OBAMA HAS POLICY ALLOWING HIM TO KILL ANY US CITIZEN

President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any US citizen... [Attorney General Eric Holder at Northwestern Law School] articulated the most authoritarian policy that a government can have: the right to unilaterally kill its citizens without any court order or review....The Republicans keep talking about a nonexistent death panel in national healthcare. We actually do have a death panel, and it's killing people who are healthy.... Of course, their proceedings are completely secret. The people who are put on the hit list are not informed, obviously.... The first time you're informed that you're on this list is when your car explodes, and that doesn't allow much time for due process. ... Obama has openly embraced these powers and created formal measures, an actual process for killing US citizens…. This is exactly what the framers of the Constitution told us not to do.... They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers. So what Obama's doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the US Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we're really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That's exactly the argument the framers rejected, the "trust me" principle of government....

OBAMA REFUSES TO PROSECUTE WAR CRIMES

For many civil libertarians it is impossible to vote for someone who has blocked the prosecution of war crimes. That's where you cross the Rubicon for most civil libertarians. That was a turning point for many who simply cannot to vote for someone who is accused of that type of violation. Under international law, shielding people from war-crime prosecutions is itself a form of war crime. They're both violations of international law....

OBAMA TORE HEART OUT OF NUREMBURG PRINCIPLES

The Obama administration has also outdone the Bush administration in other areas. For example, one of the most important international principles to come out of World War II was the rejection of the "just following orders" defense. We were the country that led the world in saying that defendants brought before Nuremberg could not base their defense on the fact that they were just following orders…  The reason Obama promised them [CIA] that none of them would be prosecuted is he said that they were just following the orders of higher authority in the government. That position gutted Nuremberg. Many lawyers around the world are upset because the US under the Obama administration has torn the heart out of Nuremberg...

IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY

In an unguarded moment, Senator Levin was speaking to another Democratic senator who was objecting to the fact that citizens could be assassinated under this provision, and Levin said, "I don't know if my colleague is aware that the exception language was removed at the request of the White House." Many of us just fell out of our chairs. It was a relatively rare moment on the Senate floor, unguarded and unscripted....  We have what used to be called an "imperial presidency"…. President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable....

The question for people to struggle with is how we ever hope to regain our moral standing and our high ground unless citizens are prepared to say, "Enough." And this is really the election where that might actually carry some weight — if people said, "Enough. We're not going to blindly support the president and be played anymore according to this blue state/red state paradigm. We're going to reconstruct instead of replicate. It might not even be a reinvented Democratic Party in the end that is a viable option...

KILL OR PUT ON TRIAL?

TURLEY: The accounts [of the bin Laden operation] suggest that this was an assassination [of bin Laden] from the beginning to the end, and that was largely brushed over in the media. There was never really any discussion of whether it was appropriate or even a good idea not to capture this guy and to bring him to justice....  If they can catch Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial, why not bin Laden? The principles are what separate us from the beasts.....

AFGHANISTAN:

CUSACK: And this also speaks to the question that nobody even bothers to ask: what exactly are we doing in Afghanistan now? Why are we there? … It has the highest recorded suicide rate among veterans in history and no one even bothers to state a pretense of a definable mission or goal. It appears we're there because it's not convenient for him to really get out before the election. So in that sense he's another guy who's letting people die in some @!$%#hole for purely political reasons….  TURLEY: I'm afraid, it is a political calculation.

ELECTION QUESTION FOR NOVEMBER

 [From earlier in article] Now, belief in human rights law and civil liberties leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that President Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution…. You cannot pretend that your vote does not constitute at least a tacit approval of the policies of the candidate... So the argument that Romney is no better or worse does not excuse the obligation of a voter….

[Back to end] The question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what's left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It's not enough to say, "Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System."