By Cliff Montgomery – Mar. 9th, 2010
A Washington Post article printed on January 27th held a remarkable statement:
“Both the CIA and the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command of the Department of Defense] maintain listsof individuals…whom they seek to kill or capture,” stated the paper.
“The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [Islamist cleric Anwar al-] Aulaqi, whose name was addedlate last year.
“As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said thatAulaqi’s name has now been added,” according to the Post article.
A few weeks later, the Post printed a correction of some of these bold statements.
“The article referred incorrectly to the presence of U.S. citizens on a CIA list of people the agency seeks to killor capture,” stated The Washington Post in a correction which ran in the paper’s February 12th edition.
“After The Post’s report was published, a source said that a statement the source made about the CIA list wasmisunderstood…and a CIA spokesman said that The Post’s account of the list was incorrect,” the newspapercontinued.
In others words, the report was wrong about the CIA list because the Agency said it was wrong…
But it’s what The Washington Post did not retract that deserves a more immediate attention.
Though the CIA apparently does not maintain such a list, “the military’s Joint Special Operations Command [indeed] maintains a target list that includes several Americans,” thepaper verified.
“In recent weeks,” the Post continued, “U.S. officials have said that the government is prepared to kill U.S.citizens who are believed to be involved in terrorist activities that threaten [other] Americans.”
The correction may be found online, printed just above the Post article.
And at a House Intelligence Committee hearing held on February 3rd, Director of National Intelligence DennisBlair testified that as far as he was concerned, federal agents may kill U.S. citizens living abroad who arethought to be involved in terrorist activity.
“We don’t target people for free speech,” he claimed before the panel. “We target them for taking action thatthreatens Americans.”
“We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community,” Blair said as a response to queries fromRep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the committee’s top Republican.
“If…we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that,” addedBlair.
That Mr. Blair and other federal officials may be acting out of some genuine patriotic intention frankly isirrelevant. We at the American Spark don’t care what U.S. government officials hope to do. We are onlyconcerned with what they actually do.
And it appears that what they are actually doing is killing American citizens without a trial.
Since there are no trials for these executions–and thus no genuine oversight of government officials–preciselywho determines which of our fellow citizens may improperly “threaten” other Americans?
And what if these same government officials–who have gotten so much so wrong over the last severalyears–get this wrong as well?
Apparently no one in our government has thought that far ahead.
