You can hear a high level of outrage in the voice of Judge Andrew Napolitano when he discusses on the Alan Colmes Show on Tuesday the death of an American in police custody in Baltimore, Maryland and the use of United States drones to kill three more Americans overseas. Napolitano expresses outrage regarding the killings themselves, as well as processes followed in the Baltimore and US governments that facilitate such killings and hide their details.
Regarding the death of Freddie Gray that has led to ongoing tension in Baltimore, Napolitano and host Alan Colmes engage in the following exchange:
Napolitano: So, look, Baltimore was a “tinderkeg,” if I am using the right term, ready to happen. And the death of Freddie Gray was the tipping point. But, people who loot and riot and cops who kill should be identified and prosecuted. There cannot be the perception that the police are afraid to stop rioters, and there cannot be the perception that the police will favor their own when they have obviously committed a grave legal act. I don’t know what it was: It was either criminally negligent homicide or second degree murder. But, this guy’s dead.
Colmes: But, you’re saying it had to be one of those.
Napolitano: It couldn’t be anything. I don’t think it was first degree murder; that would mean they planned and plotted this whole thing. And I don’t know how it could be less than criminally negligent homicide. And there are probably other crimes. If there is obstruction of justice, and we don’t know because there is silence. Government mandates transparency, particularly in the case of the death of an innocent.
The conversation then turns to the United States government using drones to kill US citizens overseas. In particular, Colmes and Napolitano discuss the January killing overseas of three US citizens that was disclosed in an April 23 White House press release last week. Ahmed Farouq and Warren Weinstein were listed in the press release as killed in one “counterterrorism operation” — language that avoids the largely forbidden mention of drones — near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The press release says Adam Gadahn, another US citizen, was killed in January as well, “likely in a separate U.S. Government counterterrorism operation.”
Napolitano describes these drone killings of Americans as “even worse” than president-directed targeted killings he has criticized before, noting that in the January killings “the president did not approve the recent drone strike.” Napolitano continues:
[Obama] said he didn’t know about it. That means he is delegating these drone strikes. War is so commonplace, death is so banal, that he delegates it to the White House staff to decide when to release these drone strikes. And the members of Congress who are supposed to approve this — these 37 people who meet in secret, the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee — they didn’t know about it. Their staff had approved it.
Listen to the complete discussion here:
Napolitano, a Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Advisory Board member, provides additional thoughts regarding the killings in Baltimore and overseas in his recent editorials “Baltimore riots: Who will protect rights, lives and property of city’s residents?”and “Can the President Kill Americans?”
