If we DON'T criticize the admin for this, there's something very wrong [View all]

[cali]

On Friday, a federal judge in Washington will hear a challenge to the Obama administration's approach to targeted killings. I find myself frustrated by how little progress we've made.


In 2004, I represented Guantanamo Bay detainees in the Supreme Court in Rasul vs. Bush, challenging President George W. Bush's claim that he could hold noncitizens at Guantanamo without judicial review based on the administration's unilateral claim that the detainees were enemies of the United States. I argued that the president's position presented a profound threat to the role of the courts in safeguarding the rule of law, and that the prisoners were entitled to due process, including judicial examination of the government's reasons for holding them. The Supreme Court agreed, reaffirming that an asserted "state of war is not a blank check" for the executive branch when civil liberties are at stake.

When campaigning for office, then-Sen. Barack Obama agreed with the court's decision and criticized Bush's abandonment of basic checks and balances in the so-called war on terror. Yet today, President Obama has taken his predecessor's assertion of executive fiat even further. His administration says it has the power not just to detain suspected terrorists but also to kill them without any judicial oversight or accountability.


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Seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, the Justice Department has maintained that such killings are immune from judicial review. The administration argues that due process does not require judicial process and that we should trust the executive's judgment when it takes the lives of its own citizens abroad. That position — that the government should be able to use lethal force against individuals it deems to be a threat based on a secret executive process using standards and evidence that are never tested by a court — is disturbingly familiar. Indeed, it is just as much an affront to the rule of law as it was in 2004 when it was defended by the Bush administration.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gibbons-targeted-killings-drones-20130719,0,4996590.story