Judging Freedom - [SPECIAL PREMIERE - Mini Series - ] - WHY - DO PRESIDENTS KILL?

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

[SPECIAL PREMIERE - Mini Series - ] - WHY - DO PRESIDENTS KILL?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Some time before he withdrew from the presidential race, President Joe Biden secretly reaffirmed his own self-willed and self-created authority to kill persons in other countries, so long as the CIA and its military counterparts have near certainty that the target of the homicide is a member of a terrorist organization. That standard was concocted by the George W. Bush administration in 2002. There is no near-certainty standard in the law, as the phrase is oxymoronic and defies a rational definition, like nearly pregnant, just as one is either pregnant or not, one is either certain or not, there is no near there. Yet the creation of this standard underscores the lamentable absence of the rule of law in government today. The Biden administration and its three immediate predecessors have all deployed drones to kill persons who were not engaged in acts of violence at the time of their killing, irrespective of the near certainty of their membership in any organizations. Terrorist cannot be a standard for extrajudicial murder because it is subjective. To King George III,

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were terrorists. To the poor folks in Libya and Syria, to the popularly elected governments toppled by CIA inspired violence in Iran in 1953 and in Ukraine in 2014, to the innocents tortured by the CIA at black sites around the world. The CIA is a terrorist organization. The presidential use of drones to kill persons overseas began in 2002 with Bush-ordered targeted killings. It continued under President Barack Obama, who even killed Americans overseas. The rules for killing were made up by each president. They were relaxed under President Donald Trump, who gave CIA senior personnel and military commanders

the authority to kill without his express approval for each killing. Trump's folks infamously murdered an Iranian general and his companions on their way to lunch with Iraqi generals to negotiate peace between the two countries. The Biden administration quietly took back the Trump grants of authority so that today only the president can authorize targeted killing yet there is no moral constitutional or legal authority for

these killings but presidents of both political parties do it anyway the laws of war a phrase itself that is oxymoronic which are generally codified in the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter, all of which were spearheaded, written and ratified by the United States, mandate essentially that lawful wars can only be defensive and must be proportional to the threat posed or the harm already caused. Stated differently, treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory restrain the president from killing persons in other countries with which the U.S. is not lawfully at war. Yet the AUMF of 2001 purported to authorize Bush to hunt down and kill the folks whom

he failed to see coming on 9-11. Those would be his friends, the Saudis, and whom he reasonably found caused 9-11. The AUMF of 2002 authorized Bush to invade Iraq in pursuit of the weapons of mass destruction that he was told by experts inside and outside the CIA Saddam Hussein did not possess. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. We can't let the world's worst leaders blackmail, threaten, hold freedom-loving nations hostage with the world's worst weapons. Both AUMFs no longer have a valid purpose today. Yet they remain the law. The Constitution authorizes Congress to declare war against foreign countries, not random killings of persons. Neither of the AUMFs was, or is, a valid declaration of war, which the Constitution requires as a predicate for all extrajudicial presidential killings. A declaration of war defines the target and sets the end. It is not open-ended as the last four presidents have claimed with respect

to these two Bush era statutes. If the presidents are right and the AUMFs authorize them to kill whomever they wish, including Americans, then they are not presidents answerable to the law and the constitution, but kings who can kill on a whim without transparency or legal consequence. The whole purpose of confining the war-making power to Congress and the war-waging power to the president was to keep those powers separate. History is littered with examples of tyrants using the powers of the state to kill for no moral purpose.

American presidents have given themselves the power to kill. It is the functional equivalent to a loaded gun in a drawer of the president's desk. Abraham Lincoln was the first head of state in world history to target civilians militarily, and the first to engage in the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians of his own country. Franklin D. Roosevelt slaughtered thousands of innocent, helpless German civilians at the end of World War II by carpet bombing German cities, rather than targeting the German military. Harry Truman slaughtered many thousands of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

All these murders were met with popular approval, as the targets had been demonized by the machinery of government, just like the terrorists Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have killed. But demonization of human targets and popular approval of their murders cannot turn an immoral act into a moral one. An act is moral when it is consistent with the natural law. According to the Declaration of Independence, under the natural law, all persons are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right to live is the foremost natural right and the great divine gift to all persons, not just Americans. Thank you.