CINCINNATI – Neither the DNC, the RNC, or other anti-civil liberties groups blinked when the President yesterday, falsely stated to an Ohio reporter that he — the President — had “never confirmed” news reports of Anwar Awlaki’s death.

THE TIMELINE

• April 14, 1865: Abraham Lincoln becomes the first President of the United States to be assassinated by an American citizen.

• September 11, 2001 (morning): Planes fly into the World Trade Center & The Pentagon

• September 11, 2001 (afternoon): Congress sings “God Bless America.”

• September 14, 2001: By a joint resolution vote of 518-1, your representatives pass Public Law 107-40 (Authorization To Use Military Force-VIDEO) which authorizes the individual who happens to be President to kill citizens of the United States.

• September 18, 2001: President Bush signs the bill into law.

• September 20, 2011: Anwar al-Awlaki becomes the first citizen of the United States to be assassinated by a President of the United States.

• October 15, 2001: Abdulrahman Awlaki — 16, from Denver, accused of nothing — becomes the second citizen of the United States to be assassinated by a President of the United States.

• October 25, 2011: The President of the United States goes on the Tonight Show, where he brags about the father, doesn’t mention the son, and — needless to say — Leno doesn’t ask.

JAY LENO: Can I ask you about taking out their top leadership, al-Awlaki, this guy, American-born terrorist? How important was he to al Qaeda?
THE PRESIDENT: We put so much pressure on al Qaeda in the Afghan/Pakistan region that their affiliates were actually becoming more of a threat to the United States. Awlaki was their head of external operations….we were able to remove him from the field. [VIDEO BELOW]

August 7, 2012 (yesterday): While campaigning in Ohio — a major league swing state — a local reporter asks the President about targeting citizens for death without trial. The President denies that he has ever publicly confirmed such prior assassinations.

BEN SWANN: The so-called presidential kill list that’s gotten a lot of attention — this list of folks who have been targeted for assassination — and on that list have been U.S. citizens who have not been afforded trial, including Anwar al-Awlaki. How do you, as President, or any president for that matter, regardless of party or person, utilize that power to assassinate even U.S. citizens?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, you’re basing this on reports in the news that have never been confirmed by me.

In June, Scott Pelley interviewed Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, who — echoing the plain language of the law — confirmed that it is the President who determines which citizens get a judge and jury and which citizens get a Hellfire Missile fired from a flying robot.

The clip (below) includes (i) the President under questioning yesterday in Ohio, (ii) the Secretary of Defense under questioning on 60 Minutes, and (iii) White House Secretary Jay Carney, under questioning by Jake Tapper of ABC News.

As I wrote yesterday, the foregoing law creates a conflict with the international law of war that caused the President to deploy Secretary of State Legal Advisor, Harold Koh to Uganda in June 1010, where Koh cajoled the International Criminal Court community into foregoing the adoption of a new crime called “act of aggression,” until January 2017 — the same month the President retires from politics.

As you watch these videos keep in mind that at the time of their incineration, neither Awlaki was on any battlefield, there was no imminent threat, and neither had been accused of killing anyone.

Young Awlaki has never been accused of anything.

The Supreme Court long ago ruled that citizens do not check their constitutional rights are the border. Period.

“At the beginning we reject the idea that when the United States acts against citizens abroad it can do so free of the Bill of Rights. The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution.3 Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution.4 When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land. This is not a novel concept. To the contrary, it is as old as government.” Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957)

The night Osama Bin Laden was killed, the President of the United States took to the airwaves:

“After a firefight, they killed Osama Bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

On May 8, 2011, less than a week later, Senator John Kerry, reigning Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, told Bob Schieffer:

“We need to shut up and move on about you know, the realities of what happened in that building.”

The next day, Navy Admiral Mike Mullen told Tom Brokaw:

“The silent special operations warriors also would like to fade back into the shadows and I hope that we can let them do that.”

In January’s State of the Union Address, the President said:

“All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves.”

At a Monday campaign rally in Detroit, Joe Biden said:

“Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

“Bin Laden is dead.” End of story. The official version? “Firefight.”

But, now we have an unofficial version — “No Firefight” — provided by Mark Bissonnette, the retired SEAL, turned best-selling, somewhat author of “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account Of The Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden.”

What makes Bissonnette inconvenient is not that he was there. It is that Presidents — all Presidents — use the Bissonnettes of the world for political gain. They exploit soldiers with impunity, tacitly encouraging you to cower behind the military, thereby avoiding certain death at the hands of the enemy du jour.

In his State of the Union Address the President said:

“One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL Team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden.  On it are each of their names.”

Bissonnette hesitated when signing his name to that flag. His book expands the narrative to 2010 legal maneuverings implicating war crimes; maneuverings that this administration would rather not talk about, especially now.

The question of whether or not there was a firefight implicates law of war issues surrounding the definition of “imminent threat” and “hot battlefield.” The New York Times has already noted that Bissonnette’s book raises “questions about whether the leader of Al Qaeda posed a clear threat to the commandos who fired on him.”

This isn’t what you want two months before an election when you happen to be the first president to target your fellow citizens for death by robot.

Bill Of Rights Goods

Barack Obama is the United States’ first President and General Counsel, and his administration (perhaps more than any other) is operated by “great lawyers,” such as Attorney General Eric Holder, excerpted in the following clip from a speech he gave in March, at Northwestern University School of Law.

What the attorney general is saying is that on the one hand, he has the Bill of Rights which compels him to give you a judge and jury if he accuses you. On the other hand, if he doesn’t accuse you, the only thing he owes you is a missile.

The Director of the FBI says it better than I ever could.

I personally experienced similar sophistry last year, when I unwittingly became the only citizen to sue the United States for the purpose of ending the unconstitutional deployment of U.S. Armed Forces in the Libyan Civil War. The President’s defense in court and official statements was that Libya was not a war. Why? Because the 9,600 humanitarian missiles the President used to bomb that nation’s Down’s Syndrome Center For Children, and otherwise, were delivered by flying robots.

Too poor to shoot back? Not a war.

All presidents endeavor to control the narrative. This President redefines words that have plain meaning; terms like “battlefield,” “imminent threat,” and “war.” In September, the President flung open the trap door to the Whitehouse basement, thereby unleashing former Bush CIA Director John Brennan, on a fawning gathering at Harvard Law.

“The traditional conception of what constitutes an ‘imminent’ attack should be broadened in light of the modern-day capabilities, techniques, and technological innovations of terrorist organizations.”

“Broaden” means “imminent” means whatever we say it means. They’ve already broadened “battlefield” to mean “wherever the missile lands.”

Conflating The Enemy

On August 7, Benjamin Torrance, the President’s defense lawyer, engaged in the following exchange with a Federal judge in the matter of Hedges v. Obama:

THE COURT: Are you aware of any provision, constitutionally, which allows for the incarceration of an American citizen without trial?
MR. TORRANCE: It depends on what incarceration means.

Torrance, on at least three occasions, also cited Nazi Germany as policy-making precedent for contending with the conflated threat posed by an irregular militia comprised primarily of individuals who train on monkey bars, and who are apparently so few in number that they are incapable of even starting a forest fire in a nation plagued by drought.

Sunday night Bissonnette is going to make the following public statement to 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley:

“We’re not there to assassinate somebody. We weren’t sent in to murder him. This was, ‘Hey, kill or capture.'”

In other words, Bin Laden — who brazenly boasted of slaughtering 3,000 innocent civilians — received better treatment than, Anwar Awlaki (a U.S. citizen accused of killing no one), who on September 30, 2011, was targeted for death by drone, while traveling through a desert.

Stated differently, there was no hot battlefield as required by the law of war, and the Bill of Rights — which applies globally — was ignored.

Two weeks later the President killed Awlaki’s 16 year old son, Abdulrahman, who was born in Denver in 1995. The locals say the boy was attending a barbeque when the President fried his ass. Ten days later the President went on Leno, where he bragged about the father, didn’t mention the son and — needless to say — Leno didn’t ask.

The official version is that Abdulrahman’s death was accidental. But, twenty-four million people live in Yemen. A cynic might say that dead men tell no lies and dead sons reveal no truths. Perhaps a cynic just did.

“’Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,’ said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee. ‘They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.’”

Chambliss, together with 92 of his senate colleagues, recently voted to authorize the President to perpetually detain U.S. citizens without trial, as the United States does with 14 dozen Muslims in Cuba; half of whom have been ordered freed by Federal judges, yet there they sit.

AGGRESSIVE WAR

In April, Charles Taylor, became the first head of state since Nuremberg to be convicted of war crimes, prompting this remark from Taylor’s former prosecutor, David Crane.

“This is a bell that has been rung and clearly rings throughout the world. If you are a head of state and you are killing your own people you could be next.”

On leave from Yale Law School, Dr. Harold Koh is the legal advisor at the State Department. He is in charge of 175 lawyers. He answers to (“extraordinary clients”) such as the President (“an outstanding lawyer”) and the Secretary of State (“a remarkably able lawyer”).

In March 2010, Dr.Koh delivered the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law. Here’s the money quote:

“The President is actively looking at ways to assist the International Criminal Court with the definition of the crime of aggression. He has a number of serious concerns that keep me up at night.”

Three months later, Dr. Koh traveled to Kampala — the capital of Uganda — to attend a conference attended by members of the International Criminal Court.  The ICC was considering adopting a crime called: Act of Aggression — which, by definition, includes targeting individuals for death by robot.

On Wednesday, June 16th 2010, Dr. Koh reported back to his colleagues at the ASIL.

“We ensure total protection for U.S. armed forces and other nationals going forward. The net result is that the crime of aggression was put on the back burner until January 2017. I think the chance of a prosecution of U.S. officials is zero at this point.”

In the two years since the elimination of consequences for U.S. officials, drone strikes in Yemen have increased by 550% and Al Qaeda has morphed from a group of 100 thugs, to a militia of 1,000 individuals with a non-idealogical reason to attack the United States — revenge.

The “back burner” date of 2017 applies globally, thereby making the world less safe for the one billion individuals who do not have enough to eat, and find themselves waiting for Bill Gates to arrive with a misquito net. Is there any end to the suffering the United States is willing to impose on the world, under the guise of so-called “counterterrorism?”

A Lot Can Happen In A Decade

1860 – the year Lincoln was elected, some men were considered property. Ten years later those same men could vote. On September 10, 2001, the United States was still known as the nation of Nuremberg – the prosecutor of war crimes. A decade later it proudly seeks permission to commit them, and the party faithful cheer.

We’re meant to be citizens – not press secretaries. And yet, since September 11, 2001, whenever it is revealed that officialdom has engaged in evil, the narrative immediately pivots to how the information came to be known by citizens.

In my small book, the Post 9-11 Executive Summary goes something like this:

• Two Harvard educated presidents.

• One clumsy. One sophisticated.

• One unilateral. One bilateral.

• The clumsy one defined in part by torture. The sophisticated one now defined in part by the murder of his fellow citizens.

• The clumsy one thumbed his nose at the International Criminal Court. The sophisticated one — together with some of the finest legal minds on the planet — read the 59 word Authorization To Use Military Force, signed into law by President Bush on September 18, 2001, and determined that the only way the President could zap his fellow citizens with missiles (without having to worry about sharing a cell with Chuck Taylor) was to obtain constructive immunity from prosecution until he retires from politics in January 2017.

The White House wants you to believe that Bin Laden was armed, because it wants you to believe the United States is not a bully. This is the hornet’s nest Bissonnette has — I suspect unwittingly — stirred up. This is why Bissonnette has already received threatening letters from Jeh Johnson, a devoted Obama acolyte and fellow Columbia alumus, who also happens to be general counsel for the Department of Defense.

Matt Bissonnette is well represented. Here’s hoping he doesn’t get Assanged.

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END NOTE: Today’s post is brought to you by William Kunstler; attorney to Martin Luther King and Daniel Ellsberg.