Napolitano: Obama 'Stealing' American Lives - Judge Blasts WH Orders to Assassinate U.S. Citizens

WND

President Obama’s policy of targeting enemies, including Americans, for death through drone strikes is the latest and most alarming example of the endless expansion of government power, according to Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Napolitano is the senior judicial analyst for the Fox News Channel and is the author most recently of “Theodore and Woodrow” and “The Freedom Answer Book.” He says the growth in government power is nothing new, and the erosion of individual freedoms is always pitched in pleasant ways.

“Monster government almost always comes with a smiling face,” he said. “After it’s here, the face loses its smile and it saps our liberties and our prosperity.”

Read Andrew Napolitano’s hot new column, “Obama gives himself permission to kill,” in which he asks: When will president’s drone murders come home to our shores?

Napolitano said there is no implosion of rights as troubling as what we’re seeing this week as the Obama administration defends the targeting and killing of enemies, including American citizens, without giving them the right to due process.

“I’ve often commented that my job here at Fox is to monitor the government as it steals your liberty and steals your property, but I never thought I’d be monitoring the government stealing your life,” he said. “Essentially, that’s what this is.”

The administration’s legal justification for the drone program was laid out in a Department of Justice “white paper” that made its way to NBC News on Sunday night. The paper, which is a distillation of countless other reports, clearly lays out what the Obama administration considers justification for the program of targeted kills.

“It basically says that the president of the United States can authorize an ‘informed, high-level official of the U.S. government’ to strip the constitutional protections of an American in a foreign country if the informed official is satisfied that the American is an imminent danger to American national security and his capture or arrest would be impractical,” Napolitano said. “That is basically the power claimed by kings and tyrants. I can suspend the law to get you if you are a danger.”

There are defenders of the Obama drone policy on both sides of the aisle, but Napolitano said their arguments fly in the face of the principles on which America was founded.

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