Wyden Challenges Obama's Death Squads

These questions [about the program] should not be a matter of 'secret law' settled behind closed doors by a small number of government lawyers - Oregon's Ron Wyden

Ron Wyden photo courtesy: siliconflorist.com

(PORTLAND, OR) - Virginia Seitz heads the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel, which provided Obama with the legal justification for assassinating US citizens on his order. Under the Bush administration, the U.S. Presidential office became notorious for enabling torture under opinions written by staffer John Yoo and approved by Jay Bybee as OLC head. Yoo is still a law professor at UC Berkeley and Bybee was appointed by Bush to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ( Bybee is currently sitting in Portland).

Stonewalling FOIA requests by the NYTimes and the ACLU, the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge that Seitz's OLC "assassination " document even exists.

Oregon senator Ron Wyden has led the congressional challenge to the assassination program by demanding what he calls the "secret law" be made public. After AG Eric Holder failed to mention the OLC document in a speech yesterday (and refused to answer questions about it).

Wyden declared:

“

These questions [about the program] should not be a matter of 'secret law' settled behind closed doors by a small number of government lawyers--every American has the right to understand when the government is allowed to kill them.

”

The Obama adminsitration, which also relied on the OLC to claim that bombing Libya was not "war," asserts its killing of US citizens without due process was authorized by Congress when it signed off on the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 but refuses to make its legal reasoning public.

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