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Who shall live and who shall die

The extraordinary powers that Obama has assumed to himself in determining who shall die - call that an execution to give it its proper name - and who not, flies in the face of what a democracy is supposed to be all about.   What makes it worse, if that is possible, is that the person to be killed can even be an American citizen.

"In the wake of the newly revealed Obama memo on drones that the ACLU has called "a stunning overeach of executive authority" - and which reveals, notes one critic, that "the administration's concept of 'imminent threat' appears to require neither imminence nor a specific threat" - Rachel Maddow asks some tough, smart, scary questions. Among them: If the president can order you dead, on what basis does he make that decision?

"The issue here is who’s a bad guy and how do you figure it out? If this is the means by which we’re going to decide not that you’re going to be arrested and tried, but the means by which we will decide whether the president can order you dead, then on what basis is the president making that decision?"

“If you’re an American citizen and the president is going to kill you, do you have the right to give yourself up instead so you don’t get killed? And how do you know you should do that if the president’s decision that he is going to kill you is a secret decision that nobody ever tells you?"

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