NDAA: Death of America, Targeted killings of innocent Americans
After the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA FY 2012) passed the Senate 86-13 Thursday afternoon, the world’s largest human rights group updated its explanation of the bill’s inclusion of targeted killings of Americans, a component already signed as an Executive Order by President Barack Obama, that the NDAA FY 2012, now being studied by the Obama administration after the White House announced the president would sign it. Aside from the defence bill furthering the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance aim including permanent war for total control, Amnesty International has stated the it’s giving the U.S. military free reign to assassinate Americans is a campaign Senator Lindsay Graham has led ten years.
“The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 passed the Senate on a 86-13 vote, a solid show of support that belied the considerable opposition and debate behind it,” reported the LA Times late Thursday afternoon, referring to the outcry of professional and lay human rights defenders opposing the bill.
Cutting to the chase about NDAA FY 2012’s codifying targeting innocent individuals, the world’s largest and most powerful human rights organization, Amnesty International has stated about the defence bill, “If someone with their finger on the trigger decides to take the view that criticizing government is providing aid and comfort to the enemy, then the critic could become a target.”
“The passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) through the Senate last Thursday saw the culmination of a ten-year crusade by Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) to make the law of war apply on US soil,” says Amnesty International in its statement.
Amnesty says that Senator Graham’s avowed military detention of “affiliated terrorists” captured on US soil “is not the only arrow in the military quiver.”
“If the war on terror is being fought on US soil the military would also now have the authority to do what it does best – engage the enemy with kinetic force. In other words, for those of you who don’t like euphemisms, to kill people.”
Amnesty points out: “As if on cue, CIA general counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson” confirmed last week that US citizens do not have immunity they are “at war with the United States.”
CodePink issued a statement Thursday about NDAA FY 2012 stating, “The 2012 NDAA effectively leaves the door wide open for human rights abuses so egregious that if they were to take place almost anywhere else in the world (Iran, for instance, or North Korea—or Afghanistan and Iraq for that matter), Congress would, at the very least, pretend to express outrage.
“Within the United States, however, passing legislation that has the potential to turn a democracy into a police state of Orwellian proportions is presented not only as acceptable, but necessary, all in the name of ‘national security.’
NDAA 2012 codifies President George W. Bush’s declaration boasted for the world to hear shortly after the mass murder on September 11, 2001, “You are either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” an oxymoron considering the former president is a wanted man for criminal activities including torture.
The same day NDAA FY 2012 passed the Senate, Amnesty International called on the government of Tanzania to uphold its “obligations under the Convention against Torture and detain former President George Bush for, by his own admission, ordering the torture of detainees in US custody.”
“Within hours Fox News had whipped up its commentariat into such a frenzy that one talking head, former Bush adviser Brad Blakeman, opined:
“’It could be taken as a call for violence against the president… I think it’s a threat upon… the former president.’
“Setting aside the fact that it takes a rather twisted mind to equate a call for the application of due process of law to a threat of violence, Blakeman’s comment comes within a whisker of accusing Amnesty International of providing material support to terrorists.”
“In summary,” states Amnesty, “once the NDAA becomes law, a US citizen on US soil can lawfully be killed by the US military if the military believes that citizen to be a terrorist affiliated with Al Qaeda or its allies.”
As Glenn Greenwald has highlighted, indefinite detention without trial has been a feature of the so-called War on Terror from the very beginning.
Furthermore, President Obama has already signed an Executive Order claiming his right to have assassinations, “targeted killings,” of Americans. (Also see: www.aclu.org/targetedkillings and ccrjustice.org/targetedkillings)
The president’s former assertion to assassinate Americans was quickly met on August 3, 2010 by a ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit against the CIA, Department of Defence and President Barack Obama in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The Center for Constitutional Rights says that since 9/11, the U.S. government has detained thousands of men as terrorists, only for courts or the government to discover later that evidence was wrong or unreliable and release them. The profits, however, were made by holding the innocent.
In September, Deborah Dupré reported that human rights group Reprieve unveiled some 1700 documents provided by its investigators about the CIA’s unlawful international kidnap-for-torture program, “rendition,” the first overview of how the U.S. secret programme was structured, managed and profitable for corporations involved in torturing so-called “terror suspects” as first reported by the Guardian. Analysis of documents and evidence related to innocent Targeted Individuals in American communities listed as “terror suspects” since 911, numbering at least 350,000, has yet to be made.
Most people kidnapped and tortured used for non-consensual human experimentation according to an AFP article, Doctors had central role in CIA abuse: rights group published September. 1, 2009 and the article, “CIA doctors face human experimentation claims” from September 3, 2009.
Amnesty International highlights that at Guantanamo Bay, of 770 or so detainees labeled ‘worst of the worst’ by Vice President Dick Cheney. over 550 were ultimately released without charge after years of ill treatment.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve estimated in early 2009 that 60,000 people had been through the American “system.” This system is now internationally known to be a U.S. state-sponsored kidnap-torture-experiment program.
Amnesty says about people the U.S. CIA and military are “detaining,” “At the very apex of US operational capability, our intelligence was flawed 2/3s of the time.”
Nevertheless, Obama admits that the U.S. continues to hold approximately 2,500 terrorist “suspects” in detention centers around the world, reported LA Times according to a letter from the president to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday.
Reprieve has provided a list of those secret hell-holes plus says “ghost ships” are holding “suspects.’
Already in the U.S., America’s widespread torture of 100,000 people in solitary confinement is one of the nation’s most pressing and ignored domestic human rights issues according to veteran human rights defenders, James Ridgeway, Jean Casella and Andy Worthington.
This year, California has made international news due to the historical Pelican Bay Prison hunger strike in that state by 7,000 inmates who are peacefully bringing attention of the world that the United States justice system includes torture in prisons.
Until the landmark CCR, ACLU lawsuit filing against President Obama and related assassination hit-squad officials, innocent civilians on hit-lists, “targeted individuals,” had been for the most part, publicly unrecognized by major organizations, health workers and media, despite evidence that those targets have been, in their own neighborhoods and homes, covertly persecuted, tortured, and used for non-consensual experimentation. NDAA 2012 codifies such inhumane treatment in the U.S.
While in the past, collateral damage in the so-called war on terror has been of little interest or consequence to many Americans, Amnesty says the “concept of collateral damage may become rather more real for Americans in the years ahead.”
The perpetual war established by NDAA FY2012 is based on a story about September 11, 2001 that even President Bush’s appointed Commission stated after releasing their investigative report that their report was “almost entirely untrue” and based on their having been ordered by the president to falsify.
The lawsuit by ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights related to assassinating Americans has been dismissed.
Copyright Deborah Dupré 2011. All rights Reserved.
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