Joe Scarborough and other "Morning Joe" panelists ripped into President Barack Obama for the administration's drone program on Wednesday, comparing him to a king who can decide the fate of American citizens without oversight.
Like he had on Tuesday, Scarborough called a recent leaked memo of the administration's rationalization for killing American citizens "frightening" and "chilling."
The document outlines three conditions in which the government can authorize legal force against an American citizen abroad: The citizen poses “an imminent threat of violent attack” against the U.S., capture is not plausible, and the strike must be carried out according to the "law of war principles.”
"You have the United States government saying, we can kill you, American citizen," Scarborough said. "
"You have no constitutional right to a jury by your peers. You have no constitutional right even to probable cause or to due process. You have no right to a lawyer. You have no right to counsel. You have no right to anything. If we suspect you, just suspect you, without evidence, that you were thinking about committing an act against the United States of America, we can kill you."
Later, Scarborough and fellow panelist Jon Meacham, the executive editor at Random House, compared Obama's authority over the program to that of a "king." Meacham compared it to British rule of the American colonies, saying that British rule failed because "the rule of law could not simply be in the hands of a king and could not be arbitrarily applied. And that’s precisely what this is: it’s in in the hands of an American king.”
"An American king who actually gets the list of people who he decides who should be killed and who should not be killed and he goes down that list. There are so many things that are chilling here,” Scarborough said.
Watch the clip below, courtesy of MSNBC:
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