NerObama Threatens You:
Stop Obama's Killing Spree
by the Editors
Oct. 24—With the murder of three American citizens by airstrikes in Yemen, and the killing of Libya's head of state Muammar Qaddafi and his family members with U.S. and NATO drone strikes, U.S. President Barack Obama has entered into a new, and even more dangerous phase of his Nero-like behavior, demonstrating to the world again why he must be removed from office now.
Lyndon LaRouche said on Oct. 21, that Obama has claimed the right to murder anyone he chooses; he will kill anywhere in the world, and he doesn't care if the target is an American citizen, either. It's as if Obama is running his own worldwide "Murder, Inc." The only difference between Obama and the notorious gangster Meyer Lansky, is that Lansky was smart, and Obama is a homocidal maniac.
LaRouche emphasized that "Bugsy" Obama is not acting on his own. His worse-than-Nero behavior is being carried out on behalf of the British monarchy. Obama is acting as an instrument of the Roman imperial system, known as the British Crown. He is worse than Nero, because he has greater kill power at his disposal. Emperor Nero had no drones.
The British hand-picked Obama precisely because he was and is totally insane, LaRouche noted. His behavior as President cannot possibly be understood unless you start from the fact that he is criminally insane. Under British orders, Obama is engaging in open and flagrant Hitler-like actions. This factor of inhumanity, displayed in the cold-blooded assassination of Qaddafi and his sons, as well as in the al-Awlaki family case, is caused by his insanity. Unless this lunatic puppet of London is removed from office, soon, LaRouche warned, something like a world war is going to erupt.
International Calls for Investigation
The condemnations of Obama's extra-judicial killings are coming from all sides—except from our own cowardly Congress in the United States. However, U.S. intelligence sources report that, behind the scenes, there is institutional awareness of the dangerous precedent that has been set by the invasion of Libya and the killing of its head of state, and that there is increasing discussion of the possibility of impeaching Obama.
Qaddafi was captured, and then killed on Oct. 20, after a U.S. Predator drone and NATO aircraft attacked and broke up a convoy of vehicles trying to leave the Libyan city of Sirte. Several of the vehicles were destroyed, killing 50 people. Although there are conflicting accounts, it is clear that Qaddafi was captured alive nearby, beaten, and probably tortured, and then executed with a bullet to the head.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared on Oct. 21, that the killing of Qaddafi was a violation of the rules of the Geneva Conventions during armed conflicts. According to Ria Novosti, Lavrov emphasized that "They should not have killed him." Lavrov also said that NATO's actions should be scrutinized for their lack of compliance with international law, since all Qaddafi was trying to do was to leave the scene.
The fact that UN Security Council Resolution 1973, based on protecting civilians, was turned into a justification for killing Qaddafi, which was not the intention of Russia and China when they voted for the resolution, is also increasingly coming under public scrutiny. Russian representative to NATO Dmitry Rogozin attacked the Western elation over the death of Qaddafi as sadistic. "The faces of the leaders of world democracies are so happy, as if they remembered how they hanged stray cats in basements in their childhoods," Rogozin said.
On Oct. 20 Rogozin told Russian radio Echo of Moscow that NATO was directly involved in the operation to kill the former Libyan leader. "Apparently there were orders that oriented the military servicemen who are in Libya and that directed them to ensure the physical elimination of Gaddafi," Rogozin said. He added that Russia must draw a conclusion from the existing situation: "We must bear in mind who we are dealing with in the face of Western democracies."
Outside the Rule of Law
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHRC) and a growing number of organizations are calling for a probe into Qaddafi's death. Commissioner Navi Pillay has called for a full investigation of the killing. "We believe there is a need for an investigation," said Pillay's spokesman Rupert Colville. "The two cell phone videos that have emerged, one of him alive, and one of him dead, taken together are very disturbing," he told reporters in Geneva. "You can't just chuck the law out of the window," he added. "Killing someone outside a judicial procedure, even in countries where there is the death penalty, is outside the rule of law."
Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, said, "The Geneva Conventions are very clear that when prisoners are taken they may not be executed willfully and if that was the case then we are dealing with a war crime, something that should be tried," according to an al-Jazeera report.
Human Rights Watch and other groups have called for an investigation of the circumstances of Qaddafi's death, because if he was killed while in detention, it would constitute a serious violation of the laws of war.
South Africa's envoy to the UN, Baso Bangqu, said on Oct. 21 in New York, that an investigation of Qaddafi's death would be a "good idea." South Africa is a member of the UN Security Council.
Obama Should Be Impeached
Barack 'Nero' Obama had already established his eligibility for impeachment prior to his murder of Qaddafi. His launching of the Libya War, and instituting of the Super-Congress, both qualify him as a violator, not just a threatener, of specific provisions of the U.S. Constitution, as well as its Preamble. LaRouche has been joined by a handful of prominent personalities in pointing out this fact. Now the number is growing.
Andrew Napolitano, the conservative host of Fox TV's "Freedom Watch," said on Oct. 21, that Obama should be impeached over the murder of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, and if Congress won't do that, then Obama should be indicted once he is out of office. In an interview with Newsmax.com, Napolitano said it doesn't matter that Awlaki was probably guilty; the fact is, he was a U.S. citizen, and the Constitution bars his killing without due process.
"We live in a time in which the government recognizes no limits on its own power," he said. "It doesn't recognize the natural law. It doesn't recognize the federal law. It doesn't recognize the Constitution.... The President in the past couple of weeks became judge, jury and executioner for a very hated and probably guilty individual. But the Constitution says no person shall be denied life, liberty or property, much less an American—which this guy was—without due process of law.... The killing of an American is unforgiveable under the Constitution and it is an impeachable offense" (emphasis added).
Napolitano said that he never hesitated to attack the Administration of George W. Bush, but that the Obama Administration, "notwithstanding the President's lofty words as a candidate and even as President, has actually ratcheted up the police state; has ratcheted up the assault on personal liberties." He said that Obama "is shredding the Constitution more so than George W. Bush did," adding, "It's not only this President who does it, but he is doing it in a more in-your-face, more obvious and, if I may, more boastful way."
Liberal columnist and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon.com, a strong critic of Obama's targeted killings, recently criticized Obama for killing a third U.S. citizen in Yemen. On Oct. 14, two weeks after killing U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, the Obama Administration killed Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, along with his 17-year-old cousin, and seven other people in a drone attack. The boy's grandfather said that Abdulrahman and his cousin were at a barbeque and preparing to eat, when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their lives.
"So here we have yet again one of the most consequential acts a government can take—killing one of its own citizens, in this case a teenage boy—and the government refuses even to talk about what it did, why it did it, what its justification is, what evidence it possesses, or what principles it has embraced in general for such actions," Greenwald wrote. "Indeed, it refuses even to admit it did this, since it refuses even to admit that it has a drone program at all and that it is engaged in military action in Yemen."
"Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world," Greenwald continued. "Who else does that? Nobody—certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people's lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts."
Obama's Killing Machine
As EIR revealed last week,[1] Obama has adopted the fascist police-state measures put into place by the Cheney-Bush regime, and taken them to an even more extreme level in violating the U.S. Constitution. The launching of the war in Libya was itself a violation of the Constitution, which the Nero-like President justified by saying that consulting the Congress would just "get in the way" of exerting his (and his British masters') will.
A number of new revelations about Obama's expansion of the "counterterrorism" killing machine created by the Bush-Cheney Administration, are found in the new book Top Secret America by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin. While the focus of the book is the huge expansion of both the government's national security agencies and the private contractors who supplement them, the book contains a considerable amount of material on the targeted-killing apparatus maintained by the military and the CIA, for which Obama became an enthusiast immediately upon taking office in 2009.
And it contains new relevations about how this apparatus is planning to target Mexico and the United States itself.
Obama's unprecedented use of drones for targeted killings began shortly after he became President. This was especially the case in Pakistan, where there were 35 drone strikes in 2008; in 2009, there were 53; and 117 in 2010. Pakistani government agencies say that over 2,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the five years up to June 2011, including 938 in 2010 alone.
(Note that, according to journalist Nicholas Brinkerhoff, Predator drones were launched in Libya at least 145 times during the eight-month assault, more than twice the number launched in Pakistan.)
Priest and Arkin report that there are three separate "kill lists" maintained by the Obama Administration—by the National Security Council (NSC), the CIA, and JSOC (the DOD's Joint Special Operations Command). The CIA operates in countries where U.S. isn't officially conducting military operations, such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan; targeted killings by the CIA in those countries require Presidential approval. In July 2011, according to Priest and Arkin, Obama took advantage of the political void caused by protests in Yemen to secretly order a dramatic increase in drone strikes against al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP); this was unusual, they note, because the U.S. is not at war with Yemen, and Obama did not seek Yemeni approval.
Private contractors play a major role in these targeted killings; they fly the drones on takeoff and landing, but have to hand the controls over to a military or CIA officer for the kill. Much of the control operations for drone attacks takes place in the continental U.S., in northern Virginia, and at military bases around the country. Contractors also maintain the drone aerial vehicles, and have built and staff the global system that carries surveillance data from drones and satellites to processing stations in the U.S.
But the CIA's targeted-killing campaign pales in comparison to that of JSOC, which has a much longer kill-list, and much looser rules, Priest and Arkin report. The Command, mostly operating in obscurity, flies ten times more drones than CIA, and has killed ten times more "al-Qaeda" operatives. Most of its killing was previously done by on-the-ground hunter-killer teams, but increasingly, drones, which are cheaper, are used.
JSOC became George W. Bush's and now Barack Obama's personal weapon against alleged terrorists, with little input from Congress, and almost no public scrutiny. The preference now is to kill suspects, and not give them a chance to surrender. After all, it's hard to find a place to keep them with all the flap over secret prisons and the spotlight on Guantanamo.
Having grown massively since 9/11, under Obama, JSOC now has a force of 25,000, including an intelligence division of 3,000. It partners with British SAS and other countries' special forces. Five thousand civilian contractors and 49 firms do top-secret level work for the Command.
A report published in the Washington Post on Oct. 23, said that it was JSOC which carried out the killing of 16-year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a native of Denver, Colo., in Yemen on Oct. 14. The Post article, by Craig Whitlock, noted that one week after the airstrike, no one in the Obama White House, the Pentagon, or Congress, had taken responsibility for his death, or even publicly acknowledged that it happened. Whitlock also contrasted the official silence about the death of the 16-year-old, with the Obama Administration's eagerness to trumpet the murder of his father Anwar al-Awlaki by the CIA two weeks earlier.
One anonymous U.S. official told the Post that this air strike was launched by JSOC, not the CIA. A "senior U.S. official" also told the Post that all individuals targeted by JSOC must be approved in advance by the NSC, contradicting the account in Top Secret America that "JSOC has the rare authority to decide which individuals to add to a kill list, and then to kill them." But Obama has been personally involved with respect to Yemen. Priest and Arkin report that in 2010, Obama secretly ordered JSOC troops to Yemen, to kill leaders of AQAP, and that Command troops did kill scores of people on its hit list during a six-month period in 2010.
Is North America Next?
When Obama took office, "he cottoned to" JSOC immediately, according to Priest and Arkin, and he has used it far more than his predecessors to carry out targeted killings; now, its scope of operations is expanding.
This year, JSOC opened a 30,000 square foot command center in northern Virginia, to replicate the Command's model for operations in still other countries. Mexico is top on its list of priorities, according to Top Secret America. JSOC wants to use its targeted killings, with night raids and drones, to go after drug- and weapons-trafficking networks in Mexico. This has been discussed in the White House, Pentagon, and CIA, but supposedly nothing has yet been approved.
And JSOC is creating "targeting packages" for raids and investigations, for use by other U.S. agencies such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), in which JSOC would utilize its vast data-mining capabilities, including its own supercomputer, which contains vast amounts of data on U.S. citizens and residents. While JSOC supposedly operates within the confines of the law regarding data-collection on U.S. citizens, we have seen, with the Awlaki and related killings, just how quickly Obama is ready to cast aside U.S. law and the Constitution to crush those whom he considers his enemies.
Are you next?
A New War?
Obama's war against the American people does not exclude more foreign wars, of course. In the wake of the Qaddafi hit, there has been broad talk of targeting of Syria's Bashir Assad, and Iran's Ahmadinejad—not to mention Russian Prime Minister Putin! This is world-empire talk, reminiscent of Cheney-Bush, but coming straight from British-run Obama.
The most obvious Obama target is Iran.
Last week, the Obama Administration announced indictments of an alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard official, along with others, in a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubair. The alleged plot involved Mexican drug cartel hit men, and plans to kill the Saudi diplomat while he was dining in a Washington restaurant.
The alleged plot was so amateurish and the details so vague that there was immediate skepticism about the story, from across the political spectrum. Andrew Napolitano of Fox TV likened the scheme to a Marx Brothers comedy, and charged that the entire story had actually been an elaborate FBI sting operation.
The Iranian government, citing Interpol evidence, claimed that the alleged "mastermind" of the plot was not a member of the Revolutionary Guard's al-Quds Brigade, as charged by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, but actually, a known leader of the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), a dissident Iranian group on the U.S. State Department's terrorist list, protected by the U.S. at their camp in Iraq, and formerly backed by Saddam Hussein.
While the assassination plot has been widely questioned, there is a clear message behind the charges: The Obama Administration continues taking its cues from Bush-Cheney, and contemplating action against Iran.
On Oct. 15, the Washington Post reported, in a lead front-page story, that the Iranian nuclear program was in disarray, according to two recent reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). The Stuxnet virus continues to plague the Natanz nuclear facility, Iran's major enrichment plant; sanctions have cut off access to specialty metals that are vital for the manufacturing of new centrifuges; old centrifuges are breaking down from wear; the assassinations of four leading Iranian nuclear physicists—widely believed to have been carried out by either Israel or the U.S.—has further set back work.
Furthermore, a senior U.S. intelligence source has reported that the recently updated National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear weapons program has reaffirmed the November 2007 assessment that Iran halted work on a weaponization program in 2003, and there is no concrete evidence that the program has been resumed.
Under these circumstances, according to another senior intelligence source, not even Israel can justify strikes against Iran's nuclear sites. Thus, the alleged assassination plot comes at a moment when just such a pretext may be what the Obama Administration—and Israeli warhawk Prime Minister Netanyahu—need to justify a war that could blow up the planet.
[1] Edward Spannaus, "The Coup Structure That Cheney Built, and How It Grew under Obama," EIR, Oct. 21, 2011.
