Top 10 Problems With America Killing Its Own Citizens

Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder

Courtesy Of Alter Net

February 5, 2010 | The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.

Here are 10 problems with this:

1. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't cease to be crimes because you cross a border.

2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don't cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently. Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.

3. Killing people has nothing whatsoever to do with gathering so-called intelligence.

4. Even in this age in which senators and house members petition and write public letters to the president imploring him to obey laws, rather than introducing legislation, issuing subpoenas, holding impeachment hearings, or defunding agencies, the fact remains that Congress, above all, IS the government, and it is just not the place of the director of national thuggery to come in and dictate what the law will or will not be.

5. Having made the globe a battlefield and sanctioned crimes including lawless imprisonment, torture, warrantless spying, indiscriminant bombings, and the use of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and other sickening weapons, on the grounds that all is fair and legal in war, preventing Americans from becoming the innocent victims of the war is becoming harder and harder. If active military can be on duty here, if we can be spied on, kidnapped, and imprisoned here. If our most prominent foreign death camp can be relocated here, by what logic -- and for how long -- can government assassinations of Americans (without trial) be confined to elsewhere?

6. Typically when we assassinate people abroad, a lot of other innocent people are killed in the process. Those are all murders. That too will come home if there is not resistance soon, major resistance to this madness.

7. We are being asked to trust extrajudicial decisions on whether or not to murder, not just to allegedly wise judges who are in too big a hurry or find it logistically unfeasible to hold a trial, but to the very people who lied us into the wars that are motivating most of the international hostility toward our country and draining most of the resources Americans need at home.

8. No republic has ever survived putting this kind of power in the hands of a single ruler, with no independent legislature, no independent press, and no independent popular resistance. And we're almost there.

9. These people usually only admit to believing they have the barbaric "right" to do things that they have already done.

10. What are the chances the Director of Intelligence will never consider a president a threat to national security?

David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press (2009) and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush," by Dennis Kucinich (2008).

Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ProsecuteBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com