Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who has consistently opposed U.S. military engagement overseas, said Tuesday that the Obama administration’s killing of a U.S.-born radical cleric in Yemen was an impeachable offense and that “we have crossed that barrier from republic to dictatorship.”
Speaking to an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the libertarian Texas congressman also expressed sympathy for the budding Wall Street protest movement.
He harshly criticized Obama for approving last week’s predator drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a prominent al Qaeda figure linked by U.S. intelligence agencies to two unsuccessful attacks on U.S.-bound airplanes. Samir Kahn, a second American killed in the attack, was the editor of the online al Qaeda magazine “Inspire.” Paul suggested the government could begin killing American journalists with impunity.
“Can you imagine being put on a list because you’re a threat?” Paul told a crowd of 60 journalists and their guests at a luncheon. “What’s going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? … This is the way this works. It’s incrementalism.”
“We have crossed that barrier from republic to dictatorship, to tyranny to empire,” he said. “He can now assassinate people without due process? What is going on with this country? But you ask me if it’s an impeachable offense, and it is! Just ignoring the Fifth Amendment and assassinating American citizens without due process. They won’t even tell us what the rules are! Oh, but he’s a threat! Can you imagine being put on a list because you’re a threat? What’s going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? Or a professor becomes a threat?”
Ron Paul says Obama should be impeached for al Qaeda killing [continued]
