the person targeted is ‘directly participating in hostilities’. If not, and they’re targeted, it’s a war crime.”

Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee, told Inter Press, ”As with its embrace of the [George W.] Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration’s even greater reliance on targeted extra-judicial killing – including of U.S. citizens – is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake.”

”Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty,” Pitts continued, “this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.”

In his testimony before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Blair said, ”We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community,” Inter Press reported. He said U.S. counterterrorism officials may try to kill U.S. citizens involved in extremist groups overseas with ”specific permission” from higher up.

In response to questions from the panel’s top Republican, Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Blair said, if ”we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Safe Schools Czar: Qestionable Connections

A Marxist atheist trained in materialism, Harry Hay tried to find spirituality in his own confused sexual identity, eventually developing the idea that he was a “Radical Faerie” who had male and female traits.

Kevin Jennings

A communist, he was also a supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).    The Obama administration’s ’safe schools czar’ Kevin Jennings says that Hay inspired him, and the Jennings-founded group, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) has promoted favorable material about Hay, the acknowledged founder of the modern “gay rights” movement, without offering any criticism or even acknowledgement of his defense of adult-child sex.

But Hay’s leading role in the “Radical Faerie” movement may be even more controversial than his communist views and pro-NAMBLA activities.

Hay in 1979 issued a call for a “Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries” that included a poem from the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Stuart Timmons, author of The Trouble With Harry Hay, documents Hay’s involvement with Crowley, noting that Hay played the organ for the Los Angeles lodge of Crowley’s Order of the Eastern Temple, a “notorious anti-Christian spiritual group” where “homosexual sex-magic rituals” took place.

Crowley, who regarded himself as the “Beast 666,” the anti-Christ, and the incarnation of Satan, also organized in such cities as London and Paris, where he developed a relationship with New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, as recounted in S.J. Taylor’s book, Stalin’s Apologist. Taylor says that Crowley staged homosexual rituals with Duranty in which they chanted “blood and semen.”

Like Hay, Duranty had a major impact on history. As the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times after the communist revolution, he helped cover up Stalin’s crimes. Hay was a Stalinist himself and stayed in the Communist Party even after the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Hay’s confusion about his own sexual identity, including the belief that he somehow benefitted from being preyed upon by homosexual predators, is something that should be pitied. But it has been elevated by the “homosexual community” into another “right” to be guaranteed by government. That is why the modern-day “gay rights” movement celebrates bisexuality, cross-dressing, and “transgender” lifestyles. It has now become known as the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) “community.” … Continue Reading

Seven CIA Operatives Killed in Afghanistan

Barack Obama was accused of double standards yesterday in his treatment of the CIA.

The President paid tribute to secret agents after seven of them were killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.

In a statement, he said the CIA had been ‘tested as never before’ and that agents had ‘served on the front lines in directly confronting the dangers of the 21st century’.

He lauded the victims as ‘part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens and for our way of life’.

Yet the previous day he had blasted ‘systemic failures’ in the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to prevent the Christmas Day syringe bomb attack.

‘One day the President is pointing the finger and blaming the intelligence services, saying there is a systemic failure,’ said one agency official. ‘Now we are heroes. The fact is that we are doing everything humanly possible to stay on top of the security situation. The deaths of our operatives shows just how involved we are on the ground.’

But CIA bosses claim they were unfairly blamed at a time the covert government agency has been stretched further than ever before in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They point to the murder of seven operatives at a remote mountain base in Afghanistan’s Khost Province as an example of how agents are putting their lives on the line at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.

The agents – including the chief of the base, a mother-of-three – were collecting information about militants when the suicide bomber struck on Wednesday.

The attack was the deadliest single day for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut.

The base targetted by Wednesday’s suicide bomber was a control centre for a covert programme overseeing strikes by remote-controlled aircraft along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

‘Those who fell were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism. We owe them our deepest gratitude,’ CIA Director Leon Panetta said.

Some CIA officials are angry at being criticised by the White House after Abdulmutallab, 23, was allowed to slip through the security net and board a US-bound flight in Amsterdam despite evidence he was a terror threat.

The president complained that a warning from the former London engineering student’s father and information about an al Qaeda bomb plot involving a Nigerian were not handled properly by the intelligence networks.

But CIA officials say the data was sent to the US National Counterterrorism Centre in Washington, which was set up after the 9/11 attacks as a clearing house where raw data should be analysed.

Agents claim that is where the dots should have been connected to help identify Abdulmutallab as a threat.

China Ready to Execute Brit

Two cousins of a British man facing execution in China have arrived in the country to make a last-ditch appeal to authorities for mercy.

Akmal Shaikh, 53, from London, is due to be executed on 29 December after he was convicted of smuggling heroin.

But relatives Soohail and Nasir Shaikh plan to deliver a plea on his behalf to President Hu Jintao.

Mr Shaikh’s supporters say he is mentally ill and Gordon Brown has asked Chinese authorities for clemency.

British consular staff have also flown to the Chinese region of Xinjiang to see the condemned Briton and discuss his case with local officials.

No contact

Legal charity Reprieve, which has taken up the case, said Mr Shaikh’s cousins left the UK on Saturday.

They intend to deliver petitions seeking a legal review to China’s Supreme People’s Court and to the local court in the north-western city of Urumqi where Mr Shaikh was arrested in September 2007.

Reprieve said the men, who are brothers, also planned to appeal to China’s president and to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, which is responsible for considering petitions for pardon or clemency.

Mr Shaikh has had no contact with his family for two years, but the cousins hope they may be granted a prison visit with him.

The Briton has denied all knowledge of the 4kg of heroin found in his possession.

His family say he has bipolar disorder and was duped by a criminal gang into unwittingly carrying drugs for them.

The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville said Mr Shaikh’s relatives want to explain that he had “suffered from long-term mental illness” and travelled to China to pursue a “fantasy” belief in a possible career as a pop star.

“They believe he was not responsible for himself and certainly not responsible for drug trafficking,” said our correspondent.

He added that the situation was getting “very desperate” for the Briton because the Chinese authorities do not have a reputation for leniency.

‘Compassionate approach’

Soohail Shaikh says in his petition: “We plead for his life, asking that a full mental health evaluation be conducted to assess the impact of his mental illness, and that recognition be made that he is not as culpable as those who might, under Chinese law, be eligible for the death penalty.”

Reprieve’s director Clive Stafford Smith said the Chinese Embassy authorities had been “kind” and opened on Boxing Day to facilitate a visa for this visit, “recognising the devastating blow that this execution date has inflicted on the entire family”.

“We very much hope that this compassionate approach continues to the point of granting Akmal a reprieve,” he said.

So far China has resisted calls to stop the execution, despite the case being raised by the UK 10 times during the last six months at senior diplomatic levels.

The prime minister has also written to China’s leaders to express his dismay after Mr Shaikh’s sentence was upheld by the Supreme People’s Court.

If the sentence is carried out, it would be the first time an EU national has been executed in China for 50 years.

Interpol gets Diplomatic Immunity

President Obama has issued an amendment to Executive Order 12425,  designating the international law enforcement agency Interpol as a “public international organization,” thus extending diplomatic immunity to the law enforcement group.

The amendment to the Executive Order — which does not need to be put to the senatorial test of “advise and consent” — reads:

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words “except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act” and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.”

The text of Section 2(c), which now applies to Interpol states:

“(c) Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity be expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.”

Because of this move by the Obama Administration any and all Interpol offices in the United States cannot be searched due to its status as a diplomatically protected organization. It’s offices are considered sovereign and its files are not subject to legal request, be it by subpoena or discovery.

The website ObamaFile.com notes, “If any branch of government wants to keep documents out of the hands of the US court system, just hand them over to Interpol until the smoke clears.” It added that Interpol can maintain files on US citizens.

Diplomatic immunity, usually reserved for those who work at diplomatic missions throughout the United States, exempts persons and offices directly connected to foreign governments from being subject to search and seizure by law enforcement. It exempts said entities from US taxes and extends this protection to immunity from FOIA requests.

The amendment to Executive Order 12425, signed by Obama on December 17, 2009, declared Interpol records immune from search and seizure, “The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.”

By virtue of this declaration, any information that Interpol may have on political operatives or elected officials in the US — including SEIU president Andy Stern, domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and President Obama himself — would be immune from any attempts to bring the information to light.