ACLU to Obama: No, You Can't Just Murder an American Overseas

Responding to news reporting, civil liberty group say White House "killing program has gone far beyond what the law permits"

-Jon Queally, staff writer

Published on Monday, February 10, 2014 by Common Dreams

An Associated Press story published Monday cites unnamed U.S. government officials saying the Obama administration is considering its options for assassinating an American citizen it accuses of being involved in terrorism.

According to AP, "one U.S. official said the Defense Department was divided over whether the man"--said to be affiliated with Al-Qaida and engaged in alleged terrorist plots--"is dangerous enough to merit the potential domestic fallout of killing an American without charging him with a crime or trying him." However, the report continues: "the Pentagon did ultimately decide to recommend lethal action."

But the ACLU, which is fighting an ongoing legal battle with the White House over the CIA and Pentagon's use of drones and Obama's secretive assassination program, responded to the leaked details of the internal deliberations by issuing a serious warning against an attempted assassination.

“The government’s killing program has gone far beyond what the law permits, and it is based on secret evidence and legal interpretations," said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. "The targeted killing of an American being considered right now shows the inherent danger of a killing program based on vague and shifting legal standards, which has made it disturbingly easy for the government to operate outside the law."

According to the ACLU and other critics, Obama's targeted killing program operates with virtually no oversight outside the executive branch. Though the "leaks" given to AP appear to be designed to show that the White House is having serious internal legal deliberations, those opposed to the targeting killing argue that the Obama administration, even with increased transparency, could not possibly justify a program in which due process is withheld from those facing an extrajudicial death sentence.

"Outside of armed conflict zones," according to the ACLU, "the Constitution and international law prohibit the use of lethal force unless it is used as a last resort against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of grave harm. Even in the context of an armed conflict against an armed group, the government may use lethal force only against individuals who are directly participating in hostilities against the United States."

Moreover, citing new reporting by Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald about the unreliable way in which the U.S. military creates an intelligence framework for targeting individuals for drone attacks, Shamsi says the revelations show why no president--current or future--should be entrusted with this kind of lethal authority.

"The fact that the government is relying so heavily on limited and apparently unreliable intelligence only heightens our concerns about a disastrous program in which people have been wrongly killed and injured," she said. "Today's revelations come as the administration continues to fight against even basic transparency about the thousands of people who have died in this lethal program, let alone accountability for the wrongful killings of U.S. citizens.”

Please go here for the original article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/02/10-3

Krishna Das: The Light Inside

The light inside, the Love inside of us, is always present.
It can't be anywhere else.
God lives inside us as who we really are.
Not as "God: Some other thing".
As who we are.

~ Krishna Das 

(from "Chants of a Lifetime")

Judith Duerk: Long Before the Patriarchal Period

Long before the patriarchal period, in many places on earth, the Goddess was worshiped. Woman in the train of history has been orphaned by the death of the Great Mother, has suffered loss of connection to her own beingness, lack of sense of legitimacy and belonging in the universe or in her own individual life. Woman can draw comfort from an image of the Great Mother reaching  out to her to fulfill and to bring to manifest form in her own individual life that of the Archetypal Eternal Feminine. Woman, with the help of the Great Mother, can leave the collective way to find her own individual way, for somewhere deep inside she knows she must leave to become herself.

- Judith Duerk, from Circle of Stones:

Woman's Journey to Herself

Stuart Wilde: I Am What I Am

I am what I am.
In having faith in the beauty within me, I develop trust.
In softness I have strength.
In silence I walk with the gods.
In peace I understand myself and the world.
In conflict I walk away.
In detachment I am free.
In respecting all living things , I respect myself.
In dedication I honor the courage within me.
In eternity I have compassion for the nature of all things.
In love I unconditionally accept the evolution of others.
There is freedom and power in my individuality. 
In service I give of what I have become.
I am what I am, Eternal, universal, and infinite.

~ Stuart Wilde

from Heart of the Islands Satsang

Chief Dan George: May the Flowers Fill Your Heart With Beauty

May the stars carry your sadness away,
May the flowers fill your heart with beauty,
May hope forever wipe away your tears,
And, above all, may silence make you strong.

~ Chief Dan George

The Intercept: The Terrible Toll of Secrecy

 Please help spread the word about The Intercept:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/

 Thank you. - Molly

*****

By Dan Froomkin

President Barack Obama walking out of the Oval Office of the White House. (AP File Photo/ Evan Vucci)

The Intercept’s inaugural exposé, by my colleagues Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, illuminates the deeply flawed interaction between omnipresent electronic surveillance and targeted drone killings –- two of the three new, highly disruptive instruments of national power that President Obama has pursued with unanticipated enthusiasm.

All three (the third being cyberwar) have a lot in common. Despite their staggering implications, Obama has proceeded to establish the rules for them unilaterally, almost entirely in secret, based on dubious legal arguments, largely unchecked by judicial or congressional oversight, and with a seemingly unshakeable yet remarkably unfounded faith in their value.

But one of the many major takeaways from the eight-month-and-counting exploration of the  trove of secret NSA documents Edward Snowden gave journalists is that what may seem like good ideas within the confines of a like-minded military-intelligence establishment look very different when exposed to overdue public scrutiny.

Only then do you find out they don’t work so well. Or that they aren’t really legal, or constitutional. Or that they do more harm than good.  Or that the government relies on them too much, at the expense of things that might actually work.

History has shown time and again that secrecy and bad decisions go hand in hand.

So the fact that two new, secret U.S. government war-making abilities when used in tandem have particularly disastrous consequences for innocent civilians is newsworthy – but unfortunately not that surprising.

Because of the Obama administration’s refusal to disclose its selection or targeting criteria in any detail, it’s impossible to determine with any confidence which or how many of the civilian massacres by drone were the product of an overreliance on SIGINT rather than, say, a HUMINT asset settling a personal score or a government official eliminating possible rivals, or just plain user error.

But it’s probably more than the Obama administration would like you to think. The White House’s record of truth-telling when it comes to drone warfare is appalling. Years of administration arguments that civilian casualties in drone attacks have been inconsequential have proven again and again to be specious. Before Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s March 2013 assurance to Congress that the government wasn’t collecting data on Americans in bulk, the administration’s single biggest whopper might have been White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan’s assertion in June 2011 that over the previous year there had not been a single collateral death from drone strikes.

Exhaustive independent studies by the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal have documented that civilian casualties are endemic – the latest count is at least 440 since the drone campaigns began, according to the BIJ.

And countless journalistic accounts have described how the strikes are counterproductive, increasing civilians’ sympathy for al Qaeda and its allies in Yemen today as in Pakistan and Afghanstan before, and as in Somalia next.

Obama himself is hardly unaware of the dreadful downside of errant drone strikes. As Daniel Klaidman reported in his book, “Kill or Capture,” Obama authorized his very first drone strike on the third full day of his presidency, after having been assured by then-CIA director Michael Hayden that the targets were high-level al Qaeda and Taliban commanders. The Hellfire missile he sent into a compound in Pakistan instead killed a prominent pro-government tribal elder and four members of his family, including two children.

Klaidman wrote that Obama was “understandably disturbed” when he found out what happened, and insisted on some procedural changes. But civilian casualties continued. And each time, Obama evidently convinced himself that it wouldn’t happen again.

His most recent public assurance came in an October 2013 speech to the United Nations, where he announced that he had “limited the use of drones so they target only those who pose a continuing, imminent threat to the United States where capture is not feasible, and there is a near certainty of no civilian casualties.”

Less than two months later, missiles fired by a U.S. drone killed 13 people in a convoy of vehicles headed to a wedding party in Yemen.

How Obama’s faith in his military and intelligence leaders was restored or remained unflagging after all these incidents, despite the skepticism that he so clearly displayed during his first presidential campaign, is surely one of the great mysteries facing his supporters today, and historians tomorrow.

The spirited and informed public debate we need to have over these new ways of war has been stifled by the Obama administration, which has not only made a mockery of its promises of transparency, but has set new records in terms of its hostility toward journalistic leaks.

Congress, meanwhile, has shirked its oversight duties, in an unholy alliance of complicit leaders, happy campaign contributors, Republican ultra-hawks and partisan Democrats who don’t want to attack their president, even when he has enshrined precisely the kind of radical militaristic and anti-civil libertarian policies they convinced themselves during the Bush years were temporary aberrations.

And the elite Washington press corps, not yet recovered from its abdication of adversarial journalism after 9/11, has done an astonishingly poor job of raising and pressing important questions.

Where does that leave us?

Here. In a place and time where the only way to have the debate the country so desperately needs is for whistleblowers to speak up, and for independent journalists to make sure that they are heard.

This article can be found here:  https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/11/terrible-toll-secrecy/

Democracy NOW!: Defying Threats to Journalism, Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Launch New Venture, The Intercept

As many have said, investigative journalism has been on life support for a long time - and, in the developed world, especially here in America. When I heard this interview on Democracy NOW! this past week, I was filled with gratitude and passionate applause for Jeremy Scahill and Glen Greenwald and for all those who, even at great risk to themselves, continue to fiercely stand up to the great powers who fight relentlessly to silence the truth. Blessed are all the truth tellers! May their courage, integrity, passion, and great caring for truth, justice, and a higher good inspire us all. - Molly

**********

Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill

Amy Goodman: Investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald join us for their first interview upon launching The Intercept, their new digital magazine published by First Look Media, the newly formed media venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden’s disclosures on the National Security Agency. He was previously a columnist at The Guardian newspaper. Scahill is producer and writer of the documentary film "Dirty Wars," which is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. "We are really about a journalistic ethos — which is not doing things like helping the U.S. continue its targeting of U.S. citizens for death, but by being adversarial to the government," Greenwald says. "Telling the public what it ought to know, and targeting the most powerful corporate factions with accountability journalism." Greenwald and Scahill founded TheIntercept.org with filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Please go here for the full transcript and video interview: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/10/defying_threats_to_journalism_jeremy_scahill 

 ******************

 With Jeremy Scahill in Portland

Judith Duerk: What If Someone Had Helped You to Own All of This...

      How might it have been different for you, if, early in your life, the first time you as a tiny child felt your anger coming together inside yourself, someone, a parent or grandparent, or older sister or brother, had said, "Bravo! Yes, that's it! You're feeling it!"

      If, the first time you had experienced that sharp awareness of ego, of "me, I'm me, not you" ... you had been received and hugged and affirmed, instead of shamed and isolated?

     If someone had been able to see that you were taking the first baby step towards feeling your own feelings, of knowing that you saw life differently from those around you. If you had been helped to experience your own uniqueness, to feel the excitement of sensing for the very first time, your own awareness of life. What if someone had helped you to own all of this ... to own your own life?

      How might it be different for you?
 

- Judith Duerk, from Circle of Stones: 

Woman's Journey to Herself

Photo: The Eyes of Children around the World 
© Elena Gromova-Kal`minskaya 
http://500px.com/photo/47199264

Helen Keller: The Best and Most Beautiful Things

The best and and most beautiful things
Cannot be seen, or even touched.
They must be felt with the heart.

~ Helen Keller

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

This is for my sweet Ron.

And for each and every one of us.

May we have the courage and intention

to open our hearts,

remember what we have forgotten,

and live our lives as a prayer.
 

~ Molly
 

from Heart of the Islands Satsang

The Way In

The Way In

 

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.

 

~ Linda Hogan ~

 

(Rounding the Human Corners)

 

 

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