Jonathan Turley chimes in on Obama & the NDAA. Another Constitutional scholar is appalled.

[Octafish]

4. Turley stood up to the BFEE

A secret CIA assassination policy for citizens

December 27, 2002|By Jonathan Turley. Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University Law School.

In a season of lists, last week's disclosure of the assassination list by the Bush administration may be the ultimate gift idea for the agency that is close to having everything. After a post-Sept. 11 windfall of expanded budgets, personnel and power, it was inevitable that CIA officials would return to the one item that they have most coveted: the discretionary use of assassination. Not only does the CIA have a specific wish list of two dozen targets, it is not confined to this list for targets and even citizens could be subject to this lethal form of agency action.

In 2001, President Bush issued a secret order to the CIA that generally authorized the use of assassination as an anti-terrorism tool. When disclosed last month, it was noted that the order conspicuously did not limit assassination to non-citizens, a fact that the White House has never denied. The order signaled a radical change in U.S. policy. In the 1970s, the Church Committee found that the United States had used assassination extensively with often disastrous results. It turns out that (to our credit) we stink at assassination.

While assassinations were sharply curtailed, the United States occasionally dabbled in the dark art. During the Reagan administration, a hit was reportedly ordered on Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a fanatical cleric with terrorist ties. On March 8, 1985, the CIA used a Lebanese team and money from Saudi Arabia to explode a car bomb outside his mosque. The bomb was detonated when hundreds of Muslims were leaving services, killing more than 80 people and wounding more than 250. One fact in the bombing instantly pegged the attempted hit as a likely CIA operation: The one person left unscathed was Sheikh Fadlallah. It is something of a signature element of past CIA hits: Many die but the target remains.

It is not clear whether the CIA will return to the use of car bombs, which has taken on a certain pejorative tint of late. However, it now has authority to engage in a level of assassination that we have not seen since before Nixon.

CONTINUED...

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-12-27/news/0212270378_1_cia-assassination-al-qaeda