By Sherwood Ross | Aletho News | January 22, 2014
David Barron, a Harvard law professor who gave President Obama the green light for his illegal global drone attacks, has been nominated by Obama for a seat on the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Barron (co-authored) the infamous Justice department opinion authorizing Obama’s murder of U.S. citizens,” says distinguished international legal authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, Champaign. “It’s a payback.”
“This is a total disgrace. If approved, we will have a murderer and a war criminal sitting on the U.S. First Circuit,” Boyle said. The First District, headquartered in Boston, Mass., includes the states of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island as well as Puerto Rico.
As a result of Barron’s opinion, Boyle says, “We know that at least three U.S. citizens were murdered in Yemen, including (Islamic cleric Anwar) Awlaki of Las Cruces, N.M., and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki,” of Denver, Co., and one other. Still another American citizen was also executed without trial in Pakistan, Boyle said.
Barron co-wrote the June, 2010, legal opinion rationalizing the illegal airstrikes as a member of Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. He was joined by Martin Lederman, a deputy assistant Attorney General in that office.
“So here Barron and Lederman deliberately and maliciously write a get out of jail free card for Obama so that he can murder U.S. citizens, which he does,” Boyle says. “Barron is thus an enabler and accessory before the fact to murder and war crimes” and thus a principal in the first degree with Obama. Accordingly, Boyle says, “Barron is neither fit nor qualified to serve as a Judge on the First Circuit…” a post which would make him a prime candidate for a U.S. Supreme Court seat.
The Barron memo justifies the murder of U.S. citizens without due process of law, in violation of the Bill of Rights and the Fifth Amendment, Boyle says. The precise wording of Amendment V states “No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury…nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”
If Obama’s nomination is approved, Boyle says, “we will have a murderer and war criminal sitting on the U.S. First Circuit and perhaps some day on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
According to the impartial Bureau of Investigative Journalism, London, since 2004 the total number of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan is 381, 330 of them launched by President Obama. BIJ gives the following figures for the period:
Total killed: 2,537-3,646
Civilians killed: 416-951
Children killed: 168-200
Injured: 1,128-1,557
(Sherwood Ross is an award-winning reporter and poet based in Miami who writes on foreign and domestic affairs and runs a PR firm “for good causes.” Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)