Last month we talked about how similar Obama's actions re the pipeline commotion were quite similar to those of Bush. This month's entry is about the Obama Office of Legal Counsel, which, with regard to the al-Awlaki killing, seems to be of the same mindset as that of Bush's. David Cole dissects this question quite well.
Cole's conclusion is that the lawyers under Obama operated basically the same as they did under Bush. The Office wrote memos that enabled the President to feel the action was legally justified, although, as with Bush, the actual memo is too secret for we citizens to know what it says. As with Bush, some liberal lawyers question the merits of the legal positions advanced, assuming their guess is good.
Cole concludes:
Secret memos, with or without leaked accounts to The New York Times, are no substitute for legal or democratic process. As long as the Obama administration insists on the power to kill the people it was elected to represent—and to do so in secret, on the basis of secret legal memos—can we really claim that we live in a democracy ruled by law?
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