In “Obama’s Shariah-protection racket” at WND, December 6, Pamela Geller discusses some ominous implications of Obama’s claim to have the power to decide to kill American citizens at war with the U.S. — which may be legitimate in itself — combined with his denial of the truth about the Islamic jihad against the U.S. and other non-Muslim states.
Obama administration lawyers stated Thursday that American citizens are legitimate military targets if they’re waging war against the United States. This came just a day after it was revealed that the administration had ordered a Shariah-compliant scrub of all counterterrorism materials, so that they wouldn’t say anything about Islam or jihad and would leave law enforcement officials completely unequipped to understand the enemy ideology.
Taken together, these two decisions are ominous. If we are not fighting against Islamic terrorists, then who exactly is the enemy? Which Americans will Obama target? And it is Obama’s decision: Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson said Thursday that it was up to the executive branch to decide whether an American citizen was waging war against the United States and thus had no legal immunity, and needed to be taken out.
If you remove jihad from the equation, and Congress has not declared war, then to whom is Obama referring as being at war with the United States?
I think this is a dangerous precedent and beyond the scope of the president’s executive powers. He has been a serial abuser of Executive Privilege. Did he consult with the Supreme Court on this question? No, he did not. Did he consult with Congress? No, he did not. Or for that matter, did he consult with Congress on his war in Libya?
Very scary. This sounds more like the old Germany or the USSR, than it sounds like America.”¨”¨I do agree that Anwar al-Awlaki should have been taken out as an enemy combatant; however, I do not agree with how the decision was arrived at. In fact, it’s contradictory: If we’re not at war with jihadists, then why take out Awlaki? He wasn’t bombing anyone or shooting anyone or slitting anyone’s throat. He was just sitting behind his computer encouraging people to wage jihad. But Obama says jihad is not the enemy, so what was the problem?”¨”¨I am also concerned about this decision relative to the U.N. and the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Neither one was mentioned by the Obama lawyers, CIA counsel Stephen Preston or Pentagon counsel Johnson on Thursday.
With Obama now using all branches of government to enforce the Shariah and erase all mention of Islam from counterterror materials, it is easy to imagine him deciding to use this power to take out American citizens against those imaginary groups of “right-wing extremists” his Department of Homeland Security has focused upon rather than on jihadists….