How much has President Obama told us about his ability to kill Americans at home?

The question is pretty simple. The answer might not be that simple but it is an answer that is deserved by the American people, no matter how laborious it is to explain that answer clearly.

How much has President Obama himself told Americans about his claimed ability to target, detain and assassinate us? For years, we were given no answers that I know of.

We, the public, have gotten access to a white paper (PDF), not the actual legal memos, and that was leaked by a journalist, Michael Isikoff.

Some senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) have now received several legal memos after they threatened to filibuster some of his nominees. There are, we believe, eleven in total. The president released two more memos for the SSCI to review. They are not allowed to show them to their staff or make any record of them. The review period is temporary. The public has not been given any access to them, even though, as we now know, the president, through his attorney general, told us that the president does assume the power to kill us, even at home. But he still dodged the direct question that has been asked of him by both citizens (in a Google+ hangout session) and elected officials, including some elected officials who are responsible for oversight on committees. Holder gave some information, but left the question still very much up in the air.

Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, says that Holder’s recent response is “non-responsive, evasive, and deliberately manipulative”. I agree. Significant pressure needs to be applied by all concerned Americans until we understand clearly what power this president has assumed, what kinds of things might get us killed, or what circumstances might put us in close proximity to someone else they might target for assassination. Many innocent civilians have been killed overseas by this president because they were somehow associated, intentionally or not intentionally, with the target of a drone or cruise missile strike.

The Question

The question asked in a Google+ hangout

The Softball Question That Wasn’t

It should have been a softball question.

During a Google+ Hangout yesterday, conservative commentator Lee Doren asked President Obama whether he claims the authority to kill a U.S. citizen suspected of being associated with al Qaeda or associated forces on U.S. soil. Notice the question was restricted to only a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil (our concerns are, of course, broader and apply to the White House’s illegitimate claim of authority to kill people it unilaterally deems a threat, even if they are far from any battlefield, abroad).

What should have been a simple “no,” turned into this:

Well first of all, there has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil. We respect and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct counterterrorism operations outside of the United States. The rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States, in part because our capacity, for example, to capture a terrorist inside the United States is very different than in the foothills or mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. What I think is absolutely true is that it is not sufficient for citizens to just take my word for it that we’re doing the right thing.

The question asked by Sen. Ron Wyden

Questions about the law that allows pres to kill Americans – Americans should know the specifics of this law. The link to Wyden’s letter is here: Wyden letter.

The question asked by Sen. Rand Paul

So the situation now is that citizens know that they can be killed by their president with no due process at all. The only kind of due process is a monarchical, off with his head type due process. But we don’t know what the rules are or what it is that we might do that could get us killed by the judge/jury/executioner president.

Rand Paul is now engaged in a talking filibuster and has agreed to end it when he gets a clear answer to the question. A statement from Holder this morning still did not clarify the situation.

Rand Paul Leads Filibuster of Brennan Nomination
Senators from both parties joined the Republican from Kentucky, who opposes John O. Brennan to lead the C.I.A., who said he would “speak until I can no longer speak.”

“I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination for the C.I.A.,” Mr. Paul began. “I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

The issue is summed up in the transcript and video below. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Rand Paul is right to demand and answer to this question and there is some bipartisan agreement on this.

It’s not so simple. You see, the drone strike program is under the Department of Defense, so when the C.I.A. says they’re not going to kill you in America, they’re not saying the Defense Department won’t. So Eric Holder sent a response, the attorney general, and his response says, “I haven’t killed anyone yet. I don’t intend to kill anyone but I might.” And he pulls out examples that really aren’t under consideration. There is the use of lethal force that can always be repelled. If our country is attacked, the president has the right to defend and protect the country. Nobody questions that. Nobody questions if planes are flying towards the twin towers whether they can be repulsed by the military. Nobody questions whether a terrorist with a rocket launcher or a grenade launcher is attacking us, whether they can be repelled. They don’t get their day in court. But if you are sitting in a cafeteria in Dearborne, if you happen to be an Arab-American who has a relative in the middle east and you communicate with them by e-mail and somebody says, oh, your relative is someone we suspect of being associated with terrorism, is that enough to kill you?. . . We have a process for deciding this. We have courts for deciding this, to allow one man to accuse you in secret, you never get notified you have been accused. Your notification is the buzz of the propellers on the drone as it flies overhead in the seconds before you’re killed. Is that what we really want from our government?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWf7_6r6WwA&feature=player_embedded

Due Process in the Age of Obama

We’ve heard a speech by Eric Holder on some kind of new age due process.

But what has the president himself told the citizens he serves about when and how he can kill them? The man is certainly a great orator and he has shown that when he chooses, he can craft and deliver big speeches on topics that are important to him. What could be more important than the topic of the right he has assumed to assassinate American citizens and why has he not had the courage and integrity to come forward and give a big speech on this topic?

In addition to some of the areas of ambiguity, Holder told us in a speech that with targeted killings overseas, the discussions among the White House and DoD leaders is good enough due process for him. No judges, charges, trial involved. In fact, he can do due process entirely on his own if he so decides.

But there are also some terms that have not been defined well enough for many people and it has caused broad objection and discussion, and not along any party lines.

Imminent

There are some serious questions about the use of the term “imminent” which is one of their requirements for using extraordinary force to kill someone overseas for the suspicion of a crime, a pre-crime. Their definition of “imminent” does not mean “immediate”. Does this definition of “imminent” also apply to their rules for killing Americans on American soil?

The DoJ White Paper’s Confused Approach to Imminence (and Capture)

Even granting — as most scholars do — that IHRL’s imminence requirement is far from the picture of clarity, this standard is woefully overbroad. It not only relieves the US of the need to possess evidence that the “senior operational leader” in question intends to continue to attack the US, it actually shifts the burden of proof onto that individual to show that he is no longer a threat. (How he would actually do that is never addressed in the White Paper. Take an ad out in the New York Times?) That is simply unacceptable from an IHRL perspective; as the Human Rights Committee has specifically noted, states must “not use ‘targeted killings’ as a deterrent or punishment.”

While the memos they are hiding are almost certainly far more damning (as I’ll lay out tomorrow), this is utterly damning in itself.

It effectively defines imminence so as to have no meaning.

Emptywheel

Associated Forces

We still don’t know what exactly associated forces means.

(Indeed, membership in al-Qaida is not even required to be assassinated, as one can be a member of a group deemed to be an “associated force” of al-Qaida, whatever that might mean: a formulation so broad and ill-defined that, as Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller argues, it means the memo “authorizes the use of lethal force against individuals whose targeting is, without more, prohibited by international law”.)

Greenwald

Definition of Terrorism

We now know that Occupy protesters were defined as low level domestic terrorists. NYPD Counterterrorism units were observed at Occupy protests more than once, as were Homeland Security vehicles. I saw the NYPD Counterterrorism unit myself. There are some serious questions about framing and entrapment of some Occupy protesters hit with terrorism charges after the NATO Summit in Chicago. Things that the NYPD is doing with informants who are religious Muslims of Middle Eastern descent are really, really shady. The FBI has had some very questionable undercover operations that gave potential domestic terrorists, very low level kinds of figures, the aid and materials that they needed to carry out some kind of attack. If you are not aware of these facts, do take some time to read about them.

The Answer

So, what has the president himself told us so far about this?

Since Holder brought up Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and the people held responsible for those attacks were not Americans, why did Holder answer Paul’s question in that manner?

Killing Americans on U.S. Soil: Eric Holder’s Evasive, Manipulative Letter
The attorney general should be brought before Congress and interrogated about his notion of what the president could do in the aftermath of an attack.

The very scenario to be guarded against is a president using the pretext of a terrorist attack to seize extraordinary powers. Isn’t that among the most likely scenarios for the United States turning into an authoritarian security state? To be sure, if Americans are at the controls of fighter jets en route to Hawaii, of course Obama could order that they be fired upon. If Americans hijacked a plane, of course it would be permissible to kill them before they could crash it into a building. But those are not the sorts of targeted killings that Senator Rand Paul asked about in a letter to White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, prompting Holder’s response.
[...]
Any thinking person can see that Holder’s letter is non-responsive, evasive, and deliberately manipulative in its sly reassurances, right down to the rhetorically powerful but substantively nonsensical invocation of 9/11. (Being more subtle about it than Rudy Giuliani doesn’t make it right.) To credulously accept this sort of response, on an issue as important as this one, is behavior unfit for any citizen of a free country, where safeguarding the rule of law is a civic responsibility.

[Emphasis added]

Marcy Wheeler, an expert on this topic who has been writing about it for years, offers this and I recommend reading the whole post and others on her site:

All three answers are interesting. Paul is upset that Holder said the President could use lethal military force in the US. Holder invoked Pearl Harbor and 9/11, during the latter of which the Vice President, on his sole authority, ordered DOD to shoot down domestic aircraft in the US. If Paul has a problem, he should probably also have a problem with Dick Cheney’s order on 9/11.

Brennan’s answer about the CIA is a masterpiece of misdirection. Brennan doesn’t answer whether the CIA can operate in the US, which is broadly covered by other questions Paul asked so easily could and should have been included in his answer. He uses very interesting scare quotes around power. He makes it very clear that this answer does not address the legal question of whether the CIA could do this (he says DOJ will answer that, but Holder in fact didn’t address whether CIA could be ordered to kill in the US). Most importantly, however, Brennan answers a question Paul didn’t answer: Whether the CIA Director could order the CIA to use lethal force in the US.

The CIA, of course, conducts covert operations based on Presidential authorization, not CIA Director authorization. And Brennan stopped well short of answering whether the President could authorize the CIA to conduct lethal operations in the US, and whether the Executive Branch believed the President could authorize such strikes based on his own authority. And as I said, Holder quite simply didn’t answer that question at all.

Finally, though, I love the way Eric Holder discusses trials only after talking about using law enforcement — like the FBI — to incapacitate terrorists and other evil-doers twice.

Holder didn’t comment, one way or another, on whether the President could authorize law enforcement authorities to conduct targeted killings in the US. And since the precedents for using lethal force in the white paper are domestic law enforcement cases, that use of lethal force would come with the most cover from legal precedent.

In short, none of these assertions constitutes a denial that a particular agency could, under certain circumstances, could conduct targeted killing in the US. All they say, in conjunction, is that were a targeted killing to be conducted in the US, it would most likely be conducted by law enforcement.

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/03/06/incapacitating-terrorists-in-the-us/”>Emptywheel

Conclusion

There should have been less secrecy and more public debate about the entire topic of targeted assassination. But that didn’t happen. The administration has, until recently, denied that the program even existed, and still does not acknowledge it in court cases. But at this point, the questions are very explicit and clear and the more that Obama and Holder dodge, the worse they look, and the more the problem escalates.

It’s time to answer the question, publicly, and very clearly. To do anything else is damaging to everyone involved. The bottom line is, we are owed a clear answer to this question.

Updates

At 7:13pm eastern, Sen. Durbin just came to the Senate floor. Sen. Paul had brought a bill to the floor, a nonbinding resolution, a sense of the Senate to not use drones against American citizens on American soil. Sen. Durbin registered his objection to that resolution and shot it down. He said “we’ll have hearings on drones”.

So not only will this administration not answer the question about killing Americans at home, they will not even express a sense of the Senate that Americans should not be killed by drone strikes at home. Amazing. No attempt to even amend the sense of the Senate or anything – they just blew it up.

Who cares about the temper tantrums being thrown by the pampered media because they didn’t get to meet Tiger Woods? The real story is that while 50,000 people were at the White House asking the president to address climate change by cracking down on the fossil fuel industry, he was spending the weekend with a guy who is the epitome of Big Oil and much much more.

No wonder he was keeping the destination secret before this trip. Intended or not, it was a big F U to the people who had planned for months to travel to Washington to protest the critical cause of climate change. Worse, there has been no response whatsoever to the tens of thousands of protesters who came to his house on Sunday, nor to the many many more who were at coordinating marches in cities across the country and untold numbers of people who were there with them in spirit.

Well maybe there was another reason why the identity of Obama’s host was kept secret in the weeks leading up to the trip. The Tiger Woods golf date captured a lot of media attention, but the real story, in my opinion, is Jim Crane, the man who owned the Floridian country club and resort, who hosted the president for the long weekend, and who has a long, sordid history.

Jim Crane

James Robert “Jim” Crane is the owner of the Floridian Yacht and Golf Club, owner of the MLB baseball team, the Houston Astros, chairman and CEO of Crane Capital Group, director of Western Gas Holdings, former owner of Eagle USA Airfreight (air freight logistics business), Crane Worldwide Logistics, et al.

Crane took his profits from EGL and formed Crane Capital Group. He also became a director and shareholder (less than 1%) in Western Gas Holdings, LLC, the general partner in Western Gas Partners, LP, a mid-stream (mainly pipelines and natural gas gathering assets) energy company operating in the southeastern Rocky Mountain region and southern Mid-Continent area (Oklahoma and Texas) of the United States. Western Gas Holdings and Western Gas Partners are majority owned by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation. Crane is also the majority shareholder in Crane Worldwide Logistics LLC.,[5] director of Fort Dearborn Life Insurance Company (a subsidiary of Health Care Service Corporation),[5] and a director and executive officer in Champion Energy Holdings LLC..

A scratch golfer, Crane has been ranked as the nation’s top CEO golfer. In April 2010 he purchased The Floridian National Golf Club from H. Wayne Huizenga. The Floridian in Palm City, Florida recently completed major renovations and additions under the supervision of noted architect Tom Fazio.

[Emphasis added]
Link

Crane has a complicated web of connections with various corporations. Here is one diagram from corporationwiki that maps out some of them based on data from the Secretaries of State in Florida, California and Texas.

Oh brother, where do we start?

Oil, Gas, Pipelines

WASHINGTON — On the same weekend that 40,000 people gathered on the Mall in Washington to protest construction of the Keystone Pipeline — to its critics, a monument to carbon-based folly — President Obama was golfing in Florida with a pair of Texans who are key oil, gas and pipeline players.
HuffPo

The men at issue are Jim Crane and Milton Carroll though the HuffPo article mentions that other men from the oil and gas industry were in attendance. Crane and Carroll, both donors to Obama’s campaign, are directors of Western Gas Holdings, “the managing partner of Western Gas Partners, a midstream energy provider created by Anadarko Petroleum, one of the largest publicly traded oil and gas companies.”

Wikipedia describes Western Gas Partners as “(mainly pipelines and natural gas gathering assets) energy company”. You have to admit, that’s really rich — 50K people protesting a pipeline at the White House, many more doing the same in other cities, while the president is golfing with guys in the pipeline business.

Western Gas Partners’ main investment is in the booming field of natural gas exploration, transportation and manufacture in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Wyoming.
HuffPo

Anadarko

Western Gas Holdings and Western Gas Partners are majority owned by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation.
Link

I recognized the name Anadarko, for a few reasons. Most recently, they were involved in the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf. They had a “25 percent working interest in the Macondo Prospect” and the U.S. sued both BP and Anadarko as owners of the well. Another reason that I remembered them was because they are an American company with strong interests in oil and gas resources in Africa, and since our military is so interested in Africa these days, I’ve been interested in companies interested in African natural resources. But I also remembered a connection between Anadarko and George Bush. This was the company that was involved with the Harken Oil scandals, Enron-type deals to hide debt and overstate earnings. Bush was a director at Harken from 1986 (Harvard began investing 30 days after Bush became director), and 1993. Bush himself made the motion to approve the Harken Anadarko partnership.

From CommonDreams in October, 2002:

Harvard Role in Harken Called Deeper
Group Says Partnership Kept Bush Firm Afloat

WASHINGTON – Harvard University’s financial relationship with President Bush’s former oil company was deeper than previously understood, with the university’s management fund creating a separate ”off the books” partnership with Harken Energy Corp. that helped keep afloat the financially troubled company, according to a report to be released today.

HarvardWatch, a student-alumni group that monitors the school’s investments, plans to issue the report and say that it has analyzed documents showing that the Harvard fund, an independent entity that manages the university’s endowment, formed a partnership in 1990 with Bush’s oil firm called the Harken Anadarko Partnership. The partnership effectively removed $20 million of debt from Harken’s books, relieving the Texas company’s short-term financial problems.

About the same time, the Harvard fund invested about $30 million in Harken, which also helped keep the firm afloat. The partnership has not been mentioned in recent accounts of Bush’s financial dealings in the oil business.

William K. Black, a former federal banking regulator, said in a telephone interview that he has examined the Harken Anadarko Partnership and concluded the arrangement was a significant expansion of the Harvard fund’s involvement in the company beyond the $30 million investment.

”Harvard had a dramatically larger financial stake and a much more interesting financial stake” than was previously understood, Black said. ”It all serves as a partnership device to move money from Harvard to Harken. This is beyond nuts from an institutional investor’s standpoint.”

Anadarko’s international “interests”:

The Company’s international oil and natural-gas production and development operations are located primarily in Algeria, Ghana, and China. The Company also has exploration acreage in Ghana, Mozambique, Brazil, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, New Zealand, Indonesia, and other countries.
Link

Turns out that Anadarko likes fracking a lot too. What a politically tangled, oily and gassy web.

Anadarko did a press release today:

“With the outstanding momentum we established in 2012 and the opportunities our deep portfolio provides, we expect 2013 to be one of the best years in our company’s history,” Anadarko President and CEO Al Walker said. “Our 2013 capital investments will focus on projects that generate rates of return between 30 and more than 100 percent in the current commodity-price environment, while spending within cash flow. We expect to deliver sales-volumes growth of approximately five percent, with the year-over-year increase comprised almost entirely of higher-margin oil sales volumes. The projected increase in oil sales volumes will be largely driven by accelerated activity in our Wattenberg and Eagleford horizontal programs and the anticipated ramp up of oil volumes during the year at our El Merk facilities in Algeria.

“Accelerating value by advancing our high-margin deepwater and international oil and LNG (liquefied natural gas) mega projects remains a priority in 2013, and we expect to continue pursuing carry arrangements and opportunistic divestitures to further enhance the capital efficiency of our portfolio,” added Walker. “Following our highly successful 2012 exploration program where we nearly doubled our original targeted resources, we plan to be among the most active deepwater explorers in the world again in 2013. We expect to drill approximately 25 deepwater exploration and appraisal wells this year, including high-potential prospects in the Gulf of Mexico and three potentially play-opening international opportunities.”
Link

War Profiteering

Crane was the founder and CEO of Eagle Global Logistics (EGL) and was the CEO until 2007. The company is now known as CEVA Logistics, after a complicated set of mergers and acquisitions explained in this Material Handling Logistics publication. Crane lost a bidding war and control of EGL and formed Crane Worldwide Logistics but he did run the company when they were dinged for war profiteering during the Iraq war.

EGL settled charges with the Justice Department — war profiteering charges due to activities in earlier years. I believe the case is now sealed but much of the information is available here:

(PressZoom) – WASHINGTON – EGL, Inc., operating as Eagle Global Logistics, has paid the United States $300,000 to settle allegations that the company’s local agent in Kuwait overcharged the military for rental charges on shipping containers to Iraq for the period from January through June of 2006, the Justice Department announced today. The Houston-based company’s containers were for shipments of military cargo to Iraq under an EGL subcontract with KBR, the prime contractor for the U.S. Army’s LOGCAP III contract for logistical support of military operations overseas.

[...]

In August 2006, EGL paid the United States $4 million to settle potential civil claims under the False Claims Act based on the company’s alleged inflation of invoices for military cargo shipments to Iraq under the same subcontract with KBR.

Two employees of Crane’s company pled guilty to charges of war profiteering as part of a “global price-fixing conspiracy by freight forwarders.” One pled guilty to overcharging for military shipments to Dubai and the other, a managing director, pled guilty to “paying kickbacks to receive future business from KBR, a major contractor that was once a subsidiary of Halliburton.” Oh, Halliburton too! Well, to be fair, Hallliburton probably had their hands in everything that involved profiteering and bribery.

To facilitate the Astros purchase deal and calm tensions, Crane hired a PR man who has experience with crisis management, got a letter from a lawyer saying that he was not the target of the investigation, it was just a few bad apples, and he probably didn’t even know what was going on. EGL’s senior managment says they were fired and later pled guilty when prosecuted. EGL continued to do government work.

EGL had $82,500,000.00 in government contracts between 2001 and 2006.

Equal Opportunity Cases

As if all of that was not bad enough, here is the part that I find to be most shocking.

In 1997, complaints were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding Crane’s Eagle USA Airfreight and its position on hiring blacks and women of child-bearing age. The EEOC issued a scathing 104 page report (most EEOC reports are said to run 3-5 pages), found that to be true, and added that Crane’s company conducted a practice of paying “female and minority employees less than white men who do similar work; did not investigate employee complaints of sexual harassment; and destroyed evidence that the company was instructed to retain as part of the two-year EEOC investigation,” according to a Houston Chronicle article from 2000.
Forbes

The Missing Houston Chronicle article

The Houston Chronicle article link is no longer operative. Actually, the link is operative, but all the content in the article is gone baby gone. Now maybe this is a technical issue, since the article is from the year 2000. But in Jim Crane’s Wikipedia bio, there is a reference to this article, and the editor notes that the article was “Retrieved 2011-10-31″. So that article was apparently available until late 2011. But now all the content in the article has been deleted.

Luckily it was based on publicly available information and it was cited and linked in many different places, like here and here. There are also numerous other articles and news reports about this history of discrimination and the EEOC and court cases. If the article was disappeared, I’m not sure why.

Crane told his subordinates not to hire blacks because “once you hire blacks, you can never fire them.” On other occasions, Crane explained the reason he wanted to keep blacks out of the company was that his top managers are bigoted and they would mistreat the minorities, “giving them no choice but to sue Eagle.”

Witnesses also said Crane did not permit the company to advertise job openings because he did not want to create a paper trail of unhired qualified minorities.

To discourage blacks and women from applying, Eagle managers refused to let female and minority applicants enter its secured facilities to fill out job applications. Eagle disagreed with that assessment.

Crane also warned managers not to hire women of child-bearing age because their productivity would be low. And top company officers told employees that women aren’t suitable for management positions because male managers won’t work with a woman.

After reading that, it would not be surprising if we learned that the Chronicle content was scrubbed, though, as I mentioned before, it has been excerpted in many other places on the internet, so scrubbing it is not all that effective. This issue is worthy of a whole article of its own. Jesus. This sure looks like racism and sexism to me. If it somehow doesn’t reach that bar, those quotes are definitely examples of blatant discrimination and bigotry.

When the company’s own General Counsel, Judith Robertson, testified in 1997 and became a whistleblower, they sued her for violating attorney-client privileges, and since the current whistleblowing laws were not in place at the time, she settled with Eagle out of court. They then used this to try to end the EEOC case. EEOC denied the claim given the fact that they had testimony from dozens of other employees.

Ultimately, however, the original case was sealed until May 2000, when it was closed and a new case was opened for civil proceedings after the EEOC joined into a discrimination case as a plaintiff. (Eagle USA Airfreight, et al v. EEOC, “Civil Docket,” Case #4:98-cv-00316, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas; Eagle USA Airfreight, et al v. EEOC, “Civil Docket,” Case #4:2000-cv-01535, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas; Dube v. EGL, “Memorandum & Order,” Case #2:2000-cv-02461, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, July 5, 2000).
Forbes

Crane later sued the EEOC and disputed some of the claims, and the number of claims was reduced considerably. EEOC originally sought $20 million. They settled at $9.5 million and EEOC was later required to reduce that by $6 million because it was decided that most of the cases were not worthy of compensation.

Crane’s spokesman, Bill Miller, called the E.E.O.C. investigation “a shakedown”
NY Times

But in addition to this EEOC case, there were eleven more discrimination cases filed against Eagle.

NAACP Objections to Crane’s Ownership of MLB Team

When Crane was in negotiations for the purchase of the Houston Astros, all of these facts about his history of discrimination came out in many media reports. This was, and still is a well known fact, and it has been reported over a more than ten year period in the Houston area. Since Crane took control of the Astros in late 2011, this has been in the news as recently as one year ago.

It was enough of a problem for Crane’s company to reach a $9 million settlement with the EEOC. And now it’s something other Major League team owners will have to consider when they vote to approve or block Crane’s offer for the Astros.

“You have issues at times,” said McLane. “He said that was a learning experience for him and he has certainly moved well past that and has never had another problem.”

If the deal does go through, the NAACP is asking for someone to keep watch.

“We are deeply concerned that someone, that has a broad reach throughout the community and across the country regarding employment … has such a dismal record in the area of discrimination. As such this is someone that should be monitored very closely in the area of employment discrimination as it relates to minorities and woman,” the group said in a statement.”
ABC News

Crane later met with NAACP to give them assurances about fair hiring practices.

Who will Obama side with?

On Alternet, Medea Benjamin writes:

But Crane is also mucked up with the very “Big Oil” the activists were railing against. His extensive business deals include a partnership in Western Gas Holdings, a company engaged in gathering, processing, compressing and transporting natural gas and crude oil for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas exploration and production companies.

[...]

So while President Obama was relaxing with one of the nation’s elite who makes millions from destroying the planet, activists—most of whom voted for Obama—were circling the empty White House with their pleas to stand up to the fossil fuel industry.

[...]

There are the moments in history when leaders are remembered for the decisions they make. This is a moment of truth for both President Obama and for the future of the planet. [...] Will he side with the indigenous women, clear air, clear water, cultural heritage and ecosystems or will he side with wealthy oil men?

For all of the reasons laid out above it’s hard to imagine why Obama would publicly associate himself with this guy, and how it cannot be taken as a big F U to the environmental movement.

Updates

350.org has posted a reference to the Huffington Post article about this subject and now has an action page.

Go on over and use their action page to contact the president.

There are a lot of questions for John Brennan’s confirmation hearing today and only a few hours scheduled to ask them.

Many questions have been published by various news organizations and blogs. I very much want answers to their questions but I have one big, obvious question as well. This is my question:

What has changed since 2008-9 when John Brennan was considered to be too toxic to be confirmed as Director of the CIA? What is so different now that he is expected to be easily confirmed and that only a few hours are needed to question him?

In my opinion, he is even less confirmable in 2013 than he was in 2009. So what has changed? I’ll explain more about why I think he is even less suited for the job today, but first, let’s explore some of the questions posed by the media.

Most of the questions from journalists center around the targeted killing laws and the drone programs and about John Brennan’s actions and background. There aren’t many other questions about the operation of the CIA, though there are some.

This is not surprising, in my view.

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.
Link

Questions for John Brennan from journalists

A fair number of journalists, both mainstream media journalists and citizen journalists have many questions for John Brennan and have published them in the past week or so. Some of these questions are also undoubtedly for President Obama. Frankly, I wonder why the media has not been flooded with more such questions and for the life of me I cannot understand why only a few hours have been scheduled for a few senators to ask such questions, the only ones who can formally ask these questions when Brennan is under oath. I should note that this is not a full accounting of questions that have been documented by journalists.

Brennan has submitted answers to some questions in writing already, and you can find two PDF documents here, but personally, I am not satisfied by the answers in these documents and I don’t find the answers to be very enlightening. Hopefully the senators on the intelligence committee will use the time that they have very well, minimizing opening statements and bloviating.

Prehearing questionaire for completion by presidential nominees (PDF)

Additional Prehearing Questions for Mr. John O. Brennan upon his nomination to be the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (PDF)

The New Yorker

Amy Davidson from The New Yorker wants to know whom the president can kill and she wants a better definition of some of the fuzzy terms that are in the white paper that was leaked this week on the topic. Toward the end of the article she uses the

It is appropriate to ask Brennan, the Drone Assassination Czar, this question since he has been at the center of this program.

You know, it doesn’t get much more serious than this, and yet, there is a relatively small amount clamor for this question to be answered. It feels surreal. I think most Americans have no idea and think it could never happen here.

Some senators, particularly Sen. Wyden have been asking the president to release the memos that justify killing Americans with no due process (or rather with the Obama/Holder new age due process) for two years now. He should not have to ask the president for this. The Constitution says that Congress has oversight over the executive and could there even BE a bigger question than this? Yet the president denied this request and has only now released two memos (there might be more) to the intelligence committees. There is no declassified version. So our president claims the right to unilaterally kill American citizens, anywhere on the globe, including on American soil, but he will not disclose to those same citizens the specific reasons why he might target you.

John Brennan was the man who was in charge of the operation that killed at least one American citizen, al-Awlaki, and there are still quite a few questions and contradicting pieces of information around that. And yet Brennan will face only a few hours of questioning from the Senate intelligence committee today.

WHOM CAN THE PRESIDENT KILL?

The question isn’t whether al-Awlaki, who worked with Al Qaeda, was an innocent—the question is at what point he crossed the line and became killable without any judicial proceedings, and when, by extension, the rest of us could be put on a “kill list.”

[...]

A few weeks before the Stevenson speech, Nixon offered his own rationalization, in which he said that we were taking our war into Cambodia because the United States could not act “like a pitiful, helpless giant” [...] In our great universities, in the days that followed, there were protests and outrage at the expansion of the war. Between Nixon’s speech and Stevenson’s came the Kent and Jackson State shootings, where students who didn’t want the United States to go into Cambodia were killed, along with bystanders, by the National Guard and the police.

[...]

What if those students had been Americans at a university in, say, Paris, who formed a group to protest a war? Could a President who read the D.O.J.’s white paper tell himself that they were an “associated force” based in a foreign country, or that, if they succeeded in mobilizing Congress or public opinion against what it considered a necessary military action, that they would pose an “imminent threat”? Could he kill them then? Could he do so now?

ThinkProgress

ThinkProgress wants some answers about the policy and direction of the drone programs and about the end game of the war on terror.

The One Question Congress Must Ask Before Confirming Obama’s CIA Director

[...] but the hearing presents the perfect opportunity to get the current top Obama administration counterterrorism official perhaps most closely involved in the targeted killing program against al Qaeda to answer the fundamental question about it: when does it end?

[...]

In the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day bombing in 2009, Brennan authored a scathing review of what was then U.S. counterterrorism policy. [...]

[...] In a profile written in the Washington Post, Brennan is identified as the primary supporter of codifying the rules regarding when and where armed drone strikes could be carried out into what’s now called “the playbook” and the benign-sounding disposition matrix that identifies targets for strikes.
So Brennan, then, is ideally positioned to answer the fundamental question that needs to be answered to get a hold on America’s targeted killing program:

What role do targeted killings play in the broader U.S. counter-terrorism strategy and under what circumstances might we cease to employ them?

Emptywheel

Read the rest of this entry →