Rein in
unchecked executive
Editing, re-reporting, brief comment by Carolyn Bennett
Nation under rule of law
Adjudication in "just" courts of law
Governed by ethically
principled people
Or by belligerently lawless barbarians
Dozen years ago
On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives
Congresswoman Barbara Lee
Mr. Speaker, I rise today really with a very heavy heart,
one that is filled with sorrow for the families and the loved ones who were
killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish and the most callous would
not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across
the world. 
This unspeakable act on the United States has forced me,
however, to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction.
September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am
convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international
terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated
matter.
This resolution will pass, although we all know that the
President can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be,
some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of
mourning. Some of us must say, let us step back for a moment. Let us just pause
for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that
this does not spiral out of control.
I have agonized over this vote, but I came to grips with it
today and I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful
yet very beautiful memorial service. As a member of the clergy so eloquently
said, ‘As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.’
2009 ─ forward
Maintaining murderous status quo or searching for an elusive
savior
“Once elected as savior,” Infowars.com editor Kurt Nimmo
wrote early last month, U.S. President Barack “Obama not only continued [former
President George W] Bush’s war policies – in fact, the war policies of the
global elite – he also expanded them.
 |
| Iraq |
“Troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon and the
CIA stepped up the terror campaign in Pakistan. Gitmo remains open.”
[Further, it should be noted that this
regime is at war or is engaged in some form of hostility with more than a dozen
nations and peoples of the world: Somalia, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Korea, Iran, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Mali, Iraq, North Korea, China,
Russia, Egypt, Venezuela]
“Democrats [were] so enthusiastic about the murder campaign
in Libya,” Nimmo writes, “that they didn’t even bother to vote on it ─ not that
Obama gave them a chance. Like Bush before him, he used the unchecked power of
a unitary presidency to attack the African country.
 |
| Drone Strikes Yemen |
“Both Republicans and Democrats love mass murder and
military conquest,” Nimmo writes. Former President William Jefferson “Clinton
attacked Yugoslavia and Democrats and liberals cheered him on. Congress was
silent. Only four Democrats objected: Barbara Lee in the House and Russ
Feingold (Wisconsin), Fritz Hollings (South Carolina) and Jeff Bingaman (New
Mexico) in the Senate….”
 |
| Drone strikes Pakistan |
Silenced opposition
In 2003 as the Bush government “prepared to attack Iraq,
President Bush dismissed the antiwar movement as a focus group.” As war
criminal President Clinton coined when he bombed the former Yugoslavia with
depleted uranium ─ “Democrats deem their war(s) ‘humanitarian.’… Democrats and other liberal supporters of the
establishment are not opposed to mass murder and wanton slaughter by the state.
They merely oppose it when Republicans do it. Opposition is a partisan formality.”
And with help from across the spectrum, President Obama “demobilized the
antiwar movement.”
Referencing a recent study by Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas
of the University of Michigan and Indiana University, respectively, Kurt Nimmo
says, “As Democrats took over the Congress and White House,” the U.S. “antiwar
movement demobilized.”
 |
| Drone strikes Somalia |
Today a murderous
regime
Term two
They play with words and meanings and change them at will.
The attorney general refuses to call what they are doing “assassination” but
admits they are targeting and killing U.S. citizens without due process of law.
Scahill called it assassination and cited among the murdered U.S. citizens by
the U.S. government, Anwar al-Awlaki.
“
|
[Beginning] in mid-2009,” Scahill said, “the Obama
administration had made a decision that it was going to try to take him out.
After numerous attempts to kill him with drone strikes, the Americans succeeded
in killing him on September 30, 2011.”
A letter by the U.S. Attorney General “talks about how Anwar
Awlaki was actively involved in imminent (imminent is variously and
conveniently defined) plots against the United States; that he had directed the
so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a
U.S. airplane over Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day 2009.” But Eric Holder
makes “these allegations … [without] actual evidence ever having been presented
against Awlaki to indicate that he played the role that Eric Holder is
asserting.”
Awlaki’s “trial was basically litigated through leaks in the
press; he was never indicted on any of the charges.” Yet Holder claims to have
all of this evidence,” which is conveniently “too dangerous to be made public.”
What persist are “posthumous trial by leaks” and the published content of this
recent letter by the U.S Attorney General.
Anwar Awlaki is not the only victim of a denial of justice
under law. There have been other killings: people targeted and people around
them, for whatever reason, who have been destroyed.
“It could mean,” Scahill comments, “…that these people were
killed in the signature strikes”…, in a kind of “pre-crime,” that is when ─
The United States determines that
military-aged males in a targeted area are terrorists and their deaths [U.S.
extrajudicial assassinations] are then recorded as having killed ‘terrorists’
or ‘militants.’ …
“Despite … [the Obama government’s] overtures to the
anti-targeted-killing or -assassination crowd ─ where they are trying to say,
‘We’re going to do this in a cleaner way’ ─ the whole thing [drone-attack,
targeted extrajudicial killing program] has just been one massively dirty
operation”
Callousness oozes from the public record
When faced with survivor lawsuits “trying to compel the
government to present actual evidence” that their relatives were involved with
terror plots, “the Obama administration and the Justice Department intervened
in the case and filed briefs saying that the evidence is too sensitive to be
made public.”
 |
| Pakistan's dead |
The government supplied “declarations from CIA Director
Panetta, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, from
then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates” all echoing the “too sensitive,” “national
security threat” claims. This, Scahill comments, is “Classic Cheney/Bush,” a
tactic now being used by U.S. President Barack Obama, Nobel Peace laureate and constitutional
lawyer.
E
|
xtralegal politically expedient targeted killing is wrong
whether or not targets are U.S. citizens.
Scahill continued by stating the obvious, which is well
overdue: that the legislative branch of government should insist on answers to,
among other questions, “how these Americans were killed.” Equally important as
impetus for Congress to do its job is that moral principal as well as U. S. law
and international convention assert an essential blindness, which means that whether
the victims (and they are clearly victims) of the U.S. government’s lethal
dragnet or fishing expedition or entrapment are “Americans or not” is
irrelevant.
“
|
How a society treats its own citizens is a good indicator of
how it’s going to treat non-citizens around the world [and] we have a Congress
that largely is failing to ask the right questions,” Scahill said. “If the
basic standards of due process are not being afforded to American citizens,
then they certainly are not going to be afforded to non-American citizens.”  |
| U.S. Militarized |
Converse also true
Scahill does not go further in affirming what I believe to
be equally true and that has been clearly demonstrated in the actions of successive
U.S. regimes. If this government or any government treats other nations and the
lives of other peoples with such contempt, belligerence, violence ─ and if a
regime is allowed to get away with it ─ then it will surely treat the lives of its
“own people” with the same contempt, belligerence and lawlessness.
 |
| U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee California |
Loyal Opposition
Honorable Barbara Lee
Today at her website, Congresswoman Lee in recalling that
she was the only Member of Congress who in 2001 who opposed the Authorization
for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and “warned about the state of perpetual war
that our nation has now entered” complimented the president’s words in his speech
today. She described it as “a bold step” to call for ‘efforts to refine and
ultimately repeal’ the AUMF’s mandate.”
B
|
ut, she said, “It is far past time to repeal this overly
broad, blank check for war.”
In January of this year ─ long before today’s presidential
words, long before the death toll and refugees mounted, before anti-American
protests and lawsuits, before hunger
strikes and domestic protests erupted ─ U.S. Congresswoman Lee had introduced
H.R. 198 to end [not amend] the AUMF. She has also introduced the “Drones
Accountability Act.” Today she linked the abuses of power reflected in the
Executive’s widespread breaches of international sovereignty and human rights
and domestic civil liberties as flowing from the Authorization for Use of
Military Force.
The lawmaker said she continues to be gravely concerned
about “the use of lethal drone strikes and the current lack of Congressional
involvement and oversight. The lethal use of drones,” she said, “is but one
example in the disturbing expansion of war powers that have been justified
under the AUMF.
This includes wire tapping,
indefinite detentions at the Guantanamo prison facilities, and the deployment
of troops in dozens of countries without sufficient Congressional oversight.
H.R. 198 introduced by Congresswoman Lee in January 2013: CONGRESSIONAL FINDING
“Congress
finds
|
that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law
107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note), signed into law on September 18, 2001, has been
used to justify a broad and open-ended authorization for the use of military
force and such an interpretation is inconsistent with the authority of Congress
to declare war and make all laws for executing powers vested by the Constitution
in the Government of the United States.”
Congresswoman Lee said today, “For the integrity of our
Constitution, we must ensure that we have full accountability and sufficient
transparency in our nation’s war powers.” She pledged to continue fighting “for
a full and public debate” on these issues.
Prescient almost a dozen years on
Recalled in a Guardian article, U.S. Representative Barbara
Lee said in 2001: “‘we are not dealing with a conventional war. We cannot respond in a conventional manner. …
If we rush to launch a counterattack, we run too great a risk that women,
children and other noncombatants will be caught in the cross-fire … We must be careful
not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused
target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.’”
T
|
he published 2012 interview ends: Congresswoman “Lee
believes that as America prepares to move on it should not neglect its responsibility
to right those things it has done wrong.
‘We bombed the heck out of these
countries.
We shattered lives.
The refugee numbers are horrendous.
We’ve unfortunately killed innocent
civilians.
We have a moral responsibility to figure
out how to help.’
Sources and notes
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Barbara Lee (CA)
September 14, 2001, the Floor of the House addressing the matter of
AUTHORIZING USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES AGAINST THOSE
RESPONSIBLE FOR RECENT ATTACKS AGAINST
THE UNITED STATES September 14, 2001, The Library of Congress (THOMAS Home:
Congressional Record107th Congress (2001-2002, Page: H5643, GPO's PDF
“Obama Successfully Demobilized the Antiwar Movement” (Kurt
Nimmo, Infowars.com), April 8, 2011, http://truth11.com/2011/04/09/obama-successfully-demobilized-the-anti-war-movement/
Truth11.com dedicates
itself “to the truth, true journalism, the truth movement.” Kurt Nimmo is
editor of Infowars.com, http://truth11.com/2011/04/09/obama-successfully-demobilized-the-anti-war-movement/
“Killing Americans: Jeremy Scahill on Obama Admin’s
Admission 4 U.S. Citizens Died in Drone Strikes, Thursday, May 23, 2013,
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/23/killing_americans_jeremy_scahill_on_obama
“Congresswoman Barbara Lee: once the lone voice against the
Afghanistan war” ( This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 14.24 EDT,
Friday July 27, 2012, last modified at 14.26 EDT, Friday July 27, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/27/barbara-lee-congresswoman-interview
H.R. 198 LEE, JANUARY 4, 2013
Summary: H.R.198 — 113th Congress (2013-2014)
One summary of the bill: Introduced in House (01/04/2013)
H.R.198: Latest Title: Repeal of the Authorization for Use
of Military Force
Sponsor: Rep Lee, Barbara [CA-13] (introduced 1/4/2013) Cosponsors (12)
Latest Major Action: 1/4/2013 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Sponsor: Rep Lee, Barbara [CA-13] (introduced 1/4/2013) Cosponsors (12)
Latest Major Action: 1/4/2013 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
H.R.198 -- Repeal of the Authorization for Use of Military
Force (Introduced in House - IH)
HR 198 IH - 113th CONGRESS 1st Session, Congressional Record
References
H. R. 198: To repeal
Public Law 107-40 IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, January 4, 2013
Ms. LEE of California (for herself, Mr. CONYERS, Mr. ELLISON,
Mr. GRIJALVA, and Ms. EDWARDS) introduced the following bill; which was
referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs
A BILL: To repeal Public Law 107-40.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1 SHORT TITLE
This Act may be cited as the `Repeal of the Authorization
for Use of Military Force'.
SECTION 2
CONGRESSIONAL FINDING.
C
|
ongress finds that the Authorization for Use of Military
Force (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note), signed into law on September
18, 2001, has been used to justify a broad and open-ended authorization for the
use of military force and such an interpretation is inconsistent with the
authority of Congress to declare war and make all laws for executing powers
vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.
SECTION 3 REPEAL OF PUBLIC LAW 107-40.
Effective 180 days after the date of the enactment of this
Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force
(Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C.
1541 note) is hereby repealed.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:H.R.198:
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