Why Can The United States Central Intelligence Agency Assassinate People? By Jacob G. Hornberger
(2018-12-03 at 14:14:53 )

Why Can the United States Central Intelligence Agency Assassinate People? by Jacob G. Hornberger

Given that we have all been born and raised under a regime that has the Central Intelligence Agency, hardly anyone questions the power of the Central Intelligence Agency to assassinate people.

The Central Intelligence Agencys power of assassination has become a deeply established part of American life.

Yet, the United States Constitution, which called the federal government into existence and established its powers, does not authorize the United States federal government to assassinate people.

If the proponents of the United States Constitution had told the American people that the Constitution was bringing into existence a government that wielded the power to assassinate people, there is no way that Americans would have approved the deal, in which case they would have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation.

Under the Articles, the powers of the federal government were so weak, it did not even have the power to tax, much less the power to assassinate people.

That is because our American ancestors wanted it that way. The last thing they wanted was a federal government with vast powers.

In fact, the purpose of the Constitutional Convention was simply to amend the Articles of Confederation.

During the 13 years of operating under the Articles, problems had arisen, such as trade wars between the states. The convention was intended to fix those problems with amendments to the Articles.

Instead, the delegates came out with an entirely different proposal, one that would call into existence a federal government that had more powers, including the power to tax.

United States of Americans were leery.

The last thing they wanted was a powerful central government.

They had had enough of that type of government as British citizens under the British Empire. They believed that the biggest threat to peoples freedom and well-being lay with their own government.

They believed that if they approved a federal government, it would become tyrannical and oppressive, like other governments had done throughout history.

They were especially concerned with the power of the government to murder people, including citizens.

They knew that state-sponsored murder was the ultimate power in any tyrannical regime.

When a government can kill anyone it wants with impunity, all other rights are effectively nullified.

And our ancestors were sufficiently well-versed in history to know that tyrannical regimes were notorious for killing their own citizens, especially those people who challenge, criticize, or object to the tyranny.

The proponents of the United States Constitution told Americans that they had nothing to be concerned about.

The United States Constitution was not calling into existence a government with general powers to do anything it wanted.

Instead, by the terms of the document that would be calling the federal government into existence, its powers would be limited to the few powers that were enumerated within the document.

Thus, if a power was not enumerated, it did not exist and, therefore, could not be exercised.

Since the United States Constitution was not giving the federal government the power to murder people, it could not exercise that power.

On that basis, our United States of American ancestors approved the deal, but only on the condition that the United States Constitution would be immediately amended after approval with a Bill of Rights.

To make sure that United States federal officials understood that they did not have the power to murder people, the Fifth Amendment was enacted.

It prohibited the federal government from killing people without first according them due process of law.

It is worth noting that the protections of the Fifth Amendment are not limited to American citizens.

The Amendment prohibits the United States federal government from murdering anyone, including people who are not United States citizens.

What is due process of law???

It is a phrase that stretches all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215, when the barons of England forced their king to acknowledge that his powers over them were limited.

The Magna Carta prohibited the English king from killing British citizens in violation of the "law of the land," a phase that evolved over the centuries into "due process of law."

Essentially, due process means notice and hearing.

It says to the government: "You cannot kill anyone unless you first give him, or her, formal notice of the particular criminal offense that you are claiming warrants killing him or her."

Then, after notice, there has to be fair trial in which the accused has the right to be heard. The United States Constitutions Sixth Amendment ensured that people would have the right of trial by jury because our ancestors did not trust judges or tribunals.

And so it was that the United States of American people lived in a society for more than 150 years in which the federal government lacked the power to assassinate people, which is really just a fancy word for murder.

A governmental assassination is the state-sponsored killing of a person without notice and trial - that is, without due process of law.

The situation changed after World War II, when the federal government, in a watershed event, was converted from a limited-government republic into what is known as a "national-security state," a type of governmental system that is inherent to totalitarian regimes.

United States officials maintained that the conversion was necessary in order to confront the Soviet Union, a communist state, which itself was a national-security state.

The idea was that in order to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it would be necessary for the United States to adopt, temporarily, its same type of national-security state system.

In 1947, the United States Central Intelligence Agency was called into existence as part of this new national-security state.

President Truman, the president who was responsible for the federal governments conversion to a national-security state, intended for the Central Intelligence Agency to be strictly an intelligence-gathering agency.

But someone slipped a bit of nebulous language into the law that called the Central Intelligence Agency into existence, which the Central Intelligence Agency seized upon to justify the adoption of omnipotent powers, including the power to assassinate people with impunity, so long as the assassination was to protect "National Security."

Needless to say, the Central Intelligence Agency had the omnipotent power to make that determination.

As monumental as the conversion to a national-security state was, it was not done through a constitutional amendment.

The Constitution continued to be the supreme law that governed the operations of the United States federal government, including the Central Intelligence Agency.

Thus, since the United States Constitution did not give the federal government the power to assassinate people and since the Fifth Amendment expressly prohibited the federal government from assassinating people, the United States Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary had the responsibility to declare the Central Intelligence Agencys power to assassinate people unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, however, in a national-security state power is everything and especially omnipotent power.

Recognizing that as a practical matter, there would be no way that the federal judiciary could keep the Central Intelligence Agency from assassinating people in the name of protecting "National Security," the United States federal courts went silent or even supportive.

In 1989 the Cold War ended. Yet, we still have a national-security state and we still have a Central Intelligence Agency with the power to assassinate people, including Americans.

Why Is That????

Printed here with permission from Mr. Jacob G. Hornberger of The Future of Freedom Foundation!! Their Great Website!!