So said Richard Nixon in his interviews with David Frost. Nixon was talking about wiretaps and surreptitious entries to protect lives and safeguard national security in a violent and anarchic war decade. The Nixon haters pronounced themselves morally sickened.
Under Barack Obama, we don’t have a Nixon “enemies list” of folks who are not to be invited to White House dinners. Rather, we have a “kill list” — a menu from which our constitutional law professor president selects individuals to be executed abroad. Not only in Afghanistan, but Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and who knows where else. And not just foreigners, but Americans, too.
When may Obama order an American killed? According to a Justice Department “white paper,” any “informed high-level official” can decide a target is a ranking operative of al-Qaida who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” and if we cannot apprehend him, order him eradicated with a Hellfire missile. As law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell argues: “For a threat to be deemed ‘imminent,’ it is not necessary for a specific attack to be underway. The paper denies Congress and the federal courts a role in authorizing the killings or even reviewing them afterwards.” And they called Nixon the imperial president.
As killing a U.S. citizen is a graver deed than waterboarding a terrorist plotter to get information to save lives, Obama, who bewailed Bush’s detention, rendition and interrogation policies, appears guilty of manifest hypocrisy. But with 3,000 to 4,500 now killed by drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen over 10 years, and an estimated 200 children and other civilians among the “collateral damage,” it is past time for a debate on where we are going in this “war on terror.”
A question raised by Donald Rumsfeld years ago — Are we creating more terrorists than we are killing? — needs re-raising. For if these drone strikes that kill innocent and guilty alike are creating new millions of sympathizers for al-Qaida, and recruiting new thousands of volunteers willing to dedicate their lives to taking revenge against us, we have entered upon a war that may never end.
But planting a U.S. drone base on Saudi soil is no small matter. Osama bin Laden gave as a primary cause for his declaration of war on America that we had defiled the sacred soil of Arabia that is home to Mecca and Medina by planting our infidel bases there. After 9/11, at the Saudis’ request, we removed our bases. What will this revelation mean for that royal family? What will it mean for America’s image in the Muslim world? Is any benefit we derive from a drone base just north of Yemen worth enraging much of an Islamic world of 1.5 billion?
Congress, the administration and the American people need to ask: Why have we been unable to bring this war on terror to a “swift end”? Why this “prolonged indecision”? Why has the battlefield in the war on terror not narrowed, but expanded from South Asia to the Middle East to North Africa? Is the war on terror to be like the war on crime, eternal, with U.S. soldiers policing the world forever, even as cops police our cities? What is Obama’s plan, the Republicans’ plan for ending or winning this war, whose scope widens with each year?
As we see the great buildings of our capital enveloped in concrete barriers, as U.S. citizens are forced to submit to intrusive searches before boarding airliners, one wonders: How long before the Republic becomes a garrison state? If we do not end this war, this war will one day bring an end to the freedom for which the Fathers fought.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Rudy-Barye-Garcia/1612190210 Rudy Barye Garcia
We are almost now a garrison state. Look at our civilian police forces; they have been militarized with helmets, high power weapons, armored vehicles, boots pounding the pavement; the beat cop is a thing of the past.
So said Richard Nixon in his interviews with David Frost. Nixon was talking about wiretaps and surreptitious entries to protect lives and safeguard national security in a violent and anarchic war decade. The Nixon haters pronounced themselves morally sickened.
Under Barack Obama, we don’t have a Nixon “enemies list” of folks who are not to be invited to White House dinners. Rather, we have a “kill list” — a menu from which our constitutional law professor president selects individuals to be executed abroad. Not only in Afghanistan, but Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and who knows where else. And not just foreigners, but Americans, too.
When may Obama order an American killed? According to a Justice Department “white paper,” any “informed high-level official” can decide a target is a ranking operative of al-Qaida who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” and if we cannot apprehend him, order him eradicated with a Hellfire missile. As law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell argues: “For a threat to be deemed ‘imminent,’ it is not necessary for a specific attack to be underway. The paper denies Congress and the federal courts a role in authorizing the killings or even reviewing them afterwards.” And they called Nixon the imperial president.
As killing a U.S. citizen is a graver deed than waterboarding a terrorist plotter to get information to save lives, Obama, who bewailed Bush’s detention, rendition and interrogation policies, appears guilty of manifest hypocrisy. But with 3,000 to 4,500 now killed by drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen over 10 years, and an estimated 200 children and other civilians among the “collateral damage,” it is past time for a debate on where we are going in this “war on terror.”
A question raised by Donald Rumsfeld years ago — Are we creating more terrorists than we are killing? — needs re-raising. For if these drone strikes that kill innocent and 
guilty alike are creating new millions of sympathizers for al-Qaida, and recruiting new thousands of volunteers willing to dedicate their lives to taking revenge against us, we have entered upon a war that may never end.
But planting a U.S. drone base on Saudi soil is no small matter. Osama bin Laden gave as a primary cause for his declaration of war on America that we had defiled the sacred soil of Arabia that is home to Mecca and Medina by planting our infidel bases there. After 9/11, at the Saudis’ request, we removed our bases. What will this revelation mean for that royal family? What will it mean for America’s image in the Muslim world? Is any benefit we derive from a drone base just north of Yemen worth enraging much of an Islamic world of 1.5 billion?
Congress, the administration and the American people need to ask: Why have we been unable to bring this war on terror to a “swift end”? Why this “prolonged indecision”? Why has the battlefield in the war on terror not narrowed, but expanded from South Asia to the Middle East to North Africa? Is the war on terror to be like the war on crime, eternal, with U.S. soldiers policing the world forever, even as cops police our cities? What is Obama’s plan, the Republicans’ plan for ending or winning this war, whose scope widens with each year?
As we see the great buildings of our capital enveloped in concrete barriers, as U.S. citizens are forced to submit to intrusive searches before boarding airliners, one wonders: How long before the Republic becomes a garrison state? If we do not end this war, this war will one day bring an end to the freedom for which the Fathers fought.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Rudy-Barye-Garcia/1612190210 Rudy Barye Garcia
We are almost now a garrison state. Look at our civilian police forces; they have been militarized with helmets, high power weapons, armored vehicles, boots pounding the pavement; the beat cop is a thing of the past.