Glenn Greenwald exposes a few of the major hypocrisies of the memo here, and you can read the memo itself here. What’s amusing, pathetic, and revolting about the memo is that it establishes entirely arbitrary, ipso facto, ipse dixi* standards for decisions to be based on secret evidence that no authority other than the President himself is allowed to examine and, even then, after dealing itself all four aces, and ensuring that no one else at the table has anything higher than a pair of deuces, the Administration deals itself a fifth ace by making the “standards” so vague and insubstantial that it’s hard to see how they could be violated. It declares grandly that a potential murder victim must “pose an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States” and then hastens to explain that this judgment involves a “a broader concept of imminence” than is usually the case. The standard “does not require that the U.S. have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” Because why should you have to have “clear evidence” before you execute somebody for a crime you think they might commit in the future, and why should you have to know what exactly it is that they might do? That’s setting the bar awfully high, isn’t it? I mean, if we actually took that seriously, we’d probably never kill anyone!
I hope that a few “liberals” will now start to realize how illiberal our president is, and I hope that “Torture John” Brennan will have to endure a few uncomfortable moments before Congress prior to assuming his role as head of the CIA and protector of our nation’s leading torturers. It would be nice if the President began to feel that there was even the slightest political downside to a policy of gratuitous assassination. But I’m afraid that he won’t be feeling that any time soon.
*The DOJ memo makes a show of citing legal authorities to legitimize the “standards,” but falls back on “inherent” (i.e., not in the Constitution) rights that somehow trump rights explicitly stated in the Constitution, like the one about not being deprived of one’s life without due process of law. And when even that fails, the “Justice” Department allows the President undefined and unrestricted leeway to redefine the legal concepts involved to fit whatever it is he has done in the past and may do in the future.
