Obama wouldn’t trust Romney with his kill list

Barack Obama draws up secret kill lists of people he deems enemies of the United States, on his own discretion based on secret criteria.  Even the legal rationale for the kill lists is a secret.  But the New York Times reported that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obama administration began work on a “legal architecture” for deciding who to kill.  The reason: Mitt Romney could not be trusted with this power.

I suppose it is natural that somebody who feels confident he should be trusted to exercise life-and-death power without accountability might not think that anybody else could be trusted with the same power.  But how is it that it only occurred to Obama in the months running up to the election that someday a Republican would occupy the White House and exercise the powers that Obama created?

“Legal architecture” is an Orwellian phrase.  It means the opposite of “code of laws.”  It simply means that the Obama administration will codify its own procedures.  It is hard to see why President Obama thinks a future administration would be bound by those procedures when he himself is not bound by the Constitution.

This would be a great opportunity for the Republican leaders to show themselves to be what they claim to be—defenders of the Constitution against all-powerful government.  Instead of asking Susan Rice why she shouldn’t get her story straight about who was behind the Benghazi attacks, they should ask her whether she recognizes any limit on the power of the government to issue death warrants.

Click on Obama Administration Was Not Willing To Trust Romney with a Secret Kill List for more by Kevin Gosztola on Firedoglake’s The Dissenter.

Click on Obama: a GOP president should have rules limiting the kill list for Glenn Greenwald’s analysis.

Tags: Barack Obama, Constitution, Flying Killer Drones, KIll List, Obama Kill List