noted. 02/10/2012

• If Ron Wyden Hasn’t Seen Awlaki Memo, There Has Been Inadequate Oversight | emptywheel

  tags: wyden awlaki

  • And yet these are the questions that Wyden still has about the killing:

     

    Some of these questions include: ‘how much evidence does the President need to decide that a particular American is part of a terrorist group?’, ‘does the President have to provide individual Americans with an opportunity to surrender before using lethal force against them?’, ‘is the President’s authority to kill Americans based on authorization from Congress or his own authority as Commander-in-Chief?’, ‘can the President order intelligence agencies to kill an American who is inside the United States?’, and ‘what other limitations or boundaries apply to this authority?’.

     

    If even the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have not been permitted to review the Administration’s legal justification for the targeted killing of an American citizen, then the oversight over the op is even more inadequate than we knew. The Administration has really been operating on the principle that it can go off and kill American citizens without even having the elected representatives designated to oversee their actions fully review such killings.

     

• Obama administration using loophole to quietly sell arms package to Bahrain | The Cable

  tags: Bahrain

  • President Barack Obama's administration has been delaying its planned $53 million arms sale to Bahrain due to human rights concerns and congressional opposition, but this week administration officials told several congressional offices that they will move forward with a new and different package of arms sales -- without any formal notification to the public. 

     

     The congressional offices that led the charge to oppose the original Bahrain arms sales package are upset that the State Department has decided to move forward with the new package. The opposition to Bahrain arms sales is led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), and also includes Senate Foreign Relations Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee chairman Robert Casey (D-PA), Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), and Marco Rubio (R-FL). 

     

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