Does anyone here really believe that no president has used his authority to direct a hit ever prior to say, George Bush?
The problem is not how high the authority goes, but how low it goes. I think anyone can readily assume that the president can and will use his authority to put the green light on a hit and there is not much legally that can be said about it, but then the real question, the real question, is how low the authority goes.
A lot of strong indications I have gotten in recent years is that the authority to direct an extrajudicial killing goes down to the US Attorney level, somewhere in the midlevel chain of command at local US Attorney's offices lies the authority to determine that someone is to be killed rather than a conventional arrest and prosecution.
This, including a claim made by a recently retired prosecutor, and upon examination of how the "assistant" US attorneys rewrote the rules of engagement at Ruby Ridge, to basically authorize execution of anyone in the weaver family observed with a firearm.
Mind you, the "observed with a firearm" leading to execution is not entirely alien to common police practice now in dealing with what they determine to be "dangerous individuals". As a matter of fact, the sniper-friendly rules of engagement from Ruby Ridge have been frequently borrowed from in other cases.
So it is not exactly the president himself who is the problem, it is when we have a dead body on our hands, a victim of murder, and nobody even knows who authorized it, except that you will likely find out that the US Attorney's office would be interfering with or ignoring the death investigation, and even among them, it goes like this:
Due to the possible "complications" of a death investigation being impossible to deflect, the methods uses would then be shifted over to things which look like accidents, crime, or suicide.
From what I gather, these things go to some sort of council, a group of people will lightly argue and discuss the utility of a targeted killing vs conventional prosecution, and when the conventional prosecution is deemed "impractical", then they go to the targeted killing decision.
Then the question is what records and level of disclosure happen at these meetings, and who are the decision makers at those meetings.
One really basic aspect of American law is that you have the right to face your accusers, to know who it is that has defamed you so much that they are demanding your blood for the offense they perceive.
I am guessing that these decisions are functionally, secret trials, with "expert juries", and they actually make death decisions on a regular basis within the prison system. I have had access to some of those manuals at a federal courthouse library, but not been able to get back there for a few years. One of the books detailed some of the procedures put in place for dealing with what they consider to be "particularly dangerous" prisoners who are near the completion of their prison sentences, and some sober realities of the decisions made on whether or not to let the person go at all, and that is regardless of whether or not a sentence has been completed.
That's not even approaching what makes a person "dangerous" or prosecution "impractical" but it does not take any special stretch of the imagination at all to have grave concerns over whether or not issues of the innocence, community standing or the fact that they would rather just kill someone while violating their rights because that tidies things up better than a messy trial where the person might disclose the criminal activity of informants, collaborators, or government officials.
That's the real problem, when you effectively have an organized crime cartel using NDAA to further their extortion and protection rackets and NOT the president having the authority to identify and deal with extreme threats to the nation.
We have two board moderators here who were subject of killing attempts made prior to Obama taking office, so please understand some of us more than others have very much of an inside view of how these things worked. Drone strike? no, murder attempts made to look like accidents with some cocky government guy taking credit and saying 'oh you just got very lucky', yes. Especially when we look at that sophisticated shit someone tried on Strat.
We could not even blame the President on that one, just some obscure nobody in some obscure corner of the government who decided to be a hater and had access to some extremely rare weapons. In the case of a poisoning attempt done to another one of our people it was someone with access to a particular substance that is very hard to come by, in a form that is even harder to get than that, and under circumstances where only the government knew the exact location of the individual.
