Forum Post: Rep. Walter Jones's bill to "wrest" the power to unilaterally go to war

Thomas Hedges, writing for the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, has written a strong article endorsing Rep. Walter Jones's (R-NC) HCR 107 bill to "wrest" the power to unilaterally go to war from a rogue Executive, and restore that power to Congress.

In his article posted Sept. 30 on truthdig.com, Hedge's reports that Jones, "along with retired military officers Col. Lawrence Wilkerson and Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer as well as former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein denounced President Barack Obama at a news conference Sept. 21 for overstepping his authority in wartime and warned that unless war powers are restored to Congress, the country could soon be involved in a battle with Iran."

The article highlights some of the crucial points made at the press conference, especially, as Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized, that Obama is a killer. Obama "claims and exercises authority to surveil every ... individual on the planet," Hedges says, and according to Fein, "If ... you're an imminent danger to the United States, you get vaporized. Predator drone. Any judicial review? No. Any congressional review? No. Any disclosure of the profile of the intelligence that justifies the finding you're one of the terrorists were going to vaporize? No."

Quoting Fein, the article says "the United States has killed well over 300,000 people, although the country faces no existential threat."

"'Those 300,000 killings,' Fein said, 'are murder. Because legal war makes whats customarily murder, legal. But if you're not at war legally, those are homicides.'"

He also highlights the danger of direct confrontation with Russia, quoting Col. Larry Wilkerson, who said, "I could paint you a scenario where we start a NATO no-fly zone over Syria, and wind up, in a year or two, with a general regional war. ... I wouldn't be surprised to see the Russians ... begin to sell their most sophisticated air defense missiles to Syria. Then they're going to start shooting down NATO airplanes; not one or two, but lots of them."

The author's father is Christopher Hedges, the lead plaintiff in Hedges et al. v. Obama [U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 12-cv-331 and Hedges et al. v. Obama, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 12-3176)[1][2]], the lawsuit filed January 13, 2012 against the Obama Administration and members of Congress by a group of activists and journalists challenging the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. On Sept. 12, 2012, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in New York granted a permanent injunction against the indefinite detention powers of the NDAA — which the White House immediately appealed to successfully overturn.