I haven't seen this discussed here yet, so I have a lot of catching up to do in regards to ranting about this.
In other threads, I have discussed how Republicans and Democrats have seemingly flip-flopped entirely their positions on the war on terror. I have discussed at length that Obama is not the hippie peace-nick that he is often purported to be by the right. But the other side of that same coin is that, he is not worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize he was given upon taking office either. Three relatively recent articles that kind of plays in-line with this topic.
Read, or proclaim tl;dr as needed. I have my own thoughts at the end.
http://www.businessinsider.com/obamas-leaked-drone-memo-2013-2?op=1Seven Elements Of Obama's Leaked Drone Memo That Should Alarm Americans
Geoffrey Ingersoll
Investigative journalist for NBC Michael Isikoff published on Monday ground-breaking documents summarizing Obama's legal justification for extrajudicial drone killings of Americans.
This document set off a firestorm of debate centered around the general vagueness of the language contained therein.
Much of it was terrifying, but we've narrowed it down to seven key linguistic issues, and their implications, that we consider the most troubling.
1. The Executive branch is under no obligation to show evidence, before or after
Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, writes:
According to the white paper, the government has the authority to carry out targeted killings of U.S. citizens without presenting evidence to a judge before the fact or after, and indeed without even acknowledging to the courts or to the public that the authority has been exercised. Without saying so explicitly, the government claims the authority to kill American terrorism suspects in secret.
This means if the administration murders someone, it cannot possibly be prosecuted.
2. The administration uses an "Elastic" definition of "imminent"
Jaffer also describes the Justice Department's use of the word 'imminent' — as in "imminent attack" — as so loose that the criterion could be applied to almost anything ... 5 days? Minutes? Months?
Jaffer says that it has been so redefined that it's lost all relevant meaning — "It's the language of limits—but without any real restrictions."
By widening out imminent in terms of time, it means that the administration can strike targets while they're in the shower, cutting toe nails, or taking a nap.
3. The loose use of language turns the War on Terror into a Forever War
The memo describes Al Qaeda as a "terrorist organization engaged in constant plotting" against the U.S. So as long as they perceive Al Qaeda exists, the executive branch can conduct extrajudicial killings.
This means the next president can conduct the same exercise of power. The authority to kill without transparency continues so long as any executive branch perceives a threat, possibly (and probably) forever.
4. Language sets precedent for foreign strikes inside U.S. borders
The following justification for crossing borders of countries with which the U.S. is not currently at war — countries "unwilling or unable" to mitigate "terrorist threats" themselves — potentially gives other nations a foot in the door, under the Constitution, to target their own definitions of terrorist threats inside U.S. borders.
From Jaffer: "The white paper also suggests, incorrectly, that the courts have endorsed the view that there is no geographic limitation on the government's exercise of war powers."
In short, a foreign nation can claim the right to strike inside the U.S. border against anyone they consider a terrorist.
5. There is zero check on authority to conduct extrajudicial killings
Much like the lack of necessity to show evidence before or after a strike, the Obama administration has also tipped power precipitously into the hands of the Executive Branch.
In grade school, every American learns that each branch of government has checks and balances against the power of the others. In this case, presently, no such check exists — the Executive Branch acts unilaterally (and until a law is passed requiring transparency to some degree, in perpetuity).
Obama, who OKs these death penalties as summarily as Judge Dredd, is Judge, Jury, and Executioner.
6. The memo blurs the line of "armed" and "violent"
There is never a proper, stringent definition of either "armed" or "violent" — as in "armed" terrorists committing "violent," "imminent" attacks.
Can a terrorist be armed with a computer keyboard, a microphone, a computer? And can his communication be considered a "violent" attack?
This means that members of Anonymous, for example, are not far behind.
7. The administration likens the terms "lawful" and "not unlawful"
With this use of words the administration moves aggressively into the space between what's legal and what's criminal.
The memo cites a carried out death sentence as an example of when the state can lawfully execute a U.S. citizen—though it ignores how a death sentence is only conducted following a rigorous examination of evidence.
This term interchangeability of "lawful" and "not unlawful" should recall memories of George Orwell's newspeak, which sought to promote state power through deliberately ambiguous language.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2013/02/leaked_drone_memo_obama_can_do_whatever_he_wants_to_fight_terrorism.htmlPresident Obama Can Do Anything He Wants To Fight Terrorism
That’s the lesson of the leaked drone memo.
By Eric Posner|Posted Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013, at 3:58 PM
Pakistani demonstrators shout anti-US slogans during a protest in Multan on January 8, 2013, against the drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas.
So far, the reporting on the leaked white paper from the Justice Department about drone attacks clearly assumes that we are supposed to be outraged by the Obama administration’s legal theories, just as we were supposed to be outraged by the Bush administration’s. And outrage is being dutifully ginned up. But the memo is utterly conventional as legal analysis; its arguments could easily have been predicted. It’s most useful as an opportunity to reflect on how the law has evolved to address the problem of terror.
All you need to know in order to understand the memo is that Obama administration lawyers have enthusiastically endorsed the once-vilified Bush administration decision to classify security operations against al-Qaida as “war†rather than as “law enforcement.†This was not an inevitable decision. Obviously, the use of military force in Afghanistan was a military operation, and to the extent that members of al-Qaida joined Taliban soldiers in defending the Afghan homeland against the U.S. attack, they could be killed on sight and detained without charges, as is permitted by the international laws of war. But the U.S. government could otherwise have regarded al-Qaida as a criminal organization like a street gang or drug cartel. Outside the battlefield in Afghanistan, the government would then have pursued members of al-Qaida with conventional law enforcement measures.
If the administration had taken the law enforcement approach, members of al-Qaida who are American citizens would have had the same rights to due process that are familiar from everyday policing. We would send FBI agents to foreign countries like Yemen after obtaining permission from governments to conduct joint law enforcement operations. Or we would have asked foreign governments to arrest suspected members of al-Qaida and extradite them to the United States. We could not have sent drones to kill them. We would have offered them trials in civilian courts.
But, at Bush’s urging, Congress did not authorize war (only) against Afghanistan; it also authorized war against al-Qaida. That meant that members of al-Qaida would be treated as belligerents. U.S. forces could shoot them on sight, just as they could drop bombs on German military formations during World War II. They could detain suspected al-Qaida members without charging them or giving them trials and hold them as detainees, just as thousands of German soldiers were held as detainees during World War II. And it doesn’t matter if you’re an al-Qaida member who happens to be a U.S. citizen, just as it didn’t matter if you were a German soldier who happened to be an American citizen during World War II. U.S. forces could capture or kill American citizens who joined German forces and detain them as POWs, and they did so.
That said, clearly the analogy is not perfect, and the memo lays out a narrower standard for killing U.S. citizens than would be used in a conventional war. It must be the case that (1) an informed, high-level U.S. official believes that the individual in question poses an imminent threat of violent attack; (2) capture is not feasible; and (3) the operation complies with the laws of war. The author of the DOJ memo pulls these requirements out of his or her hat. They are formally derived from the due process clause, via the 2004 war-on-terror case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which in turn adopted the rule from an old case called Mathews v. Eldridge (about the right to Social Security disability benefits of all things), which provided that one must “balance†the private interest and the government interest. So the memo “balances†the interest of the target in his own life against the interest of the government in protecting other citizens, and the three-prong rule is simply asserted as the outcome of that balancing.
There are several odd features of this standard that deserve comment. First, a “high-level†official (the president?) must make the determination rather than someone else in the military hierarchy, which is not the case in ordinary warfare. Nor do normal military operations require a determination that capture is infeasible before the use of lethal force. It may well make political sense for the U.S. government not to kill a U.S. citizen via drone attack without these determinations, but it is hard to see why any of this is legally required once one accepts the premise that al-Qaida, and its associated forces, pose a military threat in the same way that Nazi Germany did. To be sure, al-Qaida does not pose as much a military threat, but no one has ever argued that this makes any difference. The unstated premise must be that a roving assignment to kill anyone who is a member of al-Qaida, or seems like a member of al-Qaida, or a member of an “associated force†of al-Qaida, which may well mean any Islamic terror group or even charity, is more questionable and more subject to abuse than an order to shoot a member of the armed forces of a belligerent state. So the memo limits somewhat the degree of executive discretion by using elastic terms. (How high is “high� How feasible is capture? What is an “associated force�) In the end, all of this will do little to constrain anything.
Second, the memo both fixates on the concept of the imminence of the threat the target poses—the word appears dozens of times—while depriving it of all meaning. It turns out that the high-level official does not actually need to believe that the targeted individual is in the process of launching an attack or is about to start one. That would be too high a bar. Instead, the memo assumes that al-Qaida is constantly planning attacks, so anyone who is an “operational leader†and “is personally and continually involved in planning terrorist attacks†against the United States counts as an imminent threat. They don’t sleep or go on vacation—they are always fair game.
This is not a crazy view. German soldiers during World War II were fair game even when they were asleep in their barracks. But the question is why the lawyers would at once focus on the word imminence and ignore its meaning. The only reason I can think of is that international law says that military force can be used in self-defense only against imminent threats, and many international lawyers resist the idea that the United States can be at war with al-Qaida (because it is neither a nation-state nor a conventional insurgency) or with “associated forces,†which may be any group, anywhere in the world, that interacts with or shares the ideology of al-Qaida. And recently, nations belonging to the International Criminal Court agreed to give that court the leeway to deal with the “crime of aggression.†A drone strike against a member of al-Qaida in a country that has not given permission for such a strike would certainly count as such a crime of aggression—unless it was part of a war of self-defense, that is, a response to an “imminent†threat. Calling any use of military force against al-Qaida a response to an imminent threat may be an effort to forestall future accusations of war crimes against Obama administration officials similar to those directed at Bush administration officials. But if so, it’s a flimsy one.
Obama and Bush administration lawyers have stretched the Constitution and traditional rules of international law to accommodate the threat posed by terrorism. Some people will say they violated the law. But given the political consensus supporting these moves within the U.S., it is more accurate to say that the law has evolved. It gives the president the discretion he needs, or at least wants, to address an amorphous threat. Let’s hope he uses that discretion wisely.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/02/25/peter-beinart-liberals-back-in-love-with-imperial-presidency.htmlFollow the Leader
by Peter Beinart Feb 25, 2013 4:45 AM EST
How liberals fell in love with the imperial presidency (again).
The late American historian John Morton Blum begins his book The Progressive Presidents by describing a political gathering on a hilltop in Ascutney, Vermont, in 1967. The people assembled there are not radicals, but liberals: “good burghers … respectable suburbanites.†And they have come to oppose not merely the Vietnam War, but the toxin that lies beneath it: excessive presidential power.
Barack Obama
President Barack Obama delivers a speech beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington D.C. (Charles Ommanney/Getty)
Blum spends the rest of his book teasing out the irony: that once upon a time, to be an American liberal was to support “a strong presidency,†the kind of presidency created by Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, the “progressive presidents†Blum admires.
Had Blum revisited his subject in 2007, he would have marveled at how well his thesis fared. By the late Bush years, people like the good liberals of Ascutney—now clutching lattes—were denouncing not merely the war in Iraq, but the new “imperial presidency†hatched in Dick Cheney’s basement: the signing statements that altered the meaning of laws, the secret torture sites, the spying on Americans, the efforts to destroy critics of the war, the brazen lies. “George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship,†editorialized The New York Times in 2005. “Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.â€
But today, the liberal admiration for presidential power that Blum memorialized is back. President Obama has claimed the right to kill American citizens involved in terrorism, and resisted subjecting his decisions to either congressional or judicial review. He’s given recess appointments to nominees the Senate would not confirm even when the Senate was not technically in recess. He employed an exotic legislative maneuver to pass his health-care law and has used executive orders to institute many of the policy changes Congress would not enact. And he’s become so resistant to media scrutiny that longtime ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton recently called “the president’s [lack of] availability to the press ... a disgrace.â€
Through all this, mainstream liberal Democrats have mostly yawned. Liberals may not be thrilled about the drone program, but they trust Obama’s judgment in a way they never trusted Bush’s. And like progressives a century ago, they want a president strong enough to impose his will on a Congress that they consider reactionary, corrupt, and dismissive of the public will. During the Bush years, movies such as Syriana and the Bourne trilogy portrayed America’s leaders as deceitful warmongers. But in the Obama era, Hollywood has rediscovered its faith in the Oval Office. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is an ends-justify-the-means tale of a president who shades the truth and violates the letter of the law in order to achieve the greater good of outlawing slavery. The contemporary message is clear: Do what you have to do, President Obama. We trust you.
Would Blum be pleased? Partially, because as the progressives understood, it requires some concentration of presidential power to match the forces of concentrated wealth. But Blum would also know that, sooner or later, the liberal faith in presidential power will be betrayed, and the good people of Ascutney will rise again, probably not a moment too soon.
I find the hypocrisy on
both sides fascinating. I personally like Obama's foreign policy, more so than many of his domestic policies. But it's not the free-loving hippie leftist policy that conservatives want to paint it. At the same time, it has way more in common with Bush than the left would ever admit. Why is Bush a war criminal, the worst president in our entire history, etc. etc., but Benghazi "isn't relevant" and the leaked drone policy, giving the President sole power to murder people without answering to anyone, or showing any supporting evidence before or after is NBD? Now, I get that in order to effectively fight terrorism, we as civilians don't need to know everything our government is doing, and it takes breaking a few eggs to make an omelet. But can you
imagine if any Republican president was doing this,
let alone Bush? I'm pretty sure Bush would have been impeached over this. However, somehow, the same people leading protests against Bush seem to be totally cool with this.
Let's just go with the false premise that Obama is perfect, always makes the right decision, and is immaculately responsible with this power, and all Republicans are belligerent war-mongers. Do these people not realize, that as bad as things are for Republicans now, eventually, one
will win the presidency again? Are they going to be so comfortable with this executive power then?
As I said, I tend to be pretty ok with it for the most part, just as I supported things that I might not under normal circumstances during the Bush Administration, such as the Patriot Act, torture, etc. (which we still do, by the way, and if you saw Zero Dark Thirty, you'll realize it played a huge role in leading us to Bin Laden). But I guess the main reason it bugs me is the hypocrisy of it all, from both sides, but especially from the left. Because Bush cannot be a tyrannical war criminal in the same world that Obama is literally a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. That notion defies logic and fairness.
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