If They Can Do It To Any Citizen, They Can Do It To You

And you thought things would get better post-Bush.  Think again.  Obama's Director of National Intelligence says that it can kill an American citizen at will, and his Treasury Department can punish your lawyer for trying to protect you.  Earlier this year, the New York Times reported:

The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counter-terrorism officials said.

Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and spent years in the United States as an imam, is in hiding in Yemen. . . . A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president.

The director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told a House hearing in February that such a step was possible. “We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community,” he said. “If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Obama approved Awlaki's assassination back in April, which was rubber-stamped by the National Security Council.  As for the Treasury Department angle, here's Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com:

Early last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Obama assassination target  (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki, to seek a federal court order restraining the Obama administration from killing his son (an American citizen) without due process of law.  But then, a significant and extraordinary problem arose: regulations promulgated several years ago by the Treasury Department prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with individuals labeled by the Government as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist," and those regulations specifically bar lawyers from providing legal services to such individuals without a special "license" from the Treasury Department specifically allowing such representation.

In what is surely a coincidence, on July 16 -- two weeks after Awlaki's father retained ACLU lawyers for his son -- the Treasury Department slapped that label on Awlaki.  That action instantly made it a criminal offense for anyone to file suit on behalf of Awlaki or otherwise provide legal representation to him without express permission from the U.S. Government.  In effect, a U.S. citizen now has to ask permission from a bureaucrat to obtain his constitutional right to due process under the law.