Today’s NYT featured an article that explains why no one reads newspapers any more:  https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world/14awlaki.html?partner=rss&emc=rss.  Entitled “US Decision to Approve Killing of Cleric Causes Unease” the article discusses the National Security Council decision to permit the assassination of US citizen and Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, currently residing in Yemen.  Al-Awlaki is described as someone “who the CIA. believes is actively plotting violence. The attempted bombing of Times Square on May 1 is the latest of more than a dozen terrorist plots in the West that investigators believe were inspired in part by Mr. Awlaki’s rhetoric.” The article includes “The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.”

I would note to the Times that we in the alternative media have been screaming about this story since January when Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair casually announced the directed assassination policy.  That an American citizen can be targeted for death from the skies because a government bureaucrat “believes” that he might have inspired something by his rhetoric is nothing short of Orwellian, possibly emanating from the Ministry of Subversive Thoughts. But this kind of idiocy is a measure of the times we live in and the moral dead zone that we now inhabit as a result of the global war on terror.