Ron Paul seems to think so.
UNCONSTITUTIONAL? RON PAUL’S LETTER IN FULL
As President, I would not hesitate to use decisive force to repel any imminent threat. National defense is a primary function of Congress and the commander-in-chief, and, as chief executive, I would carry out my duties as outlined in the Constitution and in accordance with the rule of law.
President Obama apparently believes he is not bound by the Constitution or the rule of law. When it was reported that Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen last week, certainly no one felt remorse for his fate. Awlaki was a detestable person we believe helped recruit and inspire others to kill Americans through terrorist acts.
We have to take the fight against terrorism very seriously. In 2001, I supported the authority to capture and kill the thugs responsible for 9/11. In our efforts we must, however, work hard to preserve and respect our great American constitutional principles.
Awlaki was a U.S. citizen. Under our Constitution, American citizens, even those living abroad, must be charged with a crime before being sentenced. As President, I would have arrested Awlaki, brought him to the U.S., tried him and pushed for the stiffest punishment allowed by law. Treason has historically been judged to be the worst of crimes, deserving of the harshest sentencing. But what I would not do as President is what Obama has done and continues to do in spectacular fashion: circumvent the rule of law.
On Feb. 3, 2010, Dennis Blair, then the country’s director of national intelligence, admitted before the House Intelligence Committee that “Being a U.S. citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives.” This open admission by an Obama administration official, not even attempting to keep it classified or top secret, sets a dangerous new precedent in our history.
The precedent set by the killing of Awlaki establishes the frightening legal premise that any suspected enemy of the United States – even if they are a citizen – can be taken out on the President’s say-so alone. Part of the very concept of citizenship is the protection of due process and the rule of law. The President wants to spread American values around the world but continues to do great damage to them here at home, appointing himself judge, jury and executioner by presidential decree.
When Nazi leader and Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann was convicted and executed by the Israeli government in 1962, it was after he was captured, extradited and tried. Respect for the rule of law never has been for the protection of monsters like Eichmann or Awlaki, who should meet their just fate – but for the protection of the vast majority of innocent citizens who should never become subject to mere governmental whim.
I think so too.
Read on.
Is the pepper spraying of peaceful demonstrators unconstitutional?
Yes.
How about the unwarranted search and seizure going on at our airports?
Yup.
The even more unwarranted, racially dictated search and seizure going on in our ghettos?
Ditto.
Constant surveillance of the population on every possible level?
Of course it is.
The refusal to let us arm ourselves so that we have a chance of resisting when the PermaGov’s thugs comes to our door because of “information” gleaned from that unconstitutional surveillance?
50+ years of undeclared and thus congressionally unsupervised wars?
The theft of our services, our cultures and our very lives by a kleptocratic oligarchy that makes client killers like Hosni Mubarak and his secret police forces look like the neighborhood crank pissing on the lawns of neighbors he doesn’t like?
I have lived the above mentioned 50+ years in an ever-increasing state of alarm over the problems of this country. I have never, ever heard a national politician tell the unvarnished truth of what is going on here until Ron Paul raised enough money to make himself heard over the bread and circuses din of the media.
He may be wrong about some things, but he sure as hell is honest.
I’ll take it.
This other lying horseshit ain’t making it, that’s for sure.
AG
P.S. I smell a Kent State moment headed our way. As the Wall Street thing grows and spreads to other cities, sooner or later some badly trained, ill-tempered cop like Tony Baloney (NYPD Deputy Investigator Anthony Bologna…the fool who did the pepper spraying that tripled the crowd on Wall Street overnight.) is going to pop a cap in some white kid’s ass. It’ll have to be a white kid, because people of color in this country can very easily identify w/Osama bin Laden’s query “By what school of thought is your blood considered blood while our blood is water?” No one in power here (Or especially in the media…”Why…that looks like my son!”) will give much of shit unless it’s a white kid. Preferably middle class and college educated.
But once that happens?
Watch out!!!
Watch.
Unless the weather turns really bad in NYC very soon, this thing is going to keep growing. We oughta put a statue up to Tony Baloney. Like Crispus Attucks at Lexington, the people he sprayed on Wall Street were the casualties heard `round the world.
Watch.
P.P.S. By the way…”Deputy Inspector” is a rank higher than the Captain’s rank usually held by NYC cops who are charged with heading a precinct. This wasn’t some wet behind the ears patrolman twit fresh outta the Police Academy who ran this game; this was a boss of bosses twit.
Bet on it.
Gonna vote for the Constitution or the Constant Confusion?
I know which way I’m headed.
You?
AG
You are gonna vote full-nazi? Not me. Ron Paul is a fascist racist asshole.
He is also a proponent of raw milk.
If you are actually supporting him, you are a fucking moron.
Thank you, dataguy. Your views are very valuable to me. If I need reinforcement on any subject, opposition from you is always welcome confirmation of my decision.
AG
P.S. He’s not a “Nazi,” a fascist or an asshole, although the media…all the media, not just the faux center, left and right versons thereof…have striven mightily to portray him as such. In fact it was the media’s attempt to disappear him that made me want to find out more about where he was coming from.
When a president of the United States sends people into wars in the full knowledge that some of them…many, many of them…will be killed or maimed, he is simply considered to be doing his job. If he does not do that, the presumed alternative (assuming that the the war is not a bullshit, dishonorable attempt to rob other countries) is much worse than the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives.
Ron Paul believes…and I agree with him…that the American system as it stands cannot continue in its current form and that serious changes will have to be made. Many people will certainly suffer and some will die if these changes are made, but many more will suffer and die if they are not made.
One of the worst parts of this system as it exists today is its approach to what we laughingly refer to as healthcare. It is really just profitcare for the financial oligarchy. Yes, it provides medicines and doctors to those who can afford to pay the price, but not only are they generally not very good doctors or medicines, they are really almost totally unavailable except in their most ineffective form to a large percentage of the American public. Urban public medicine is a sick joke, a holding cell for the societally stricken and destroyed of this country, and I am sure that the same concept holds true in poverty stricken non-urban areas as well.
When Ron Paul suggests that this has to change, a vast hue and cry immediately arises from two portions of this system.
1-The only people who really get anything out of it, the profit taking owners of Big Med, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Advertising/Media and Big Politics.
and
2-The poor working and middle class schmucks like you who have been media-hypnotized into believing that it is “the only way to go.”
Yes, if that system is taken down some people…quite possibly myself included…will have to pay some sort of mortally threatening dues. So will the members of the ruling oligarchy.
It’s gong to be a war, dataguy. People get hurt in a war. That’s why we are supposed to think long and hard about entering a war. That’s why there are supposed to be checks and balances in place to stop unjust wars from being waged…checks and balances that have not been well applied here since the end of WW II, by the way…and the last “check and balance” available to us in this situation is the popular vote.
That’s why Paul is running.
He is quite clearly saying to us that we are going to have to go on a wartime footing in order to beat this enemy, an enemy from within that has taken over this country just as surely as say Adolf Hitler would have taken it over by other means.
Will this idea prevail in the face of total media resistance, in the face of the massive disinformation system that is the media’s real role in the culture?
I dunno. I didn’t think that the Occupy Wall Street thing would go nearly as far as it has gone, but here it is today, growing exponentially in only its third week. I didn’t think that Ron Paul’s message would be able to effectively penetrate the
IronMedia Curtain either, but during those same three weeks it has begun to do so quite strongly.Maybe we have an American Autumn on our hands, dataguy. Like the Arab Spring only much, much bigger.
Wake up and smell the leaves burning.
Look outside…they may even be burning in your own front yard.
And …wake the fuck up.
Please.
AG
Typical pap. I never read your comments AG, they are simply too arch for words, and actually have little content. Just single
sentences, posed
by themselves
to look
like you know something
while you just really don’t.
It’s an easy technique.
you simply need to work on the
content.
You should work on your impersonations, dataguy.
That one was really lame.
AG
The worst hospitals in the US treat the poorest Americans: study
Unless you are well off…do not dare to get sick here in Omertica.
And even then…be careful. Almost the entire healthcare industry is a scam.
Bet on it.
I am.
AG
Yeah. I find that I don’t really care about this. Since the Republicans are trying to take away womens’ rights, destroy unions, deny me affordable medical care, and allow corporations to completely buy off the Supreme Court and, therefore, our “democratic” election process it’s hard to work up any pity for terrorists, even if they’re US citizens.
This isn’t about pity for anyone. And I suppose you are someone who is eager to boast at the appropriate moment that “America is a nation of laws”.
I am seeing a lot of comments from relatively unfamiliar posters here, Hurriah. Posters whose general tenor is suspicious to me. When I go to see how much they have been posting, I find that many of them started regularly commenting just a few weeks ago.
Hmmmm…
Daily Kos/intelligence services operations redux?
Could be…
AG
Um, Sorry guys….but I’ve been a member here since the beginning. No, I don’t think America is the greatest country on earth. But I am suffering from outrage overload at the moment. Just being honest saying that this issue is meaningless for me. If you can find room to be outraged about a terrorist being killed with all the shit that’s going on here, then your outrage center is much larger than mine.
Also, Ron Paul thinks FEMA is unconstitutional.
People throw around the term terrorist far too easily and casually these days.
In any case, human rights is one of the few absolutes. You cannot deny them to anyone, including the worst of the worst (of which Awlaki was not one), without the risk that you will find reasons to deny them to everyone. I despise the fact that the United States continues its steady and escalating progress down that slippery slope.
When it comes to human rights, the US left the reservation a long time ago – if it was ever there in the first place.
We are entirely in agreement. What I find intolerable is the eagerness with which nice American liberals, and self-proclaimed “progressives” self-righteously leap to condemn other governments’ human rights problems while ignoring, shrugging off or justifying their own government’s far more egregious behavior.
And no, the US was never on the reservation (no pun intended). Remember what they did to the natives of this land.
When other governments’ human rights violations involve genocide, systematic rape and torture I think this nice liberal has every right to call them out. When ours involves targeted killing of a terrorist recruiter instead of, perhaps, bombing the hell out of his town in a declared war in the hopes of possibly killing him, and in the process killing hundreds more, this liberal can’t really work up a good outrage about it.
What about our own government’s human rights violations, which most certainly involve genocide, systematic theft and torture? Do those crimes strike a chord in your “nice liberal’s” hard, spoiled little heart?
“Targeted killing”, eh?
Do you have any idea whatsoever of the terror that is being spread in Afghanistan by that whole drone thing? It is very easy even for troops on the ground to raid the wrong house. Hopefully some of the better commanders and soldiers at least make an effort to be sure that they have the right people (if there really is something that resembles the concept of “the right people” in an invasion that is totally based on economic imperialism, of course) before they
assassinate…ahem, “question”…them.But a drone strike? Controlled from hundreds or even thousands of miles away?
Please.
Mistakes? Just another buncha crispy critters as far as the controllers are concerned.
Please
Wake the fuck up.
Ron Paul pinned it during a recent GOP debate:
Ditto everywhere else that is involved in this modern Crusade.
And yet you “can’t really work up a good outrage about it.”
Not even a little annoyance there, Second Nature?
Maybe you should work on your first nature a little.
Wake the fuck up.
We are the bad guys.
Most of us, anyway.
Which side are you on?
Check yourself out.
Please.
You been had.
AG
Wake up? Then what, AG. You never have figured that out, have you?
After waking up, AG believes firmly in looking under the hood.
Yes.
I have.
I’m doing it now.
i am trying to tell people what is really up with their country, their culture and their society.
We are the bad guys, SN. There are other bad guys on the other side(s), but we started this thing with our acquiescence to the whole blood-for-oil thing in the Middle East and North Africa starting way back before W.W. I. Maybe the starting point goes all the way back to the genocidal policies of the U.S. vis à vis Native Americans, the slave labor basis of America’s initial economic growth, the 100+ years of segregation that followed the Civil War and the equally racism-based economic imperialist policies of the U.S. in South/Central/Caribbean America and Asia.
Wherever it started, it’s on now.
My own belief is that we should take all of out troops out of their far-flung
semi-colonial positions and put them to work inside of the country rebuilding our infrastructure and guarding our borders from illegal drugs and unwanted aliens. Then we should tighten our belts, include every able-bodied man and woman in our efforts and get ready to pay some dues in order to regain our independence from reliance on foreign goods, energy and loans. Ten years or so later? This great and gifted country would once again be on its feet.if we do not do this? If instead we continue to pursue the same sorts of policies that got us into this mess in the first place? If that happens we will continue to spiral down as we have been doing since at least the late’60s/early ’70s, and eventually we will hit rock bottom and either go broke and then break up into competing semi-states, become some sort of true military dictatorship or be conquered by one or more foreign enemies.
Are you listening?
I hope so.
If you’re not?
Nothing new there.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
It’s not just unconstitutional, it’s criminal. Murder is what they did, and that’s a crime.
My many reservations about Paul notwithstanding, he has been pretty consistent about his opposition to the expansion of the power of the presidency to wage wars, to execute citizens without a trial, or whatever since the Bush The Lesser years – citing Constitutional grounds. I suspect that is the sort of thing that made him mildly appealing to some left-leaning bloggers. Hopefully before jumping into supporting his candidacy, those same bloggers remember to check under the hood very, very carefully.
I have been looking “under the hood,” Don. Could you be more specific, please?
AG
Let’s see: based on what I know of Ron Paul over the last several years, I can mention a few things that would be deal breakers for me:
Then there’s the whole Gold Standard thing, and on and on and on. I have no doubt that his own ideological positions are ones that those in positions of privilege would appreciate, and would no doubt benefit from. The sort of rugged individualism that Paul and his cohorts tend to espouse is one that in practice would leave the rest of us on our own to viciously fight one another for the few remaining scraps. I guess that just doesn’t jibe with my values.
If one wants to advocate his presidency, that’s great. I just think it is wise to consider that if the dude were successful, we all get the whole package – not just the parts that might have seemed on the surface kinda sorta nifty.
No, Don. His “position” is simply that these matters are the concerns of more local areas…states, etc. Live in say Masschusetts or California? You would assuredly have different options in these states than you would have in more conservative areas of the country.
Further, it has been my own observation for many years that the more centralized any given system becomes, the less well it works.
Add to that the idea that this country would soon begin to thrive if it was saved from the depredations of the corporate-owned Permanent Government…an idea whose test time seems to have finally arrived because the ways that we are functioning now sure as hell are not working very well…and all bets are off.
It becomes an experiment.
When one experiment fails…as this one is most certainly in the process of doing…then another experiment is in order.
No viable presidential candidate other than Ron Paul is proposing anything but more of the same, and more of the same (military adventurism and its concomitant “anti-terrorist” security state particularly) is going to eventually take this country down at the knees.
So why not give Paul’s ideas a try?
We could do worse.
In point of fact, we are doing worse.
Bet on it.
AG
Replacing one right-wing experiment with a different flavor of right-wing experiment? Good luck with that. That’s not something I can willingly go along with.
Left, right, center…it’s all media branding bullshit today, Don.
Obama?
How “right-wing” is he, really?
Read my Was the al-Awlaki assassination unconstitutional? Pt. II article and get back to me on that, please.
AG
I’m quite familiar with the authors you cite in that diary. Paul Craig Roberts is by his own admission an old school conservative (and who gets accused of being an isolationist), and William Blum is someone I’ve recommended for many moons now. I never could peg him, but he seems to have an anarchist streak, which is fine with me even if I am more of an Existentialist-Marxist along the lines of Sartre, early Gorz, and to a degree Fanon (most anarchists tend to be grounded in one of a number of leftist traditions, except for anarcho-capitalists).
That aside, I’ll simply repeat what I have observed about American politics for more than a decade now (whether on Usenet, BBS forums, blogs, or via Twitter). The Republican Party is very similar to the sort of hard-right nationalist parties one finds in Europe (e.g., the British National Party, or what used to be known as the National Front), whereas the Democratic Party has evolved over the last few decades into a sort of center-right party (e.g., The Tories in the UK, or many European Christian Democratic parties). Really what we’re allowed are two different flavors of right-wing. In the last couple decades we occasionally are allowed to vote at a national level for some form of conservative populist candidate as an indie or third party (e.g, Perot & his Reform Party, which quickly devolved into a precursor to today’s Tea Party types before disintegrating altogether) or some form of libertarian like Paul (presumably small federal government, hard-core capitalists, and often culturally conservative as well). There are reasons there isn’t much of a left in the US – some of it historical (Red Scares, McCarthyism, COINTELPRO) and some of it structural (I dare you to find a large corporation whose CEOs are diehard socialists – and it is those corporate interests who buy political candidates). That is the ugly reality.
I used to laugh my ass off when someone would refer to Obama as a “socialist”. Knowing full well what a socialist is, it was obvious from the moment Obama formed his election team back in 2007 that he was going to offer at best a slightly cheerier version of the sort of neoliberal economic policies and neocon foreign policies than his predecessors. Suffice it to say, that was enough to turn me off. He has run to the right, and governed to the right, at least in my opinion of Ronald the Raygun.
You are very wrapped up in naming things, Don.
Like…this wrapped up:
And so on.
All of those brands in one little comment, along with more…personal…brands like “Sartre,” “Gorz,” “Fanon,” “Perot” and “McCarthy.” You may as well throw “Ralph Lauren” and “Reebok” into the mix. They’re all sewn together by people who live in radically different universes than those to whom the brands are supposed to be sold.
Hmmmmm…
As I said in the post to which you are responding:
So are these words that you are using.
Bet on it.
I am coming from a thought tradition that does not put much stock in “words,” Don…in branding things with the use of names. Zen, sufism, call it what you will. It doesn’t care what you call it, actually.
The point of most effective meditative disciplines is to teach the mind to stop obsessively naming things in order to become able to more clearly see what they really are. One teacher of mine compared the process to the difference between two types of butterfly lovers…the ones who catch the butterflies and then kill and mount them on cardboard as opposed to the ones who simply love to watch them fly.
The wonderful zen koan that follows comes very near to that idea as well.
I am applying this concept to the study of American politics, Don.
After doing this…after stopping the obsessive word-mind for appreciable periods of time in meditative states…not only is a tree once again just a tree (only different), but so are the terms:
Etc., etc., etc.
Yup.
What is “right” is really sometimes “left” again, Don.
Where are you, then? I guess it all depends on the direction in which you are facing.
Where you are now, apparently?
Lost in a forest of names to such a degree that you can no longer see the true characteristics of the trees.
Lost in the woods with a defective compass.
At least you can take solace in the fact that you are not alone. Not hardly. However, being part of a large crowd is often a sign that you are seriously lost.
Been there.
Look again.
In a silent way.
I did.
AG
P.S.
I guess what I am really trying to say here is I am not interested in supporting Ron Paul’s presidential bid under any circumstances. Perhaps I need to sit back and rethink how I am communicating myself.
When it comes to your preferred political figure being marginalized, I can empathize. Social critics and political figures whom I deeply respect have been marginalized for decades. It sucks. No way around it. That said, there’s no way I could rationalize or meditate my way to believing the Paul is the last best hope for whatever might be left of our democracy.
Stay open, Don. To everything. Your mind is totally closed now.
Open up.
You be bettah off.
We would all be better off.
Bet on it.
AG
in this matter??
Ok…how’s about someone who was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration who became fame as a co-founder of Reaganomics and also an editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service?
Insider enough for ya?
Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch
Read on.
i dare ya.
Yup.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."