The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially

Under this new standard, a president can go on a four-to-eight year crime spree and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable.

The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially

Related:

Immunity for Me but Not for Thee

President Obama ordered a drone strike in Yemen to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and Islamic Imam critical of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Before releasing the drones that killed al-Awlaki and two others, the White House sought and received a Memorandum from the Department of Justice providing legal justification for the attack.

Several questions come to mind.  Should the memo from DoJ authorizing the killing of an American citizen abroad without judicial due process immunize President Obama for violating the federal criminal statute that imposes criminal penalties for the extra territorial killing of an American citizen?

Could a subsequent President, a member of the opposing political party, direct a new Attorney General to investigate whether the killing of the U.S. citizen by drone attack in Yemen violated federal criminal law? If an indictment is returned against the now former President for that killing, should President Obama be allowed to claim immunity or be forced to stand trial?

06-10-2024 Reading update: Trotsky the Traitor

I just finished reading ‘Trotsky the Traitor’ and ‘Why I Resigned From the Trotsky Defense Committee’ by Mauritz A. Hallgren. While reading ‘Trotsky the Traitor’, I was reminded of what happens when so-called ‘pro-democracy’ activists are being investigated in their home countries, for treason, yet the corporate media sings their praises. Interestingly, Wikipedia states that the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky was a front organization.

Related:

Trotsky The Traitor – Selected Writings

Trotskyism

Why Are CNN, ABC, and NBC Reporters Embedding With the Israeli Military?

Why Are CNN, ABC, and NBC Reporters Embedding With the Israeli Military?

Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, noted in an interview that “the original purpose of embedding was to control journalists.” She and Christenson both referenced Phillip Knightley’s classic 1975 book The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker From the Crimea to Vietnam, which describes how the government invented embedded journalism in response to critical coverage of the Vietnam War. In a chapter added in 2004, Knightley wrote that as civilian casualties in Afghanistan passed 5,000, “the Pentagon sought a media strategy that would turn attention back to the military’s role in the war, especially the part played by ordinary American service men and women. This would require getting war correspondents ‘on side.’

H/T: Council Estate Media

Previously:

Israel’s War on American Student Activists

For years the Israel on Campus Coalition—a little-known organization with links to Israeli intelligence—has used student informants to spy on pro-Palestinian campus groups.

Israel’s War on American Student Activists (archived)

Looks like those microgrants are for more than just attending pro-Israel protests.

Previously:

Gaza Poet Who Inspired Nonviolent Protests Is Injured in Israeli Airstrike; 5 Relatives Killed

Palestinian poet Ahmed Abu Artema was seriously injured in an Israeli airstrike on October 24 that also killed five members of his family, including his 12-year-old son. Artema helped inspire the Great March of Return, a series of nonviolent protests in Gaza starting in 2018 when thousands of Palestinians marched to the militarized fence separating them from their ancestral homes inside Israel, braving deadly Israeli sniper fire that killed hundreds and injured thousands more. Artema spoke with Democracy Now!about the mass protests in 2019. “The Palestinians in Gaza are actually in a real prison,” he said. “When tens of thousands of Palestinians share in the March of Return, they want to say that we never gave up our right to return.”

Gaza Poet Who Inspired Nonviolent Protests Is Injured in Israeli Airstrike; 5 Relatives Killed

The Maidan Massacre, Censorship & Ukraine: Interview with Ivan Katchanovski

Genocide Joe and Porky Poroshenko.

By Natylie Baldwin, Consortium News, 10/20/23

Canadian-Ukrainian professor Ivan Katchanovski’s investigation of the Maidan massacre in Kiev in February 2014 found an organized mass killing of both protesters and the police, with the goal of delegitimizing the Yanukovych government and its forces and seizing power in Ukraine, as he wrote for Consortium News in an in-depth article in 2019. (On Wednesday three policemenwere sentenced for the massacre, one was acquitted and one was released for time served. The official investigation ignored Katchanovski’s academic research.)

The Maidan Massacre, Censorship & Ukraine: My Interview with Ivan Katchanovski