Targeted Killing Program Used Against Anwar Al-Awlaki Will Remain Under Wraps After Judge's Ruling

"The Obama administration will be able to keep secret its legal justification for killing without a trial an American suspected of joining al Qaeda after a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed most of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times.

New York Southern District Court Judge Colleen McMahon issued a ruling acknowledging that the government's actions "seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution." Still, she concluded, citing a "veritable Catch-22" of a "thicket of laws and precedents," she could not order disclosure of the Department of Justice memorandum supporting the 2011 drone killing of alleged al Qaeda militant -- and American citizen -- Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

The judge's ruling hinged on the Freedom of Information Act Law, not on the drone program itself.

Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, called it a "disappointment." Still, he noted McMahon's almost woeful tone, along with the fact that she spent "several pages talking about the very troubling questions that relate to the substantive authority itself that the government is claiming to carry out these extrajudicial killings of people who are located far away from any conventional battlefield."

McMahon said there were "legitimate reasons" to question the legality of killings like al-Awlaki's".

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/02/targeted-killing-program-_n_2398805.html

 

"Thicket of laws and precedents"

"Thicket of laws and precedents" well....you could start on the inside brackets and factor your way outward like you do in algebra.

Great Image, Peter

Radical=Root (radish), pure and simple. We've been brainwashed to regard a "radical" as a revolutionary. Getting to the "root" is getting to the elemental core truth of a matter. It's time to restore its meaning.

Uprooting the deceivers

And (to paraphrase Orwell), in a time of universal deceit, 'getting to the elemental core truth of the matter' becomes a revolutionary act. We live in a time of universal deceit because defense of the corporatist status quo depends on it. I think where the brainwashing comes in isn't in identifying 'radical' with 'revolutionary,' but in causing people to see the latter term as denoting something ipso facto bad. It's the flip side of getting people to think of blind loyalty to the government and military as 'patriotic' and 'good.'

“The Alice-in-Wonderland

“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me”, Judge McMahon said in her ruling.