When President Barack Obama‘s online gurus created an interactive Web forum for receiving and evaluating citizen petitions, this is probably not what they had in mind.
“We the People,” the Obama White House’s answer to the office suggestion box, got a bit more interesting on Wednesday with the launch of a petition asking the administration to “create a Do Not Kill list.”
“The New York Times reports that President Obama has created an official ‘kill list’ that he uses to personally order the assassination of American citizens,” the petition’s author wrote.
“Considering that the government already has a ‘Do Not Call’ list and a ‘No Fly’ list, we hereby request that the White House create a ‘Do Not Kill’ list in which American citizens can sign up to avoid being put on the president’s ‘kill list’ and therefore avoid being executed without indictment, judge, jury, trial or due process of law.”
The May 29 Times story described a January 2010 meeting during which Obama studied the faces of terror suspects and weighed giving the order to have them killed.
“The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout,” reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote. “Several were Americans.”
The Times editorialized the following day that no politician, not even a U.S. president, “should be able to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners located far from a battlefield — depriving Americans of their due-process rights — without the consent of someone outside his political inner circle.”
Even if the “Do Not Kill list” petition’s authors can’t count any New York Times editorial writers among their signers, as of this writing 3,984 people have agreed.
If the petition collects 25,000 signatures by June 29, it will “require a response” from the Obama administration, according to the “We the People” program’s published rules.