The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says:<\/p>\n
No person shall \u2026 be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law \u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So how did the legal memorandum \u201cjustifying\u201d assassination of U.S. citizens by drone try to sidestep the Fifth Amendment?<\/p>\n
It relied on reasoning from two countries that don\u2019t have any constitution.<\/p>\n
The New York Times reports:<\/p>\n
One might have expected a thoughtful memo that carefully weighed the pros and cons and discussed how such a strike accords with international and Constitutional law.<\/p>\n
Instead, the memo turns out to be a slapdash pastiche of legal theories \u2014 some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law \u2014 that was clearly tailored to the desired result. Perhaps the administration held out so long to avoid exposing the thin foundation on which it based such a momentous decision.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Neither England nor Israel have a constitution.<\/p>\n
Indeed, as the BBC notes, they are in a very small group of three:<\/p>\n
In all but a handful of democracies in the world, the nation\u2019s constitution can be found in a single document. The exceptions are Israel, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nothing in the memo says that it only applies to U.S. citizens living abroad. Indeed, the government has claimed the right to assassinate or indefinitely detain any American citizen without any due process.<\/p>\n
Actually, the U.S. has never said that it won\u2019t assassinate Americans living on U.S. soil.<\/p>\n
Sadly, even though Americans have a constitution, we have lost virtually all of the rights contained in that document.<\/p>\n
Source: George Washington’s blog<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says: No person shall \u2026 be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law \u2026. So how did the legal memorandum \u201cjustifying\u201d assassination of U.S. citizens by drone try to sidestep the Fifth Amendment? It relied on reasoning from two countries that don\u2019t have any … Continue reading “Assassination by drone: US relies on laws from countries without a constitution”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[9357,186,9359,178,9358],"class_list":["post-14524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-assassination-by-drone","tag-britain","tag-fifth-amendment","tag-israel","tag-us-constitution"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14525,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14524\/revisions\/14525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}