Holder: Not ‘assassination’ to target Americans in terror hunt
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/05/holder-targeting-american-terrorists-not-assasination/?hpt=hp_t3
Can you believe this guy? Talk about legal hair spitting! So this is what our Constitution has come to.
I don’t think it is possible for it to get better before it gets worse, the fear in my mind is that it will get _a lot_ worse before it has a chance to get better.
He’s more than “splitting hairs.” He’s making statements that contravene the views of most legal scholars regarding due process.
Here’s my view: The target should be apprehended, tried, and judged on the evidence. If the judgement is “guilty,” then he or she should be sentenced and the sentence carried out.
If the target cannot be apprehended and will not surrender, then he or she should be tried in absentia. If the evidence results in a guilty verdict and an appropriate sentence of death, then one can reasonably argue that an executioner can be tasked with carrying out the sentence.
In any case, the entire chain of events must be transparent. The results must be results that would have been arrived at by reasonable persons.
It is the only way that we can prevent some authority figure from killing any of us simply because we disagree with his or her dicta.
Private, opaque decisions will not do, not even in the name of security. They clearly violate due process, as it has been defined over many decades by many rulings and the settings of many precedents.
Glenn Greenwald has his thoughts out now:
Attorney General Holder defends execution without charges
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/06/attorney_general_holder_defends_execution_without_charges/singleton/
We have no Constitution any longer. It is well and truly shredded. It greatly saddens me to think that to have any chance of reversing this police state we would need to elect Ron Paul (not that there is a chance in hell of him becoming the GOP nominee). No one else, not even Hunstman (to my recollection), made the slightest peep in objection to the death of our Constitution. What a situation we have sunk to when our only hope return to a lawful society is to elect someone like Paul.