Holder spells out why drones target US citizens

[sad sally]

4. From last October:

Speaking hours after the world learned that a C.I.A. drone strike had killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, President Obama could still not say the words “drone” or “C.I.A.” That’s classified.

Instead, in an appearance at a Virginia military base just before midday Friday, the president said that Mr. Awlaki, the American cleric who had joined Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, “was killed” and that this “significant milestone” was “a tribute to our intelligence community.” The president’s careful language was the latest reflection of a growing phenomenon: information that is public but classified.

The passage demonstrates well how classification undercuts meaningful public discussion of vital national-security issues. The CIA’s drone war in Pakistan and Yemen is being talked about around the world; in Pakistan, details about strikes are reported more promptly and deeply than in the United States. Only in the U.S. is the public subjected to stilted, bizarrely passive statements from officials about matters that are common knowledge. The reason: here, the CIA drone program is “covert action.” Officially acknowledging its existence could be grounds for a criminal prosecution.

http://harpers.org/archive/2011/10/hbc-90008266

Wait until the President's personal army/private assassination squad, "the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists," is moved from the Pentagon administration/budget to the CIA's - then anyone, including any American deemed to be a terrorist, will be fair game to be assassinated by presidential orders, and will never have to tell anyone why they made that determination.

If this is policy under a Democratic presidency, what will it look like when there's another Republican administration?

Remember CIA Director Petraeus called JSOC "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."