Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

I suppose this will surprise some people somewhere, but it seems totally logical to me. If

• the President has the power to order Predator drones to file missiles killing people — including US citizens– abroad, and
• the President has the right to grab US citizens in the US and hold them in a military prison without trial, an attorney, or any contact with the outside world, on the grounds that he thinks they are terrorists or terrorist supporers or might someday in the future be up to something, and
• the President has the power to order the crushing of a child’s testicles to make the parent talk

surely it follows natuarlly that, as a Dept. of Justice official recently argued, this same President may have power to order people he considers to be “terror suspects” killed in US:

Steven Bradbury, acting head of the US Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, told Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in a closed Senate Intelligence Committee meeting last week that the president may have the executive power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the US…

But don’t worry!

An unnamed Justice Department official has since said Bradbury’s comments were in the context of a theoretical discussion and that practical policy would be to capture the terrorist alive in order to interrogate him.

Good thing it’s only a theoretical danger. Sort of like Saddam Hussein…