PRESS RELEASE
Activist David Swanson Shows
Obama Is Doing Everything
for Which We Dumped George III
Jan. 2, 2012 (EIRNS)—David Swanson, an antiwar activist and a founder of AfterDowningStreet.org (now, WarIsACrime.org) showed Dec. 31 that Obama's signing statement for his Hitler Law, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, duplicates everything for which we threw out George III beginning in 1776. Under the title, "Obama Crowned Himself on New Year's Eve," Swanson writes, "These were among the complaints registered the last time this nation had a king," and lists the colonists' grievances against George III from the Declaration of Independence, such as, "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:... for depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury; For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments...."
"To prevent the U.S. government from behaving like a king," Swanson wrote, "the drafters of the U.S. Constitution empowered an elected legislature to write every law, to declare every war, and to remove its executive from office [emphasis added]. To further prevent the abuse of individuals' rights, those authors wrote into the Constitution, even prior to the Bill of Rights, the right to habeas corpus and the right never to be punished for treason unless convicted in an open court on the testimony of at least two witnesses to an overt act of war or assistance of an enemy."
Obama has repealed all these rights, and the only remaining remedy, as Swanson implies, is to remove him from office. Speaking of the NDAA 2012 bill that Obama just signed into law, he says: "The law that Obama was signing was the most direct assault yet seen on the [U.S.] basic structure of self-governance and human rights... [but] it is not a leap from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating decade-long march toward a police-and-war state.
"President Obama has claimed the power to imprison people without a trial since his earliest months in office. He spoke in front of the Constitution in the National Archives while gutting our founding document in 2009. President Obama has claimed the power to torture if needed, issued an executive order claiming the power of imprisonment without trial, exercised that power on a massive scale at Bagram, and claimed and exercised the power to assassinate U.S. citizens. Obama routinely kills people with unmanned drones."
Swanson further document how each of the "exceptions" to the NDAA itemized by Obama in his signing statement, are to argue that it is not up to the Congress to define what Obama's powers are and are not. It is only up to his sole discretion.
Obama must be removed.
