Panetta: Obama Absent Night of Benghazi
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified this morning on Capitol Hill that President Barack Obama was absent the night four Americans were murdered in Benghazi on September 11, 2012:Panetta said, though he did meet with Obama at a 5 o'clock prescheduled gathering, the president left operational details, including knowledge of what resources were available to help the Americans under siege, "up to us."
In fact, Panetta says that the night of 9/11, he did not communicate with a single person at the White House. The attack resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Obama did not call or communicate in anyway with the defense secretary that night. There were no calls about what was going on in Benghazi. He never called to check-in.
The 5 o'clock meeting was a pre-scheduled 30-minute session, where, according to Panetta's recollection, they spent about 20 minutes talking a lot about the American embassy that was surrounded in Egypt and the situation that was just unfolding in Benghazi.
As Bill Kristol wrote in the month after the attack, "Panetta's position is untenable: The Defense Department doesn't get to unilaterally decide whether it's too risky or not to try to rescue CIA operators, or to violate another country's air space. In any case, it’s inconceivable Panetta didn't raise the question of what to do when he met with the national security adviser and the president at 5 p.m. on the evening of September 11 for an hour. And it's beyond inconceivable he didn't then stay in touch with the White House after he returned to the Pentagon."
Perhaps it was "inconceivable," but it is according to Panetta exactly what happened.
But Obama did have time to make a political call to the Israeli prime minister. "[W]e do know one thing the president found time to do that evening: He placed a call to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in order to defuse a controversy about President Obama's refusal to meet with Netanyahu two weeks later at the U.N. General Assembly, and, according to the White House announcement that evening, spent an hour on the phone with him," Kristol wrote.
"While Americans were under assault in Benghazi, the president found time for a non-urgent, politically useful, hour-long call to Prime Minister Netanyahu. And his senior national security staff had to find time to arrange the call, brief the president for the call, monitor it, and provide an immediate read-out to the media. I suspect Prime Minister Netanyahu, of all people, would have understood the need to postpone or shorten the phone call if he were told that Americans were under attack as the president chatted. But for President Obama, a politically useful telephone call—and the ability to have his aides rush out and tell the media about that phone call—came first."
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/panetta-obama-absent-night-benghazi_700405.html
And:
General on Benghazi: 'We Never Received a Request for Support from the State Department'
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the State Department never requested "support" in Benghazi:"Why didn't you put forces in place to be ready to respond?," Senator John McCain asked the general.
Dempsey started, "Because we never received a request to do so, number one. And number two, we --"
McCain interrupted, "You never heard of Ambassador Stevens's repeated warnings?"
"I had, through General Ham," responded Dempsey, referring to the commander of AFRICOM. "But we never received a request for support from the State Department, which would have allowed us to put forces--"
"So it's the State Department's fault?"
"I'm not blaming the State Department," Dempsey responded.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/general-benghazi-we-never-received-request-support-state-department_700403.html
Hey, Remember When Obama Claimed to Support the Troops?
Well he doesn't and neither does his outgoing defense secretary:Just days before he leaves office, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is recommending military pay be limited, effectively decreasing troop salaries next year.A few reminders:
Panetta will recommend to Congress that military salaries be limited to a 1% increase in 2014. The Pentagon has calculated that the Labor Department's 2014 Employment Cost Index is expected to be above 1% but wants to still cut back on pay because of "budget uncertainties," a department official told CNN. In 2013, a 1.7% increase was approved, based on the index, which has been the basis for military pay for the last several years.
Three Pentagon officials have confirmed details of the plan to CNN. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have also agreed to Panetta's proposed pay plan. Final approval for the pay would come from Congress in the form of the 2014 budget.
The recommendation is tied to the Defense Department's 2014 budget recommendation, which was expected to be sent to Congress this month, one of the officials said. But the officials acknowledge it is going to be seen as an effort to push Congress to stop the automatic budget cuts that could go into effect if no deal is reached on spending reductions.
1) Sequestration was Obama's idea. That's right folks, Obama phones, welfare and solar panels are way more important than our troops getting paid what they deserve.
2) Obama has already astronomically increased healthcare costs for military families thanks to ObamaCare.
The Obama administration’s proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers’ benefits untouched. The proposal is causing a major rift within the Pentagon, according to U.S. officials. Several congressional aides suggested the move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare’s state-run insurance exchanges.3) And then there's this:
The disparity in treatment between civilian and uniformed personnel is causing a backlash within the military that could undermine recruitment and retention.
The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and $12.9 billion by 2017.
Significantly, the plan calls for increases between 30 percent to 78 percent in Tricare annual premiums for the first year. After that, the plan will impose five-year increases ranging from 94 percent to 345 percent—more than 3 times current levels.
According to congressional assessments, a retired Army colonel with a family currently paying $460 a year for health care will pay $2,048.
The military is poised to extend some benefits to the same-sex partners of service members, U.S. officials said Tuesday, about 16 months after the Pentagon repealed its ban on openly gay service.Cutting the pay of our military is the last thing we should be doing especially on top of increasing their medical care, something soldiers need more than the average citizen when coming home from deployments.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has not made a final decision on which benefits will be included, the officials said, but the Pentagon is likely to allow same-sex partners to have access to the on-base commissary and other military subsidized stores, as well as some health and welfare programs.
Panetta must walk a fine, legal line. While there has been increased pressure on the Pentagon to extend some benefits to same-sex partners, defense officials must be careful not to violate the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. The federal law forbids the federal government from recognizing any marriage other than those between a man and a woman.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/02/07/hey-remember-when-obama-claimed-to-support-the-troops-n1506948
Just 6 in 10 young people employed; half part-time
Americans under 30 are going to remember the Obama presidency for a long time. These numbers on unemployment for the young are almost as bad as Greece or Spain.
Washington Examiner:
But the next generation is still up for grabs. Republicans would do well to make their case.
Washington Examiner:
A comprehensive new Harvard University report on Americans under 30, the so-called Millennials, shows that the economy is having a crushing impact, with just 62 percent working, and of those, half are toiling at part-time jobs.
The report, released by Harvard's Institute of Politics, paints a depressing economic portrait of young Americans, many of whom are stuck with huge college tuition bills and little chance of finding a high-paying job.
But over half, or 59 percent of those aged 18-29, have gone to college and The report reveals that time in college is a better sign of social status than income, mostly because jobs aren't available.
Contrary to common media wisdom, most younger Americans did not vote in the last election. Of the 46 million Millennials, just half voted. "Although turnout was higher than it was in 1996 and 2000, it was right back to where it has been consistently from 1976-1992," said The report compiled by the National Conference on Citizenship, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University's Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, Harvard University's Institute of Politics, and Mobilize.org.
Another blow to conventional wisdom: Younger Americans interact less than their baby boomer parents, apparently choosing Facebook over facetime. "Conventional group membership, attendance at meetings, working with neighbors, trusting other people, reading the news, union membership and religious participation are all down for young people since the 1970s," said The report provided to Secrets.You wonder why such a large majority of Americans under 30 support the president when he has so clearly failed. Simple: Republicans have failed utterly to make a compelling argument for their point of view. That, and it may be harder these days to penetrate the media screen erected to stop counter ideas from taking root.
But the next generation is still up for grabs. Republicans would do well to make their case.
PK'S NOTE: Again and again, this is tying into something big and not good.
DHS Purchases 21.6 Million More Rounds of Ammunition
The Department of Homeland Security is set to purchase a
further 21.6 million rounds of ammunition to add to the 1.6 billion
bullets it has already obtained over the course of the last 10 months
alone, figures which have stoked concerns that the federal agency is
preparing for civil unrest.
A solicitation posted yesterday on
the Fed Bid website details how the bullets are required for the DHS
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico.
The solicitation asks for 10 million pistol cartridge
.40 caliber 165 Grain, jacketed Hollow point bullets (100 quantities of
100,000 rounds) and 10 million 9mm 115 grain jacketed hollow point
bullets (100 quantities of 100,000 rounds). The document also lists a requirement for 1.6 million pistol cartridge 9mm ball bullets (40 quantities of 40,000 rounds).
An approximation of how many rounds of ammunition the
DHS has now secured over the last 10 months stands at around 1.625
billion. In March 2012, ATK announced that they had agreed to provide
the DHS with a maximum of 450 million bullets
over four years, a story that prompted questions about why the feds
were buying ammunition in such large quantities. In September last year,
the federal agency purchased a further 200 million bullets.
To put that in perspective, during the height of active battle operations in Iraq, US soldiers used 5.5 million rounds of ammunition a month.
Extrapolating the figures, the DHS has purchased enough bullets over
the last 10 months to wage a full scale war for almost 30 years.
Such massive quantities of ammo purchases have stoked
fears that the agency is preparing for some kind of domestic unrest. In
2011, Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano directed
Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prepare for a mass influx of immigrants into the United States, calling for the plan to deal with the “shelter” and “processing” of large numbers of people.
The federal agency’s primary concern is now centered
around thwarting “homegrown terrorism,” but information produced and
used by the DHS to train its personnel routinely equates conservative
political ideology with domestic extremism.
A study funded by the Department of Homeland Security that
was leaked last year characterizes Americans who are “suspicious of
centralized federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” as
“extreme right-wing” terrorists.
In August 2012,
the DHS censored information relating to the amount of bullets
purchased by the federal agency on behalf of Immigration & Customs
Enforcement, citing an “unusual and compelling urgency” to acquire the
bullets, noting that there is a shortage of bullets which is threatening
a situation that could cause “substantial safety issues for the
government” should law enforcement officials not be adequately armed.
As we highlighted last month, the
DHS’ previous ammunition solicitation was awarded to Evian Group, an
organization that was formed just five days before the announcement of
the solicitation and appeared to be little more than a front
organization since it didn’t have a genuine physical address, a website,
or even a phone number.
While Americans are being browbeaten with rhetoric about
the necessity to give up semi-automatic firearms in the name of
preventing school shootings, the federal government is arming itself to
the teeth with both ammunition and guns. Last September, the DHS purchased no less than 7,000 fully automatic assault rifles, labeling them “Personal Defense Weapons.”
http://www.infowars.com/dhs-purchases-21-6-million-more-rounds-of-ammunition/
Anti-Gun Maryland State Senator Ignores Pro-Gun Testimony by Playing Chess
During a public hearing last night in Annapolis about new sweeping gun control proposals in Maryland, State Senator Jamie Raskin decided to ignore testimony by pro-Second Amendment attendees and play chess instead.
Maryland Shooters posted the photo on their Facebook page and people were not impressed.
"Pathetic. I'd get fired from my job if I was playing a game in a meeting," one person wrote.
"I would expect nothing less from a representative of Montgomery County. He and the majority of the voters in his county are the reason this state is circling the bowl," another wrote.
Townhall reader Albert Hewitt sent this quote by email, "The rabidly anti-gun Sen. Jamie Raskin decided that he would rather play computer chess than listen to those testifying against his views and bill. I'm a Maryland gun owner and this makes me more angry than just about anything else I've ever seen."
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/02/07/antigun-maryland-state-senator-plays-chess-to-ignore-progun-testimony-n1507429
Three-Year-Olds Chant ‘Union Power’ After Reading New Children’s Book
Is your three-year-old preschooler chanting ‘union power’ these days? She might, if author Innosanto Nagara has his way.Nagara wrote A is for Activist, a book supposedly geared for the children of the “99 percent.” In other words, a new vehicle has been developed for leftists to begin indoctrinating children.
“It’s pretty awesome to hear a three-year-old saying ‘union power,’” Nagara said in a YES! magazine interview.
But union power and student activism aren’t the only goals. Consider these other letters and how they are applied in the book:
B is for banner, as in a protest banner hanging off a construction craneHeady stuff for preschoolers, but the indoctrinators believe the tikes are old enough to learn the basics of revolutionary thought.
L is for LGBTQ, as in Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered and Queer
T is for Trans, as in transgendered
Z is for Zapatistas, as in Mexican revolutionary leftists
Nagara’s A is for Activist has been heralded by the likes of Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, who said, “Many a thousand young activists bloom!”
“This is an amazing book for toddlers,” wrote Oakland teachers union activist Mary Prophet.
The Radical teachers group Rethinking Schools gave the book its hearty endorsement, offering it on its resources page.
“This beautifully illustrated alphabet reader brings a whole new vocabulary to board books,” the organizations wrote about the book. “For example, ‘Kings are fine for storytime/Knights are fun to play/But when people make decisions/we will choose the people’s way.’ As a spirited and humor-filled introduction to progressive values, A is for Activist is a book to grow on, and return to again and again for many years. It could also be used as a prompt for older students to create their own alphabet books with a conscience.”
One might ask how anyone with a conscience could even think about exposing little children to this sort of political garbage, or how any parents would allow it.
East Bay Express – an “alternative” Oakland news outlet – said the book is for “grooming your future activist.”
“Children's entertainment comes with no shortage of messages: disobedient princesses learning to obey their parents; giant red dogs urging teamwork; purple dinosaurs imparting the wisdom of just being yourself,” the newspaper wrote. “But with a few exceptions, kids' books, movies, and music highlight only a narrow range of voices and viewpoints. Most are an implicit endorsement of stratified wealth. (After all, what are princes and princesses if not the embodiment of entitlement?) There's an acute shortage of voices from queer folks and people of color. Many have outmoded gender norms.”
Who knew Barney was endorsing the perpetuation of “stratified wealth”?
This isn’t the first leftist book with an agenda. I wrote in “Indoctrination, “How ‘Useful Idiots’ are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism” that another more subtle book, Click Clack Moo, Cows That Type, pushes the union agenda.
There is a war on for the minds of our future leaders. And judging by Nagara’s book, they’re targeting children at younger and younger ages.
The question remains: As a parent, do you know what your student is learning?
http://townhall.com/columnists/kyleolson/2013/02/07/threeyearolds-chant-union-power-after-reading-new-childrens-book-n1506445/page/full/
The Unscary Sequester
Washington is in a fit of collective terror over the "sequester," aka the impending across-the-board spending cuts. Trying to explain the zero economic growth at the end of 2012, White House spokesman Jay Carney blamed Republicans for "talk about letting the sequester kick in as though that were an acceptable thing." He left out that President Obama proposed the sequester in 2011.Then on Tuesday Mr. Obama warned about "the threat of massive automatic cuts that have already started to affect business decisions." He proposed tax increases and "smaller" spending cuts to replace the sequester until Congress and he can agree to another not-so-grand-bargain. It's nice to see Mr. Obama worry about "business decisions" for a change, but listening to his cries of "massive" cuts is like watching "Scary Movie" for the 10th time. You know it's a joke.
The sequester that nobody seems to love would cut an estimated $85 billion from the budget this fiscal year starting in March. Half of the savings would come from defense and half from domestic discretionary programs. Medicare providers would take a 2% cut. This "doomsday mechanism," as some in the Administration call it, was the fallback when the White House and Republicans couldn't agree during the 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations.
The White House strategy was to create a fiscal hatchet that would disproportionately carve up the defense budget to force the GOP to raise taxes. The Pentagon absorbs half the sequester cuts though it is only about 19% of the budget. This hasn't worked.
Republicans have rightly concluded after two years of being sucker-punched that the sequester is the main negotiating leverage they have and may be the only way to restrain spending. So now Democrats and a gaggle of interest groups are denouncing Mr. Obama's fiscal brainchild because the programs they cherish—from job training to education, to the EPA and energy subsidies, to money for Planned Parenthood—are about to get chopped too.
Fear not. As always in Washington when there is talk of cutting spending, most of the hysteria is baseless. The nearby table from the House Budget Committee shows that programs are hardly starved for money. In Mr. Obama's first two years, while private businesses and households were spending less and de-leveraging, federal domestic discretionary spending soared by 84% with some agencies doubling and tripling their budgets.
Spending growth has slowed since Republicans took the House in 2011. Still, from 2008-2013 federal discretionary spending has climbed to $1.062 trillion from $933 billion—an increase of 13.9%. Domestic programs grew by 16.6%, much faster than the 11.6% for national security.
Transportation funding alone climbed to $69.5 billion in 2010 with the stimulus from $10.7 billion in 2008, and in 2013 the budget is still $17.9 billion, or about 67% higher. Education spending more than doubled in Mr. Obama's first two years and is up 18.6% to $68.1 billion from 2008-2013.
But wait—this doesn't include the recent Hurricane Sandy relief bill. Less than half of that $59 billion is going to storm victims while the rest is a spending end-run around the normal appropriations process. Add that money to the tab, and total discretionary domestic spending is up closer to 30% from 2008-2013. The sequester would claw that back by all of about 5%.
More troublesome are the cuts in defense, but for security not economic reasons. The sequester cuts the Pentagon budget by 7%. This fits Mr. Obama's evident plan to raid the military to pay for social programs like ObamaCare.
But at least high priorities such as troop deployments are exempt from the cuts. And there is waste in the Pentagon: Start with the billions spent on "green energy" programs at DOD, bases that are no longer needed, and runaway health-care costs. Mr. Obama could work with Congress to pass those reforms so as not to cut weapons and muscle, but he has refused.
The most disingenuous White House claim is that the sequester will hurt the economy. Reality check: The cuts amount to about 0.5% of GDP. The theory that any and all government spending is "stimulus" has been put to the test over the last five years, and the result has been the weakest recovery in 75 years and trillion-dollar annual deficits.
The sequester will help the economy by leaving more capital for private investment. From 1992-2000 Democrat Bill Clinton and (after 1994) a Republican Congress oversaw budgets that cut federal outlays to 18.2% from 22.1% of GDP. These were years of rapid growth in production and incomes.
The sequester will surely require worker furloughs and cutbacks in certain non-priority services. But most of those layoffs will happen in the Washington, D.C. area, the recession-free region that has boomed during the Obama era.
The bad news for Congressional Democrats and their spending interests is that the noose only tightens after this year. Mr. Obama's sequester mandates roughly $1.2 trillion of discretionary cuts over the next decade. But if Democrats really want to avoid a sequester, they should stop insisting on higher taxes and start getting serious about modernizing the entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid that comprise the other 60% of government. If they won't, then sequester away.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324156204578276262281998922.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
Assassin in Chief?
Exercising a power that no prior president ever thought he possessed -- a power that no prior president is known to have exercised -- President Obama admitted that he ordered the execution of American citizens, not on a battlefield, based on his belief that they were involved in terrorist activities. It is known that at least three U.S. citizens, including a 16-year old boy, were killed on the president's order in drone strikes in Yemen in 2011.As the worldwide drone program ramps up, there have been increasing calls for the president to reveal the basis for his claimed authority. Only a few weeks ago, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon denied both the ACLU's and New York Times' requests under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain any and all legal documents prepared in support of the president's claim of unilateral powers. While Judge McMahon was concerned that the documents "implicate serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States, and about whether we are indeed a nation of laws not of men," she felt constrained by precedent to withhold them. Now, a bipartisan group of 11 senators has written a letter to president Obama asking for "any and all legal opinions" that describe the basis for his claimed authority to "deliberately kill American citizens."
However, not until the Senate began gathering information for hearings on John Brennan's confirmation as CIA director, to begin February 7, has public attention finally been focused on this remarkable presidential usurpation of power.
On the night of February 4, the walls of secrecy were breached when NBC News released a leaked U.S. Justice Department White Paper entitled "Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa'ida or An Associated Force." Now we can see why the Department of Justice has been so reluctant to share the basis for its legal analysis. It is deeply flawed -- based on a perverse view of the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause. Additionally, the white paper completely ignores the procedural protections expressly provided in the Constitution's Third Article -- those specifically designed to prohibit the president from serving as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.
The white paper does not seek to delimit the federal power to kill citizens, but simply sets out a category of "targeted killing" of American citizens off the battlefield on foreign soil which it deems to be clearly authorized. Moreover, this power is not vested exclusively in the president, or even the secretary of defense, or even officials within the Department of Defense -- rather, it can be relied on by other senior officials of unspecified rank elsewhere in government.
According to the white paper, there are only three requirements to order a killing. First, "an informed high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States." Second, capture is "infeasible." And third, the " operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with the applicable law of war principles." Indeed, from the white paper, it is not clear why killings of U.S. citizens on American soil would be judged by a different standard.
Mimicking a judicial opinion, the White Paper employs pragmatic tests developed by the courts to supplant the plain meaning of the Fifth Amendment Due Process and Fourth Amendment Search and Seizure texts. Balancing away the constitutionally protected interests of the citizen in life, liberty, and property against the more important "'realities' of the conflict and the weight of the government's interest in protecting its citizens from an imminent attack," the Justice Department lawyers have produced a document worthy of the King Council's Court of Star Chamber -- concluding that the U.S. Constitution would not require the government to provide notice of charges, or a right to be heard, "before using lethal force" on a U.S. citizen suspected of terrorist activity against his country. How very convenient. The Obama administration lawyers appear to have forgotten that the Star Chamber was abolished by the English Parliament in 1641 in order to restore the rule of law adjudicated by an independent judiciary, terminating the rule of men administered by the king's courtiers.
Also, conspicuously missing from the Justice Department's constitutional analysis is any recognition that the Founders already balanced the life, liberty, and property interests of an American citizen suspected of "levying war against [the United States], or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort," and provided them the specific procedural protections in Article III of the Constitution. When a U.S. citizen is suspected of treason, the constitutional remedy is not to invent new crimes subject to the summary execution at the pleasure of the president and his attorneys. In Federalist No. 43, James Madison proclaimed that the Treason Clause would protect citizens "from new-fangled and artificial treasons ... by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it[.]" To that end, the Constitution does not permit the Obama lawyers to invent an elastically defined offense of "an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States," in substitution for the constitutionally concrete definition of "levying war against [the United States], or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."
Moreover, Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution requires trial in "open court" -- not in some secret "war room" in an undisclosed location. That same section of Article III requires proof by "the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession" -- not by a unilateral "determin[ation] that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of an attack against the United States." Finally, as is true of "all crimes," Article III, Section 2 requires "trial ... by jury" on a charge of treason, not trial by some unidentified "high-level official of the U.S. government[,]" no matter how well-"informed" he may be. In short, the Constitution provides that an American citizen must be tried and punished according to the judicial process provided for the crime of treason, not according to some newfangled and artificial executive "process" fashioned by nameless collection of lawyers.
These nameless lawyers have also ignored the Justice Department's own venerable precedents. The White Paper relies on the "laws of war" -- but laws of war do not control here. On August 21, 1798, U.S. Attorney General Charles Lee -- serving under President John Adams -- directed to the U.S. secretary of state an official opinion in which he determined that in the undeclared state of war between France and the United States, "France is our enemy; and to aid, assist, and abet that nation in her maritime warfare, will be treason in a citizen[, who] may be tried and punished according to our laws[, not like a French subject, who must be] treated according to the laws of war."
It is a measure of how far we have fallen as a nation -- not only that President Obama asserts and exercises such a terrible power, but that only 11 U.S. senators would be willing to affix their names to a letter to ask the Obama administration to provide its legal reasoning. If John Brennan is confirmed as CIA director, and the killings of U.S. citizens continue based on this whitewash of a white paper, then the U.S. Senate will have yielded up to the president without even a fight the power to kill citizens without judicial due process -- a power that has been unknown in the English-speaking world for at least 370 years.
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