Eric Holder’s reply [pdf] to Rand Paul’s question of whether the President can order a drone strike in the US is getting some play from sober conservatives (Obama White House Thinks It Can Kill Americans in America is Doug Mataconis’ restrained take on it). Here’s the nut of what Holder said:
The question you have posed is entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no President will ever have to confront,’ Holder wrote. ‘It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the President could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.
I don’t understand why using drones to kill an American is any different from using a helicopter, tank, fighter jet, humvee or some other conveyance to deliver deadly force. If Congress doesn’t like the way the President could use force on Americans within our borders, I believe there’s something called the “war power” that can be used to limit it. But instead we get a green eggs and ham discussion (from a drone? on a plane? in a train? from a car? on a bike? from a trike?) and intimations of a grim meathook future “where Predator drones are roaming American skies looking for American citizens to strike at, regardless of the reason” from serious conservatives like Mataconis, just because a new killing machine has been invented. We’ve got plenty of killing machines, so how about we concentrate on regulating the killing?
Gin & Tonic
Congress abdicated the war power decades ago.
Raven
This is the same old shit. Dead is dead be it a nuke or a fucking sink hole.
mikej(droid)
If we have to burn Atlanta again I have no problem with using drones to do it.
Napoleon
They are not, which makes his response completely unremarkable. If Lincoln had drones does anyone seriously think he would have not used them against the rebels?
kc
I wonder if you’d say the same thing if this were Bush and Ashcroft?
Wag
Would you, could you from a drone?
Would you, could you over the phone?
Would you, could you with a gun?
Kill you, kill you!
This is fun!
BGinCHI
The drone from the right wing is doing more damage to this country than any unmanned aircraft ever could.
Howlin Wolfe
MM, of course, you make the mistake of thinking about stuff.
It’s amazing the way the political discourse in this country gets focussed on the latest meme and can’t see the bigger picture at all, and then bounces to the next shiny object. It’s like the national consciousness has ADHD and can’t concentrate on many things at once without getting distracted and wrong. Same with the economy and the deficit. We get the Republicans, as soon as they’re out of power, shouting about “the deficit!!” and the village idiots can’t see any other aspect of the economy except that. Similarly, “drones!!”.
Todd
I enjoy the hysteria from the defenders of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, OBL and Jose Padilla, sobbing tears for the murderous.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Which is the real problem here, whether you’re talking about drones, targeted air strikes or ‘boots on the ground’. Broder bless me, but both sides in Congress treated Libya like a hot potato. I’m no fan of Dianne Feinstein, to say the least, but she’s been doing the right thing in holding to the idea of Congressional oversight.
Omnes Omnibus
I hate the use of the word homeland.
General Stuck
The constitution as well as international law, does have exemptions from usual processes for engaging in warfare when there is an imminent threat of attack, and a right to self defense. Or, pre emptive warfare. Not to be confused with Bush’s preventive war bullshit. It doesn’t really matter where or if citizens are involved . Whether it is a drone used , or a sniper rifle in a hostage situation, the imminence of attack is the controlling factor. And is generally filed under common sense.
Big R
@kc: That’s a fair question. Of course, the instinct is to be skeptical of those we’re already inclined to be skeptical of, and vice versa for those we’re already inclined to trust. And while fighting a hypothetical is a bad habit, it’s fair to ask if the Bush administration would have been even that reasonable, or if they would have said, “Screw you, we do what we think is best and we’re not answerable to you metre peasants.”
BJ over
The issue isn’t the drones. Its whether Obama thinks he can kill US citizens here the way he killed Alwaki. Its about the power to target citizens for death without charges.
I think the important thing is that none of this is Obama’s fault. We have to find someone else to blame: hey Congress should do more!
I’m sure that if Bush and Cheney said they can kill US citizens on US soil without charges or trial, BalloonJuice writers would have been looking for ways to say it’s no big deal, that its Congress’ fault, that it’s all just a big yawn.
That’s why I love this place: principled, honest and hard-hitting commentary.
And anyone who compares the Civil War (Lincoln did it!) to the war on terror is probably either mentally ill or extremely stupid.
El Caganer
I don’t think it’s the drones that are the problem – isn’t the military supposed to be pretty restricted in its activities within USA borders? Normally, going after a dangerous individual (or group) would be a law enforcement matter, and I was under the impression (IANAL) that the military could only act in very specific situations.
mrmcd
When we want to do extrajudicial killings of American citizens we use the local police department. Why bother with drones?
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Omnes Omnibus: It always puts me in a mood. Specifically, I put on my boots and get my riding crop, and pace back and forth in front of the nearest American flag shouting curses at hippies, degenerates, coloreds and freethinkers.
I feel very important while I’m doing this.
dance around in your bones
@BGinCHI: QFT.
I love how Holder responding to a question asked of him, and taking pains to call it hypothetical and unlikely to ever happen and etc becomes OMG THE PRESIDENT WANTS TO KILL AMURKANS WITH DRONES! A grip, get one.
Also, somehow the title of this post made me think of this song.
eta:also loved the green eggs and ham sentence. well done. (see what I did there?)
f space that
U.S. citizens have been killed on U.S. soil by members of the military and law enforcement. They were striking for better pay and working conditions. The Republicans can shove it. And what Todd says.
Ash Can
@kc: If Bush and Ashcroft had used drones to mitigate or prevent the actions of 9/11 like Holder implies, I’d sing their praises.
Raven
@mikej(droid): Good luck, they’d be stuck in traffic.
Cassidy
@kc: No I wouldn’t. Bush and Ashcroft and various others of that period of time were known liars who undermined our democracy. Context is everything.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@mrmcd: This. Mine will pretty much do it on request.
Plus it’s much cheaper.
The current debate on drones and “the gubbmint” killing citizens is horseshit. We’ve been killing our own citizenry without trial or legal oversight for centuries, we do it with police, and any politician or citizen who doesn’t address that issue FIRST when talking about the horror of extrajudicial killings is a demagoguing piece of shit with an agenda that has nothing to do with preserving the rights of American citizens.
Mike in NC
I’m very comfortable at using my taxpayer dollars for launching drone strikes against the likes of treasonous scum like Rand Fucking Paul.
Raven
The Battle of Blair Mountain, W VA.
SteveM
Because thinking that President Obongo X wants to kill white Christian gun owners with drones gives white Christian gun owners a rage hard-on.
TooManyJens
@El Caganer: I think you’re correct. I understood the “extraordinary circumstances” to be something like the Air Force shooting down one of the hijacked planes on 9/11, which … come to think of it, has anyone ever sat down and figured out if that would be legal? Most people I’ve read have said they’d be OK with that, but I don’t know what the legality would be. I mean, if someone is attacking the United States, the military has to be able to fight back; it’s a question of what gets considered “an attack on the United States” versus a crime, I suppose. (IAsoNAL)
zattarra
On Sept. 11th if there was a fighter in the area I think you would find most of America would say that fighter should have shot down the hijacked airliners before they slammed into the towers or the Pentagon. Are we then going to argue over “well, it’s OK if an F16 with a pilot in it launches that missile but not OK if a Predator with a pilot sitting in Jacksonville, FL does it”? Seems like a stupid argument to me.
Ask those freaking out about this a simple question – do you think it is the right of the President to shoot down a hijacked airliner with Americans aboard before that aircraft is used as a bomb/missile. If yes why the heck does it matter how we shoot it down?
Raven
@SteveM: You’re killin me over here!
General Stuck
@SteveM:
As well as justifying the right to buy a chain gun from Walmart.
Hawes
State on state violence is at historical lows (despite what you might think from breathless reporting and the Jehovah’s Witnesses that come to your door).
The real violence today is from civil wars and non-state actors. Most civil wars are none of our damned business. But non-state actors (terrorists and criminal enterprises mostly) are of concern.
The failure of imagination under C+ Augustus is that only states (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran) matter. And so they pursued state on state solutions.
Drones seem to be an acknowledgment that we must address non-state actors the way we used to address states.
Patricia Kayden
@kc: I disagree with the Obama administration on their use of drones to kill American citizens without any oversight. So I wouldn’t say anything different had Romney won.
Vlad on the Tracks
Ah, so drones don’t kill people, people kill people. Got it.
But let me ask a question: Do drones make it easier for people, in particular politicians, to kill people? It certainly seems that way.
Are you sure there is absolutely no issue here?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
As I understand, the President has a lot of leeway to act under such circumstances– practically speaking, I guess the only before-the-fact check is the military refusing to follow orders? and the after-the-fact check is impeachment. I also am soNAL.
And it’s not just the right going reductio ad absurdum on this. Salon and HuffPo have headlines about “Obama Free To Use Drones!”, I haven’t even looked at Eschaton, D-Kos or FDL. Rachel Maddow and Senator Ron Wyden, both of whom I respect, on her show a couple weeks ago ominously intoned that Obama is claiming the right to “kill you”, I think it was Maddow who said “kill you in your bed”.
Michael
@kc: @zattarra:
Pretty sure Bush did have fighter jets scrambled on 9-11, and pretty sure nobody gave a fuck
Ben Franklin
Just make sure you’re not a ‘Liberation Theology’ Priest.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/05/us-still-fighting-threat-of-liberation-theology/
Let’s have a Vatican III so we can all get back on track with the new Popey.
Scott S.
@Vlad on the Tracks: Drones are easier than a gun?
celticdragonchick
@TooManyJens:
I read an interview with one of the pilots scrambled to intercept the last hijacked flight (all of the alert F-15 fighters were on the standby points well out over the Atlantic from the initial scramble order which did not indicate that the attackers were in hijacked passenger jets)
Anyways, she was running to her F-16 with her squadron commander and both of their jets were unarmed. No ammunition and no missiles. She started to do her pre-flight checklist and he yelled at her to can that shit…it was a scramble and no fucking pre-flights apply now. So they get into the air and he tells her the target is a passenger wide body jet with people on board and terrorists bound for Washington DC. His plan is to crash his fighter right into the cockpit, and that she should try to take out the tail section of the jet with her own fighter.
In other words, neither of them expected to live through the experience.
different-church-lady
There’s something obvious that the drone-floggers of the left refuse to admit publicly: they think it makes the game unfair. In their minds as long as the person who pulls the trigger is actually at some degree of risk on the battlefield, it balances the moral playing field a bit. They don’t want to come right out and say “IT’S CHEATING” because they know that’s absurd, but that’s what the emotional charge is for them.
As for the drone-floggers of the right, it’s just as obvious, but without the moral conundrum: they see it as a card they can play against Obama. If it were Bush they wouldn’t give a shit.
4tehlulz
>I don’t understand why using drones to kill an American is any different from using a helicopter, tank, fighter jet, humvee or some other conveyance to deliver deadly force.
Well, what you fail to understand is that these things, combined with the Islamofascist communist ideology of that 1, is the greatest threat to our freedom since that Bill Clinton shot Monica with his cruise missile.
Ben Franklin
@different-church-lady:
If it were Bush they wouldn’t give a shit.
Um, yes. And the BJ perspective would differ, how?
Jebediah
@Omnes Omnibus:
So I’m not the only one creeped out by that.
different-church-lady
Additional observation: it is impossible to have a sane conversation about this because the separate components of “drone”, “targeted”, “domestic” and “American” keep getting pressed into a single greasy meatloaf.
Example: the question of whether the president has the right to do targeted killing overseas can be completely different from the question of the morality of drones, which can also be completely different from whether American citizens can be killed in America no matter what the method, etc. etc. But no discussion of the individual components ever takes place.
Roger Moore
@different-church-lady:
FTFY.
Soonergrunt
@ Mistermix, top:
Heh. Good luck with this one. The last time I asked the question…well.
Omnes Omnibus
In the event of an attack on US soil, the president would undoubtedly have the authority to use US military assets within the territorial US. Drones are US military assets and the president, therefore, would have the authority to use them here.
To answer kc’s question above, I would not have trusted the Bush administration to do this well or properly. I did not ever trust them to do anything well and properly. That does not mean that they would not have had the legal authority to use military force within the US in the hypo presented by Holder. It just means that I would expect them to hamfistedly fuck up something that was within their power. Katrina, not Iraq.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@TooManyJens: I think you’re trying to push the legal system into places it’s not made for. But in an analogy, this would be like asking, if someone stole a car and was running over people on the sidewalk, would it be legal to shoot the person or blow up the car to prevent further deaths.
Mnemosyne
@BJ over:
If that’s your issue, then Holder has answered your question — the administration would only use drones in the case of an outside attack. What, you thought that Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were carried out by US citizens?
@different-church-lady:
This right here. For the people complaining about the “unlawful” killing of al-Awlaki, would you have been A-OK with it if the US had sent in a squadron of Navy SEALs and shot him in the head because it was only the drone that made it unacceptable?
ericblair
@BJ over:
OK, fine, you’re totally confused over civil and military powers. To avoid another 200+ comments:
-The US Constitution applies to US and American-controlled territory. We don’t go yanking US citizens out of German courts because they’re accused of hate speech crimes.
-Awlaki was a command and control target under the AUMF. And yes, he was actually an active C&C agent, not just a noisy guy on Youtube.
-Regardless of the military authority, Awlaki was under a capture or kill warrant by Yemeni courts.
-Trials in absentia are illegal in the US.
If you want a broader discussion of the AUMF, whether it should be repealed or changed, go for it. Remember that it’s Congress you have to deal with here.
jonas
Can’t wait to read a column by John Yoo attacking this as yet another example of Obama dangerous overstepping of constitutional boundaries…
TooManyJens
@celticdragonchick: Jesus.
Maybe it makes me a goose-stepping fascist, but I’m OK with that plan in that situation. I also don’t think, if we do our jobs as citizens and demand accountability and proper limits on executive authority, that the slope from that to “murdering Americans in their beds with drones” actually has to be that slippery. Granted, I’m somewhat pessimistic about us doing our jobs as citizens because most people don’t seem to care that much who the government kills as long as they don’t think it will ever be them or anyone who looks like them. But legal authority to do something like take out the hijacked planes on 9/11 is not the problem here.
Suffern ACE
@TooManyJens: I would assume that the president could order the air force to shoot down a civilian aircraft that was thought to be both hijacked and flown by the hijackers. After 9/11, it would be foolish to think that that would not be done. Now, they are going to have to prove that it was being hijacked. But that’s another story.
Honestly, this is silly. You’d be better off complaining about the wiretapping and eavesdropping than worrying about bomber drones.
TooManyJens
@Suffern ACE: Amen to that last sentence.
RP
Wow. I didn’t think Mataconis was that dumb.
Scamp Dog
Why did Holder go with the examples of December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001? Was there any notion of going after American citizens on those days?
I’d have gone with the Civil War, but I suspect that’s something that would offend Republicans, Southerners, and their media enablers.
MikeJ
@ericblair:
I would have thought we would have seen a real surge in recruiting for the US Marshal’s Service for people who wanted to serve warrants in the back country in Yemen.
different-church-lady
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Let’s break this down further:
– would killing the driver be the right course of action?
– would killing the driver be a moral course of action?
– Does it make any difference if the driver is an American citizen or not?
– Can the right course of action be different from the the course of action that would deny the American citizen due process?
– When innocent people are dying on the sidewalk, should you be giving a shit about what might happen in the courts later on?
– Does the technology involved change the legality or the morality of the killing of the driver?
– What if the driver hadn’t gotten into the car yet, and had only made statements of his intent?
Who wants to answer every one of these and other questions when they can just make quick, cyncial, blanket statements of outrage on the internet?
Xantar
@Mnemosyne:
Well, the counter-argument seems to be that a drone strike causes a lot of collateral damage (Al-Awlaki’s son, for example) whereas Navy SEALs wouldn’t.
I don’t really think that holds much merit. Navy SEALs are just as capable of unintentionally killing bystanders as any other military tactic. But it is a pretty significant component of the debate.
You and different-church-lady are completely right about how all kinds of issues get conflated together in the drones conversation. Most people don’t have logic training to break issues down into their components so that we can discuss them rationally.
Joey Giraud
I don’t understand why using drones to kill an American is any different from using a helicopter, tank, fighter jet, humvee or some other conveyance to deliver deadly force.
This obtuseness is tiresome, and almost everyone here is guilty of it.
The reason why drones are different is one of degree, not of kind.
Those other conveyances bear at least some small risk of bodily harm to the conveyor, the human being pulling the trigger. Even snipers, cannons, RPGs and short range missiles entail some degree of vulnerability for the shooter.
Drones are the first retail killing device where the shooter is virtually invulnerable. Which is quite nice if you’re the shooter, and is probably why so many ex-military people here defend drones.
From the point of view of the target human being and their friends, this invulnerability is despicable, unworthy of respect.
There’s an old-fashioned aspect of violence that aims to instill in the target population not just fear, but respect. Perhaps some of you understand this.
In this department, drones are a major fail. Targets will feel nothing but contempt for the drone operators, and will not be properly repressed.
Xantar
@Joey Giraud:
Cruise missiles? Bombs dropped from miles in the air over Libya?
different-church-lady
@Xantar:
Fixed that for you.
Omnes Omnibus
@Scamp Dog: I think that, during an actual military attack, the citizenship of the attacker is irrelevant. Holder would have been better served, IMO, to have included Fort Sumter in his set of examples.
Ben Franklin
@different-church-lady:
Who wants to answer every one of these and other questions when they can just make quick, cyncial, blanket statements of outrage on the internet?
Ah, those hypotheticals…..
Here’s another; “You have a conspirator in interrogation. He has information about a suitcase nuke. Do you torture him?”
Sound familiar?
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
Bill Clinton didn’t have drones in 1993, but he had plenty of JaBos of one sort or another. If I had been him, and I found out some nut cult like the Branch Davidians was stockpiling weapons like they were, you goddamn betcha I would have called in an airstrike in a hot minute—I wouldn’t have sent in agents on the ground to be murdered.
As for drones vs. piloted aircraft, I have to admit I am unable to understand the distinction. In the kind of actions people are hyperventilating about—”killing you in your bed”, forsooth!—there would be no danger to a pilot anyway. That’s unless you’re sending them off unarmed to ram an airliner, as celticdragonchick told us about upthread—but hopefully such a criminal case of unreadiness wouldn’t happen today.
Oh, and flame away, but I don’t give a rat’s ass if Anwar al-Awlaki was by some tortured interpretation a “US citizen”—and the fact that it matters so much to the firebaggers says a lot about them. Either killing him was wrong or it wasn’t—but if he was a “US Citizen” then it’s especially heinous?
Even if he was a citizen, he “levied war against the United States”—they couldn’t get Aaron Burr on that (thanks, John Marshall), but a clearer case than al-Awlaki’s is hard to imagine.
Todd
There is a tendency among right wingers to welcome the sort of extensive collateral damage suffered by the browns when American forces invade and live pilots in humanly operated airplanes drop bombs or fire missiles. One part Walter Mitty, one part George C Scott’s portrayal of Patton and all parts asshole, for them, this sort of destruction is deserved – God’s justice, if you will, delivered by the white man against the evil browns, a lesson that the browns can never, ever forget. Their quest for this is never sated.
The drones deprive them of that extent of carnage, and don’t give them the Walter Mitty pleasure rush.
Jane2
@kc: This.
Joey Giraud
@Xantar:
Exactly, that’s why air bombing campaigns fail to cow the target population into surrender. ( ex; England in WWII )
But I qualified my assertion with the word “retail.”
SatanicPanic
@Vlad on the Tracks: When has it ever been hard for American politicians to kill people?
Todd
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge:
As I always say to wingers and firebaggers, you don’t have a constimatooshinal right to maintain an armed standoff, despite what god fringed flag cultists and tax protestors on the right say, and what drum circle leaders on the left say.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: How do you make a moral decision? Do you analyze the consequences of your actions? Do you ever think about why it might be permissible to go a certain distance down a road but no further? and If so, do you think about why you set that no further mark where you did? Those were the types of questions d-c-l was asking. The alternative is to go with your gut.
Jane2
@BJ over: And this. The current state of the conversation about killing US citizens either in or out of the USA, not the method, shows the deterioration of US thought regarding civil rights, oversight, and the necessity of courts since 2001
And a Democratic President does not change that.
mk3872
It’s known as “trolling” … Trying to gin-up the drone outrage on the Left to hurt the POTUS.
Joey Giraud
@different-church-lady:
Go away and take your clear thinking with you! It’s not welcome here.
chopper
y’all have to remember, in right-wing fantasy land, when the ‘chicoms’ invade, it isn’t the US military that stops them, it’s good old-fashioned right-wing gun-loving WOLVERIIIIIINES.
Jane2
Joey Giraud: Ah, but there’s a medal for drone operators now, so it must be legit. Talk about ginning up zero risk.
General Stuck
I do think there are some profound ethical questions concerning unmanned combat aircraft going into the future. And what that means to peoples and their governments going to war by remote control. Possibly too easily.
But I don’t think we are there yet, that the question has ripened to a critical mass with limited use of small drones with one or two hellfire missiles attached.
That is a question for the world, as we speak, larger, full sized unmanned bombers and fighter aircraft are being built. But the question of method of killing an enemy in an already sanctioned war both by the world and the USA, is not relevant to such profound and ethical questions for future wars. imo
edit – and if it is relevant, only so that how such drones effect the killing of innocent civilians. As I have linked to in other threads on this topic, The Obama admin. has gone to some fairly great lengths to develop better protocols for targetting, as well as the Pentagon using much smaller missiles than they were/ And then there is the ability of drones to hover over a target for many hours with high tech video to assess the situation before firing / All of this has dropped civilian deaths drastically from what they were.
Cheap Jim
When you say “serious conservatives” and “Mataconis” in the same sentence, you’re not equating the two, are you?
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus:
Which prompts a further thought: the real decision is that one either has to ask and examine all of the questions, or one has to go with just the gut. You can’t just ask and answer the one or two questions that suit your gut. People who do aren’t just being emotional, they’re being intellectually dishonest to support their emotions.
There’s nothing wrong with having an emotional perspective on something. But within the real of policy debate there’s something highly wrong with creating a faulty and incomplete intellectual construct as cover for your emotions.
Geeno
@TooManyJens: Clinton had given wing commanders the authority to do exactly that without the need for higher authorization when the possibility was being addressed for the Atlanta Olympics.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
How do you make a moral decision? Do you analyze the consequences of your actions? Do you ever think about why it might be permissible to go a certain distance down a road but no further? and If so, do you think about why you set that no further mark where you did? Those were the types of questions d-c-l was asking. The alternative is to go with your gut.
Let’s say some body of authority sees the extinction of the Human Race approaching due to insufficient resources to sustain life. Let’s say One Billion persons must be liquidated by the end of the year, in order to save the rest of humanity. What would your position be?
moderateindy
I am fairly unconcerned about the whole drone thing. It’s just technology. I actually think it’s a better choice than most of the alternatives (i.e. dropping bombs from a plane at a high altitude or having boots on the ground) for such missions.
For me it’s more about transparency and oversight. Take the armed drone program away from the CIA and make it only military, so there is more congressional oversight. Why does anyone have a problem with offing AL Awaki? Just because he is an American citizen doesn’t mean he can act as an agent of terror with impunity. Does anyone doubt that he was acting as an enemy agent against the U.S.? Again with more congressional oversight I think the concerns over offing American citizens without clear evidence of them basically actively being part of an enemy force that is targeting the country are a bit overblown.
The fear of having drones all over the U.S. for surveillance purposes is valid, but a little silly when put into the context of our current surveillance society. I’m not really sure there is anywhere that the government can’t track you already, without the aid of drones. It’s not something I personally agree with, but I don’t see adding surveillance drones as anything that different from the status quo.
JP7505A
I really fail to see why this is causing such an uproar. The government, i.e. police officers/FBI agents/border patrol/etc kills Americans on American soil every day. Usually it is in the legitimate line of duty but even when it is under questionable circumstances they are rarely if ever held accountable. Whither an FBI sniper ends a stand-off with a rifle or a drone I don’t see the moral/legal difference. As long as the drone is simply being used in place of some other less exotic weapon then it doesn’t matter. Obviously a rifle would be the preferred weapon in a hostage situation or in a densely populated urban area but if the area surrounding the site of the stand-off makes it impossible to use a sniper then maybe a drone would be the tool of choice.
The police already use fixed wing aircraft to monitor highways in rural areas so why would a drone be that different.
Now if the police started using drones to end car chases by blowing up the fleeing vehicle then that is a different matter. It all depends on the context.
Rand Paul feels that the constitution has been insulted by Holders hypothetical response. Paul and the rest of the conservative media have had no problems with GITMO and the torture memos. Warrantless wiretaps and unlimited detention are just ducky with them. Habeas Corpus is just some Latin phrase that no one understands. Last week SCOTUS made it impossible to sue the government if you suspect that they are reading your mail without a warrant and Clarence Thomas seems to have no problem executing people even when the defense lawyer was a drunk.
BUT OBAMA and drones oh the horror of it all. We will just have to wait until the next Bush presidency before the right decides that drones are ok after all!
Todd
@chopper:
When the chicoms invade, the wingers are making a mighty big assumption as to the continuous provision of power adequate to charge a battalion of hoverrounds in a fashion adequate to support both blubber AND major collections of firearms for the final roll on the chicom occupation headquarters.
chopper
@Joey Giraud:
this has absolutely no bearing at all on the legality of its use. even morally speaking – if you have a valid reason to drop a bomb on someone it doesn’t really matter how it’s done.
chopper
@Todd:
and when they invade, rand paul will be sitting in his basement in a puddle of his own urine screaming ‘WHERE ARE THE DROOOOONES?’
Todd
@JP7505A:
You gotta admit, it would make for some AWESOME reality TV. I admit, I’d watch.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: Well done. You have grasped the concept. The question you just posed is called the “trolley problem.”
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s new to me. I think of it as the ‘overcrowded lifeboat’ metaphor.
But it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
? Martin
Every once in a while I think Obama is trolling the electorate to push for a repeal of AUMF. This is one of those times.
Conservative: “What do you mean the AUMF authorizes the president to kill white people? I’m sure ‘camel jockeys’ was clearly stated in that document somewhere…”
But Holder’s position is hardly controversial. On 9/11 we scrambled fighter jets with the potential that one would need to shoot down an airliner. That never came to pass because it took too damn long to scramble the planes. Had a drone been loitering over NYC, we might have had a slightly different outcome that day by intercepting the 2nd WTC plane. Not that the final result would have been any different – the 2nd tower almost certainly would have still fallen, but there would have been some lives saved.
Put simply, there are already cases where military assets can be used against civilians. Taking the pilot out of the plane and putting them in a building hardly constitutes a significant change to what happens to the civilians in these scenarios.
Egypt Steve
@Scamp Dog: @Ben Franklin: I think my position would be to assume that whoever was making these claims was bat-shit insane, and hope to hell I was right.
? Martin
@Ben Franklin:
Welcome to end-of-life care. Welcome to infrastructure spending. Welcome to grant awarding. Welcome to college admissions. Welcome to foreign aid. Welcome to warfare. Welcome to life.
We make those decisions every goddamn day. You get labeled a troll because you appear to live in a bubble where you paint those every day decisions impossible to implement, because we can’t send every deserving kid to Stanford or build every city a new water treatment plant. You refuse to accept the impossible to avoid tradeoffs in every facet of life. You’re like a video game character armed with cheat codes that asserts that every hard decision can be resolved by just creating more resources at will. Nothing works that way, and yet you assert that everything should work that way. Its fantasy. If you can’t deal with these basic problems, then I hope to hell you never get a job making such decisions because you will be unbelievably bad at it.
Joe Max
Thank you! Whenever the subject of DRONES! comes up in a conversation, I bring this up: the US military always has the latest in killing machines – what’s your point? Of course we have kill-bots! Kill-bots were inevitable.
“The point is extra-judicial assassination!” OK, what we’re talking about then is the basic plot of every James Bond movie ever made: an international terrorist threatens the world, and 007 is sent in to do what? Negotiate diplomatically with Auric Goldfinger or Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Tell them that they’re under arrest, so kindly turn off the laser cutter aimed at my nuts and come along quietly?
No, a double-aught agent has a license to kill. (Goldfinger was even a British citizen, not a KGB agent, as was Hugo Drax and some other Bond villains who ended up on the business end of 007s Walther PPK.)
Shall we have a picket line at the next Bond movie opening, protesting that MI6 didn’t give Largo and Le Chiffre a chance to surrender to the World Court for trial?
When I brought this up to a particular firebagging fellow I know the other day, his response was that, ok, the problem is that the Justice Dept. came up with legal papers justifying such killings, that’s what was frying his bacon. Oh, so what is a “License to Kill” then? I guess it would have been OK if they just kept it all tippy-top secret, and ‘M’ and Felix Leiter made sure it never got into the papers?
JP7505A
@Raven: It was ok to bomb those people, they were union thugs, who probably would have voted for that Kenyan usurper if he had been born yet, not REAL Merkins. Even a Sarah Palin can tell the differnce
Snarki, child of Loki
It’s hard to see how domestic drone strikes would have helped in those two cases. On the other hand, something like April 12, 1861, yes, drone strikes could be useful.
Tactical nukes, also, too.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: Fine. I’ll give you an honest answer. I have no idea what I would do if I were a person faced with the power and need to make such a decision. But we make similar but smaller decisions every day. Do you give money the the guy who is asking for bus fare? If you don’t he might not make it to a job interview and thus not get a the job, and, as a result, his wife will die because he didn’t have the health insurance the job would have provided. The thing with the the trolley problem is that there isn’t necessarily a right answer. It does not mean that one shouldn’t wrestle with the concepts.
ericblair
@Egypt Steve:
This is one of the problems with the ticking time bomb or trolley scenario. How do we know all these parameters so certainly? In this billion-person trolley scenario, how do we know that this Authority is telling the truth: maybe it’s some sort of stupid moral test? Why do we think it’s invulnerable? Why do you think that any decision would be possible, since you’ll be dealing with worldwide chaos and panic with no capability to actually do anything?
With the ticking time bomb: we know that there’s a bomb, that it’s likely to go off in the next hour or whatever, we have exactly one conspirator in custody, we know he knows all the answers somehow, and we know absolutely nothing else? We don’t know the likely targets to be evacuated, his likely accomplices, nothing? All the uncertainty in real life situations and the convenient rock-solid certainties of the dilemmas make these textbook cases useless.
kerFuFFler
@Raven: Thanks for the history lesson! Stuff like this never seems to make the cut into high school history books…
Ben Franklin
@? Martin:
then I hope to hell you never get a job making such decisions because you will be unbelievably bad at it.
That was an unbelievably tortured response, and I can tell you would have trouble deciding who lives and who dies. But I am making an assumption since you didn’t address the question itself. Instead you equate such decision to the mundane, everyday variety.
burnspbesq
@BJ over:
Al-Awlaki was actively engaged in armed hostilities against the United States. That makes his citizenship legally and morally irrelevant.
The use of drones against Ted & Hellen would, unfortunately, be a very different thing.
different-church-lady
@Ben Franklin:
Global warming is a complicated issue, yes.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
I have no idea what I would do if I were a person faced with the power and need to make such a decision
What if you have no say in it, or don’t even have access to the data which ostensibly supports the facts about the need to liquidate. Now imagine they won’t even tell you if you are marked for the killing.
. But we make similar but smaller decisions every day
Yes, targeted killing, currently in vogue, is the smaller scenario.
Omnes Omnibus
@ericblair:
I wouldn’t say useless. They are useful as a way for people to examine their priorities and try to work out a way of solving problems. It must always be understood that none of these problems are as cut and dried as they appear in the book or the classroom because real life is messy. And that even it it is that cut and dried, you find that yo, personally, can’t push the fat man onto the tracks even though you had reasoned that it was the “correct” solution.
burnspbesq
@Vlad on the Tracks:
Yes.
different-church-lady
@Ben Franklin:
I dunno about the rest of you, but I do find choosing who I’m going to targeted kill to be the hardest decision of my day.
Ben Franklin
@different-church-lady:
You lost me with Global Warming…
different-church-lady
@Ben Franklin: Good.
aimai
@kc:
Yes. I would.
I wish holder had said “In a Red Dawn type scenario I think its possible that any President might need to resort to a variety of military tactics to protect the American people but I can’t discuss hypotheticals.” That would have been an excellent way to deal with the question.
MomSense
@General Stuck:
Yes! What is the saying. “Common sense is so rare it is practically a superpower”
MomSense
@BJ over:
The crazy dude who killed the bus driver and then took a five year old hostage was killed without being charged.
It had to do with the threat he posed.
Ted & Hellen
@celticdragonchick:
It is hilarious and sad that you believe that story. Right out of Buck Rogers, it is.
aimai
@Scamp Dog:
We did, in fact, imprison both Japanese and Italian US citizens during the war.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: Yes, it would suck to be on a targeted kill list. But, you know what, every soldier in the Japanese Army during WWII was technically on a targeted kill list.
ETA: So was everyone in a CSA uniform from 1861-65.
MomSense
@Michael:
They went right over my house, house shook, dog barked, cats hid under bed, kids cried. I remember it well. I also remember it well because my husband was on a flight on his way to PA and I didn’t know which flight. It turns out that he was on the same flight from Portland, ME to Boston early that morning.
He was fine (I didn’t know that at the time)but yeah I pretty much knew why the jets were screaming towards NY or DC or PA.
? Martin
@Ben Franklin:
Of course I would have trouble deciding – everybody does. But people do jobs every day where they decide, because they have to. EMT arrives at a crash with more people hurt than they can handle. They have to start with someone – who do they start with, knowing that the ones they don’t choose might die as a result of that decision? You can’t sit there and ruminate why there aren’t 5x as many EMTs available so that such decisions never need to be made – you make the decision as best you can and move on.
There – life and death decision. Police do it. Firemen do it. Doctors, nurses, soldiers – all kinds of people make them. And even the more mundane decisions still carry opportunity costs to the person deciding. Getting into college may not be life or death, but it may well have a consequence on the trajectory of that person their entire life.
It’s not that the question of ‘how do we decide’ isn’t a bad topic – it’s a great topic. But you don’t present that topic in good faith. You don’t want the decision to be made at all until the topic is exhausted, and you don’t want to accept the outcome even if it comes. Your real goal is to eliminate the problem so that the decision never needs to be made. Which is great if it’s in our power to eliminate the problem. It almost never is, and you (and others) consistently refuse to accept that.
Cassidy
@? Martin:
We have a process for that.
Mnemosyne
@Joey Giraud:
Uh-huh. How much vulnerability did the operators of the Paris Gun have? Was the Paris Gun immoral by definition because it could shoot at its target from 81 miles away?
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
But, you know what, every soldier in the Japanese Army during WWII was technically on a targeted kill list.
It wasn’t a secret that uniformed military were a viable target. You or I might be on the list, but we wouldn’t know it. Does it give you pause that someone may be monitoring this discussion? Does that understanding create a chilling effect on expressing our opinions in public? I have a fatalistic attitude about such things, so it matters not. But do you think others think twice before hitting the submit button?
Cassidy
Not going to quote any of it. The whole comment is a crock of horseshit.
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne:
That’s the thing that always gets me. I don’t hear any complaining about how we killed OBL, and a better way to do that from a purely operational standpoint was with a couple of 2000lb gps-guided bombs dropped from a B-2.
Killing an enemy commander is killing an enemy commander. It doesn’t really matter where he was born.
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: This thread is sounding like an episode of fucking Torchwood.
Mnemosyne
@Scamp Dog:
Because he’s saying that the US would not use drones against US citizens within US borders.
I realize you guys are having a hard time recognizing his clear language because you’re completely convinced that Obama is champing at the bit to use drones against US citizens within the US, but that’s what Holder is saying: no use of drones against US citizens within the US.
MomSense
@different-church-lady:
And then there is the question of whether or not it makes sense politically. That is, does the use undermine the perception of us where the drones are being used.
ie: People in Yemen may hate the target of the drone but their hatred is not as persuasive as their fear of the use drone.
lol
@ericblair:
This this this this.
Al-Awaki’s citizenship is utterly irrelevant to the conversation. He’s a legal target under the AUMF. (I know Greenwald and others like to pretend he was just an outspoken warblogger or something… which is another annoying tendency on the left – to coddle and excuse people perceived as sticking it to The Man.)
If people want to have a conversation about how to deal with non-state terrorist actors, have at it. I expect to see an actual alternative provided, not the Pollyanna-ish strategy of “do nothing and they’ll go away”.
But citizenship has nothing to do with that conversation. It’s not a get out of jail free card.
Cassidy
@Ben Franklin:
I think you overestimate your standing in the world just by a small measure. If commenting on a blog leads you to pause before you hit submit and the resulting conversation in your head ends with “killed by Obama’s drones”, you should probably consider seeking a mental health professional.
Mnemosyne
@Ben Franklin:
Uh, no. But that’s because I’m not a paranoid who’s convinced that the government is out to get me for making blog comments.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne: At least they had the risk of dealing directly with munitions and a machine that could fail in a deadly way.
Which is kind of getting closer to the point: realistically speaking, codes of honor that were created in the days of hand to hand combat have been anachronisms for quite some time now. Asymmetries of danger started with the invention of the gunpowder, and just got more drastic from there.
Ben Franklin
@? Martin:
Everything you write is true, but especially this; ” Which is great if it’s in our power to eliminate the problem.”
It is in our power. AUMF is the problem, but how do you unscrew a pregnant pooch?
Abort the AUMF.
However, enabling POTUS with socratic euphemisms doesn’t accomplish that. Some here have said POTUS may be trolling the Public to get rid of AUMF.
Let’s hear more about that from the moral leaders, here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin:
How do you get to this from a statement that basically says, in a military emergency on a par with Pearl Harbor or the WTC, we would consider using drones within the territorial US?
Ben Franklin
@Cassidy:
There are online reading comprehension helps.
Soonergrunt
@Joey Giraud: They can feel all the contempt they want, right up until the point where the die.
Tell me that you’d feel better about yourself if you had the ability to do whatever you thought needed to be done with minimal risk to the operator, but you chose instead to use an increased risk method just so that the soon-to-be-dead-guy wouldn’t feel contempt in his last few seconds of life.
That kind of attitude is just fucking stupid. And it makes me both glad that you don’t have the authority to make such decisions, and sad that you don’t seem capable of thinking outside such a constrained box.
different-church-lady
@Ben Franklin:
It’s on a fuckin’ PUBLICLY VIEWABLE BLOG!
Are you for real?
Cassidy
@Ben Franklin: You should use those as well, such as @Omnes Omnibus: @128 points out. But get the psychiatric care first. Your level of fantasy and paranoia requires some meds and a cooling off period.
Ben Franklin
@Yutsano:
Sorry. We ran out of Entertainment Tonight subjects.
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: Problem is that too many people have this quaint notion that combat involves meeting in the middle, having a short conversation, returning to our positions, and yelling “game on”. Of course, we know that isn’t how it works, but that’s what too much TV and movies will do to a person.
Soonergrunt
@Ben Franklin:
They have very good treatments for that, and I’m given to understand that the side effects are minimal these days.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
Which is, I think, another part of the point: people seem to be making a huge assumption that only the US has drones and that only the US will ever have drones. Which seems kinda like the assumption that, since the US had the first nuclear weapon, the US would always have the only nuclear weapon. History has shown that as soon as one country develops a weapon, other countries start developing their own version.
There definitely are weapons that have been banned in the past — after WWI, chemical weapons were removed from everyone’s arsenal (or were supposed to be coughAgentOrangecough). But to me it seems more likely that other countries will develop their own drone technology rather than drones being banned the way mustard gas was.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: I agree that it is time to repeal or severely limit the AUMF. That being said, doing so would have no effect of the legality of the president authorizing a drone strike in the US under the terms of the Holder letter.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
How do you get to this from a statement that basically says, in a military emergency on a par with Pearl Harbor or the WTC, we would consider using drones within the territorial US?
Within that limited context, I don’t.
Soonergrunt
@different-church-lady: That’s easy compared to which K-cup to use for the 9:00 AM coffee break.
? Martin
@Cassidy:
Of course you do – and it’s a good process. But the people that wrote the process still have to deal with the consequence of the process, as do the people that implement the process still have to deal with the consequences. You’re still making a decision there, even if the decision is to ‘follow the process’.
But if Ben Franklin learned that you did everything by the book and someone died, he’d be jumping up your ass demanding why you didn’t save everyone. He doesn’t so much want you to save everyone, as to make the accident not happen to begin with. That’s the only outcome he’ll fully accept – as if the driver had no free will, and there were no other decisions made along the way that contributed to the outcome that you wandered into.
Ben Franklin
@Soonergrunt:
Well, your slavish allegiance to the Authoritarian has earned you many credits for SOMA.
http://www.huxley.net/soma/somaquote.html
Yutsano
@Cassidy: I’m thinking of a phrase involving pigs and mud. But I’ll leave it alone for now. Ben is just a morally superiour condescending asshole.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, within that limited context.
MomSense
@Joey Giraud:
“Drones are the first retail killing device where the shooter is virtually invulnerable. Which is quite nice if you’re the shooter, and is probably why so many ex-military people here defend drones.”
Missile strikes from naval ships–dude way off the coast of Iraq who pressed the button to launch the missile was virtually invulnerable. I should add that collateral damage was much higher from these strikes.
Also the bombers used were slightly more vulnerable but still not very vulnerable. They too had much higher rates of civilian deaths.
Cassidy
@Yutsano: I’m a sucker for a good fight. I admit it.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
: I agree that it is time to repeal or severely limit the AUMF
It seems we’re in the minority.
Soonergrunt
@Ben Franklin: You really are sadly stupid. And the whole one-note thing you have going on with me, regardless of what I actually ever say is pretty entertaining.
Do keep it up. It’s like substituting ‘pants’ into Star Wars dialog lines.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: No, it doesn’t. If you look back at the threads around here, you will not see a lot of support for the AUMF. You will see a lot of comments saying that certain actions are legal because of the AUMF. Those are entirely different things.
? Martin
@Ben Franklin:
AUMF eliminates a certain category of authority, but not all of it. There was no AUMF on 9/11 when we scrambled jets. And there is no way in hell that we won’t scramble jets when a plane enters certain airspaces (like the WHs) even after AUMF is repealed. So, this does extend beyond the AUMF – but how far? That’s a good question. What checks and balances should be there? Whose authority is needed? What’s the chain of command? What’s the consequence for getting it wrong?
But there will never, ever be a time when military assets can never be used against civilians. There never has been in our history, and there never will be – because the AUMF is the response to the problem, not the problem itself. Until you find a way to vanquish terrorism and other criminal and warlike acts before they happen, we’re going to have to deal with this reality.
ericblair
@Ben Franklin:
No, I think most people here do, but you keep confusing military and civil power and executive and legislative authority so much you can’t or won’t ask a coherent question about the subject.
chopper
@Soonergrunt:
besides, how exactly does this whole ‘contempt’ fantasy play out? in the split second when the bomb blows up before the guy explodes like a blood sausage, this d-bag is going to somehow magically know it was dropped from an unmanned plane as opposed to one with a pilot?
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
you will not see a lot of support for the AUMF.
I know you have to say that. But silence is sometimes interpreted as support.
I don’t hear any anguished voices lamenting it’s continued existence.
Andrey
@Ben Franklin: I haven’t seen anyone here recently lamenting malaria. I guess that means they support malaria?
There’s lots of shit to oppose in this world, it’s physically impossible to oppose all of it at once, and sometimes people use a specific context to oppose specific subsets.
Ben Franklin
@ericblair:
but you keep confusing military and civil power and executive and legislative authority so much you can’t or won’t ask a coherent question about the subject.
The problem is that the civilian and military are converging to a point where they are inseparable. As to the legislative vs Exec, that’s why a loud and unanimous voice in condemning the AUMF is so important.
chopper
@Ben Franklin:
by idiots, yes.
Cassidy
@Ben Franklin: I haven’t heard anything from you critiquing the raping of nuns on the 50 yard line on Monday Night Football. Sick fuck.
Give it up nun-raper. Now you’re just making yourself look stupid. Plenty of threads have had people saying the exact opposite. Don’t project onto us because you’re too stupid to remember and/ or too lazy to look it up.
Ben Franklin
@Soonergrunt:
Heh. You must enjoy pulling the wings off of flies; so much for the contrarian opposing torture.
? Martin
@Ben Franklin: We’re not in the minority. But policies even backed by the majority don’t go anywhere if there is insufficient urgency to act. There are lots of policies that the public would be content with, but they aren’t so eager to see them implemented that there is a call to act. Unfortunately AUMF falls in that category – mostly because people trust Obama with the AUMF more than we trusted Bush with it, but as the drone policy goes out and Afghanistan winds down, that sense of urgency may increase.
That’s the whole reason why gun control is happening now, we tipped from content to urgent because of Newtown. While the fundamentals of public support haven’t changed that much – the political consequences of being on one side or another have changed significantly, and that’s what causes action. Nobody is being primaried for being on one side or the other of the AUMF.
Andrey
@Ben Franklin: Civilian and military have always been inseparable. What specific year in US history can you point to when this was not the case?
Cassidy
Ben Franklin hassn’t lamented sticking his dick into a donkey’s ass. I guess his silence supports it.
He hasn’t lamented beating his wife or children. I guess his silence supports it.
He hasn’t lamented the eating of Argentinian rugby players. I guess he supports it and enjoys the flavor.
He hasn’t lamented skullfucking kittens. I guess he supports it.
This is fun, but I can get really gross. I should probably quit.
chopper
@Ben Franklin:
as far as i can tell, SG has never written anything opposing pulling the wings off of flies, so i can understand why you’d assume he likes it.
then again i’ve never read anything of yours to that end either. you sick fuck.
Ben Franklin
Malaria and nun-raping posts would get a ton of comments, because it’s more interesting.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: Every person who says that, if someone has a problem with such and such a military action, they should take it up with Congress is effectively making that point. Q
Quite a few conversations here end up revolving around the legality of certain actions not the advisability of the actions. If someone tells me that something was illegal and it wasn’t I, and others, will have a tendency to point out that the action was, in fact, legal. Now, if the person says the action was ill advised, stupid, and/or immoral, that is different. The legality of the action is not implicated in the discussion.
Tl-dr version: If you want to say something is bad, don’t simply say it is illegal. It is like saying something is blue when you mean it is cold.
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus:
Keep trying to teach the differences in those concepts, but don’t hold out hope that this particular student will get the lesson.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
I really don’t know how one sectors the subjects. To me, it’s not just the legality, because anything can be made legal or illegal. What I thought we were talking about is the Right Thing, and that indeed can be very confusing as a subject for discussion.
RaflW
Late to the party, but look, it’s all just a fucking circus to get us to not talk about how 1,000s of Americans are getting killed every year by absurdly legal means: hand guns.
Also, too, when we’re talking about hypothetical drones* (or La Palin is makin shit up about coffins or bullet-hoarding or whatever), we’re not talking about the endles racailized oppression that is still going on in our country, soon to get a big assist from Angry Ol’ Antonin.
Its a fucking sideshow. Ignore it.
*(Not to be confused with actual drones that, IMO, are a very problematic part of our forward force projection overseas. But that’s a hairy mess every time it comes up here)
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin:
Very simply. Use Venn diagrams. One circle is labeled moral actions. One is labeled legal actions. Where they intersect, the actions are both legal and moral. The moral but not legal are the realm where civil disobedience comes into play. The legal but not moral are the things you use to determine whether someone is a good person or not.
Soonergrunt
@Ben Franklin:
So because YOU are confused as to the difference between legality and morality, and refuse to separate the two like every other grown up in the world can, the rest of us are authoritarians. Got it.
Ben Franklin
@Soonergrunt:
, the rest of us are authoritarians. Got it.
Don’t conflate yourself with the others here. You are a peculiar brand of progressive.
Cassidy
@Ben Franklin: WHERE IS YOUR CONDEMNATION OF SHOOTING SQUIRRELS OUT OF POTATO GUNS! YOUR SILENCE IS APPROVAL!
lol
@Ben Franklin:
Repealing the AUMF doesn’t get rid of the problem; it just means you’d rather ignore it.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
Grey areas or the subjective interp of moral or ethical is what I referred to. It’s a semantic swamp. I generally look at the Big Pic before I get into the weeds of microcosms.
I made the jump to AUMF because I thought this was the Big Pic people would be onboard for. I’m sure if we had a post on AUMF (not as a fucking open thread) there might be a few voices more than appeared today.
Soonergrunt
@Ben Franklin: Actually, I’m like most of the commenters here, with respect to the fact that I can tell the difference between how the world is and how I think it should be. The fact that I front page only makes my voice slightly louder.
Who said the following?
It’s you, by your own admission, that can’t separate reality from your own special little version of the universe. I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to point this out. I’m not even the funniest or most creative.
Ben Franklin
@Soonergrunt:
I’m not even the funniest or most creative.
True enough. It’s hard for a Black/White mentality to develop a sense of humor, but you should keep trying. Most funny people start from a sad perspective.
Ben Franklin
@Soonergrunt:
An edit ! I must’ve really put a bee in your bonnet.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: The gray areas are where most decisions in life are made.
Yutsano
@Cassidy: I know. Hell we used to argue like cats and dogs. How things change. :)
@Soonergrunt: U HAZ BEEN LABELED BY SAINT BEN THE PUREST AND MOST RIGHTEOUS PROGRESSIVE IN EXISTENCE! I hope it didn’t sting too much.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
And….?
Omnes Omnibus
@Ben Franklin: And nothing.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: And…popsicles anyone?
TG Chicago
@ericblair:
Could you provide evidence of this?
sherparick
@TooManyJens: A State, such as the United States and other such states that came into existence post-1648 are defined by their monopoly on legal lethal violence. The shooting down of the planes would have been justified by the magic words used to justify all such killings since President George Washington: “war powers.” Technically, on 9/11, the United States was “invaded” by a “foreign power,” (Al Qaeda), and as such the Executive could use lethal force, even that force that causes the death of innocent by-standers, to defeat that invasion and to ostensibly save a great number of lives.
I see that the subject has caused other to research the many times the State has killed other Americans without much qualm, especially when the others were union workers, Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and etc. And well within living memory we have a bomb being dropped by police blowing up a whole city block.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE
chopper
@Ben Franklin:
yeah, i’m sure you’re really keeping him up at night.
chopper
@Ben Franklin:
PANCAKES, motherfuckers.
Ted & Hellen
@Ben Franklin:
The apparent fact that you consider your authoritarian, military fetishist self to be generally progressive is beyond hilarious.
Mnemosyne
@TG Chicago:
Umar Abdulmutallab (better known as the failed underwear bomber) told federal agents under oath that al-Awlaki paid for him to travel to Yemen, questioned him closely about his dedication to jihad, and then arranged for him to learn bomb-making.
There is also his trial and conviction in absentia in Yemen.
But, hey, I’m sure it was all a farcical mistake that he was in Yemen living in an al-Qaeda camp and publicly claimed to be the #2 guy for al-Qaeda. I’m sure a lot of innocent people end up accidentally becoming al-Qaeda spokespeople without ever realizing it.
chopper
@Ted & Hellen:
the child rape apologist has got you there, SG.
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy: I know. I’ve pretty much given up trying to explain that neither we nor the other people particularly care about what the opposition thinks of us.
If I could accomplish the missions I was given without bloodshed and stress, I always preferred that to fighting for various reasons, but sometimes the other people didn’t want to let me do my mission. And sometimes it worked the other way. I couldn’t let them do what they wanted or needed to do. It wasn’t ever personal for me, and I never hated the enemy as much as some people seemed to need to, nor as much as some people, including some around here, seem to need me to.
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne: The trial in Yemen is meaningless.
The testimony of the undiebomber is a worthwhile data point, but hardly conclusive.
If it’s certain that Awlaki was operational, why is the government so secretive about the methodology they used to put him on the kill list?
Keith G
Yes I worry about drones being used domestically just as I was justifiably worried about tazers.
Tazers gave cops a way to fuck with people without getting dirty. Cops no longer had to deescalate. So now we have grandmas, preteens and folks in wheel chairs getting a 50,000 volt hello from Officer Krupke.
And then there are the abusive use of tac units that even backwater towns seem to have thanks to the war on drugs.
But no…no worry with drones. Except that many are worried and they should be. Human history seems to indicate a trend that the easier it is to kill, the more likely it is that killing is going to be moved up to a higher alternative. If my government were run by angels, I could forego all concerns, but is is not now, nor ever will it be in the future.
Therefore it is mind-numbingly foolish not to demand the utmost restraint and transparency in regards to the expansion of internal policing powers.
I know it old-hat to bring up…
…but Franklin’s words are true. Sometime the giving up of liberty is not obvious, but is nonetheless manifest in a slow erosion accomplished by hundreds of nearly unnoticed moves.
You can trust or not trust Obama; you can like or not like the AUMF; you can detest the cancerous apathy of Congress all you want. It is all the same. We are witness to the erosion of our civil liberties and it would be really good to take a stand.
Mnemosyne
@TG Chicago:
Because it involves the use of informants whose lives would be endangered if they were exposed. Even saying “we talked to Informant X in Pakistan who directed us to Informant Y in Yemen” could give enough information that the bad guys could identify them because, after all, the whole point of an informant is that you’re getting information from someone who knows the bad guys.
I honestly find it hard to believe that anyone is arguing at this point that al-Awlaki was a totally innocent guy who just happened to be working for al-Qaeda. Seriously?
chopper
@Keith G:
we all willingly give up a little liberty for security. otherwise we’d live in a libertarian paradise where your next door neighbor would stick a gun in your face every time you asked him to turn the music down.
sorry but we live I this place called ‘the real world’.
General Stuck
@TG Chicago:
You asked for evidence of this, for Alwaki being command and control with AQ. Mnemosyne gave you some evidence of this with the Yemen trial of Al Alwaki.
Just like I did, as well as others the last time you showed up with your mendacious bullshit. You didn’t ask for an American trial and conviction. You are a dishonest commenter, and don’t deserve the time of fucking day around here.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
The Posse Comitatus Act is still in effect — the US military is not permitted to act against US citizens unless they’re on federal property. The CIA is also banned from acting against US citizens within the US. So that solves your fear of having the Army lob a missile into downtown Chicago to pursue a bank robber.
If your fear is that local police departments will start using armed drones against suspected criminals, then what we need to do is ban the sale of armed drones to police departments. There’s a whole lot of military-issue equipment that police departments aren’t allowed to have. I know we don’t have a whole lot of LAPD F-11 fighter jets zooming overhead, because the LAPD is not allowed to purchase that (or most military-grade) equipment.
Living out West, I can think of a whole lot of ways that unarmed drones would be very useful for agencies like the US Forestry Service or the US Coast Guard when they do search-and-rescue for lost hikers and lost boaters. Does the intrinsic evil of the drone technology mean that we can’t even use unarmed ones for those kinds of purposes, because it’s all a slippery slope down to every podunk sheriff’s department having one armed with Hellfire missiles?
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
Shorter me: Leave drones (armed and unarmed) in the hands of the federal government since they’re prohibited by law from using them against American civilians. Problem solved.
David Koch
What’s odd is how the people who most fear drones are technophiles.
No one has been able to explain to me why a prop plane is scarier than a jet fighter or Apache gunship?
Keith G
@Mnemosyne: Excellent.
Let’s hope that Obama’s team is as smart as you and announces this policy tomorrow.
@chopper: Don’t dumb it down. This is not either/or. It’s about getting our government to set boundaries.
chopper
@Keith G:
i’m not the one living in an either/or world, dogg.
Joey Giraud
@Cassidy:
Geez, all you guys are just seeing red and ignoring what I said. Insults, not a lick of thought.
My point was clear and narrow. It had nothing to do with legality or morality or military effectivness.
Weak. I have no respect for you.
Go ahead. Lob a bomb. It’s all you have.
@Soonergrunt:
I’ve pretty much given up trying to explain that neither we nor the other people particularly care about what the opposition thinks of us.
And that is why you will lose the war.
Joey Giraud
It’s like all you can conceive of is tactics, strategy is beyond your pay grade, and wisdom is out of the question.
Grunts indeed.
Keith G
@chopper: Are you sure? Because when you assert that…
…it seems like you are setting up a false dichotomy to evaluate what I was saying earlier.
I mean, what was it I typed that led you to feel I am arguing for “a libertarian paradise “? No. I made no such implication. Instead, I am calling for considering common sense limits on the expansion of the domestic use of deadly force.
Joey Giraud
@MomSense:
Does a ship-launched missile strike qualify as a “retail” killing tool to you?
I don’t expect a response. It’s late.
chopper
@Keith G:
no. you’re an idiot.
what i’m pointing out is that the people who keep quoting
are being naive and stupid. everybody, everybody, EVERYBODY gives up some liberty to gain some security. that’s what civilization is all about. the only situation where that couldn’t be considered true is some sort of magical libertarian paradise where all sorts of stupid wacky shit is the norm. and that doesn’t exist, and is stupid.
get it?
Omnes Omnibus
@Joey Giraud: How is a drone launched hellfire missile “retail?”
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne: You just said that we know Awlaki is guilty due to undiebomber. Now you’re assuming there were secret agents. Do you have any evidence that there were secret agents? Or you’re saying you don’t mind secret kill lists because it’s okay that the ways one gets on a secret kill list should be secret?
I just have a hard time understanding how any American can defend secret kill lists.
TG Chicago
@General Stuck: I guess I just don’t share your unquestioning faith in the rigor and high ethical standards of the Yemeni justice system.
I seem to recall that part of the rationale for drone strikes in Yemen the fact that the Yemeni justice system is incapable of dealing with AQAP on its own.
Keith G
@chopper: Jeese, so you need to insult?
Anyway, I have never seen that quote used in a way that argued for no “liberty compromize” and I was not arguing that either. So, when you shout…
…you are making a counter argument against a premise that is not being considered. Some call that a straw man.
That I get.
I do wonder what is so controversial about supporting the social contract as being essential to our governance while still asserting that there needs to be tough limits on the use of the executive’s policing power.
Mnemosyne
@TG Chicago:
Wow. You really are the stupidest person on the planet. OMG, the CIA uses informants!? Why did no one tell me about this brand-new and completely unfamiliar information of which I have never heard before?!
Personally, I’d like to see your evidence that al-Awlaki was accidentally working for al-Qaeda and had no involvement at all in terrorist activities. Show me the links. You do have some form of evidence for your claims other than he looked like a really honest guy whenever you saw his al-Qaeda videos, right?
I’m having a hard time understanding how the list al-Awlaki was on was a “secret” when his father brought a lawsuit to try and have him taken off. That’s a really crappy secret list if everyone on the list knows they’re on it.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
Really? Because I’ve only ever heard it used that way. The only people I’ve ever seen use it are the ones who claim that (for example) having to show ID in order to buy a guy is OMG THIS IS WHAT FRANKLIN WARNED US ABOUT!!
ETA: Heh. I meant to type “buy a gun,” but it’s almost funnier this way. I did mean “gun,” though, not “guy.”
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Mnemosyne: It amazes me just how eager the firebaggers want to make their stand on Al-Alwaki Hill. Its as if they’re asking for the rest of us to go ‘what the hell, dude’.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne: Oh god girl, where were you when the first Patriot Act was being shoved down our throats?
And I would never show ID to buy a guy.
chopper
@Keith G:
wow, you’re really new to the internet.
Joey Giraud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Aren’t threaded conversations grand?
I meant the opposite from what you interpreted. A drone is sold as a precision kill tool, like a sniper; retail death. A ship launched missile is not.
And the point is that remote killing, whether blanket bombing, ship launched missiles, or even the sacred drone, leads the target society to despise us for our cowardice, and that defeats our avowed larger strategy of reducing terrorism, however we define it.
And that using violence to win respect, a time-tested if brutal approach to peace, requires demonstrating bravery. Demonstrating power alone doesn’t work.
Disagree with that? Then we have little to discuss.
Keith G
@chopper: No. It’s just that my experiences coming of age during the Nixon Presidency leads me to not believe in the tender mercies of enlightened leaders. Nixon used the fear of commies and “urban criminals” to accumulate executive power. Future presidents will find new threats and new enemies to try to herd Americans into giving up their right to question governmental actions done in our name with our money.
And some of y’all are just greasing the skids.
MomSense
@Joey Giraud:
When I can go to the Sharper Image at my local mall and buy a drone or a hellfire missile–it will qualify as “retail”.
chopper
@Mnemosyne:
exactly. the quote is not only completely overused, it’s overused by naive morons. every time I read someone cough it up I gag a little.
chopper
@Joey Giraud:
I really don’t think al qaeda or the people of Pakistan really give a shit whether or not the bombs are dropped by a dude in or out of a cockpit. you’re ascribing your own emotions to people halfway across e world who couldn’t give a shit about what you think of or your problems.
Joey Giraud
@MomSense:
I chose the word “retail” as a metaphor to succinctly describe the relative precision of the tool. Apparently that was a poor choice.
If “wholesale” killing means a lot of death with collateral damage, then “retail” means killing one or a few specific humans, not a literal reference to the point of purchase.
I actually don’t like having to be so damn pedantic. Can’t anyone here concede to accept even one tiny little point?
Probably not. Fruitless argument appears to be the objective.
Joey Giraud
@chopper:
Nice attempt to personalize with cheap psycho-babble, and I don’t accept your authority on the mindset of foreigners.
My point isn’t new. It isn’t especially fringe. It’s Sun Tzu, it’s Ghengis Khan, it’s Napoleon. And it’s common sense, people sense, the sense anyone who isn’t drunk with belligerence should have.
Now if you’re prepared to admit that all you want to do is kill “bad guys”, and don’t care about winning hearts and minds, much less preventing the deaths of innocents, then your blindness makes complete sense.
Soonergrunt
@Joey Giraud: reading comprehension is not one of your strong points, apparently, much like your ability (or lack thereof) to understand how the military works or what we do.
“The other people” in that posting of mine refers to the enemy.
They don’t care whether I respect them any more than I care whether they respect me.
It’s very telling that you seem to deeply value something that you will never have. You, by your own lights, seem to value the respect of the enemy more than the lives of the Soldiers for whom you would theoretically be responsible (in the process of killing that same enemy, no less.)
You won’t get the respect of the enemy. Ever. And you’re not particularly worthy of respect on this side of the fence either if that really is your thought process.
And the quoting of Sun Tzu and Napoleon doesn’t make you seem smart or well read. It makes you seem pretentious.
different-church-lady
@chopper:
To be fair, try to find a quote that isn’t.
Joey Giraud
@Soonergrunt:
Sooner, thanks for the good faith.
Reading mistakes happen, I misinterpreted that one part of the sentence. I don’t think it affects my point that much though.
So you say the enemy doesn’t care if you respect them. I’m sure it helps you to think so, but what I know about other cultures suggests you are quite wrong about that.
That sounds like the words of someone who’s pretty invested in the fight, in you’re-with-us-or-against-us, someone who feels uncomfortable looking at the situation from a General’s point of view.
Like a grunt. I know, it’s a term of honour for you, and I’m really not out to insult you.
I’m not concerned about making the enemy respect us, I’m pointing out that if we want terrorism, such as it is, to stop, our big thinkers all agree we need to win the respect of the enemy. Doesn’t the phrase “hearts and minds” ring a bell at all?
Anyway, I’ve read your stuff enough to know that I’m not looking for respect from you. Your type of soldier feels superior to mere civilians, who’ve never had to face death or do the amazing things you’ve done. And you especially despise civilians who don’t hold the military in high esteem. And I certainly don’t.
But I do understand and hold in high esteem the instinct to protect your family and tribe, and that instinct is what motivates many young men to join the military. I really respect ex-military men who come to understand both the admirable motivations and the ugly realities and how the whole business should go away. And I understand how people who’ve lived on the edge of death can get addicted to it.
And I understand all this without having gone through basic training like you did, or having been in a fire-fight like you may have, or having had a buddy die like I hope you haven’t had to.
And I’m sure you’re angry and feeling patronized as hell because I’m not an approved member of your club, and that’s the attitude I hate most of all, that if you haven’t served then shut the fuck up!
So call me names and disrespect me. But I’ll tell you this, if this country ever had a real threat or if my family or kin were in danger, I would be as vicious and effective in killing the enemy as you would, although I would defer to your combat experience.
And I’m not trying to insult you. I’m being honest.
Joey Giraud
@Soonergrunt:
And as for being pretentious, every military man in my family just loves that kind of stuff.
Maybe you don’t get into that….
chopper
@Joey Giraud:
Lol, that’s psychobabble?
Seriously, you’re being a buffoon. how do these people being bombed even know what type of plane is dropping a bomb on them? do they honestly, in the last split second of their lives when they realize they’re being bombed, think about their opinions on drone vs manned plane technology?
chopper
@Soonergrunt:
and what exactly does al qaeda think in terms of ‘respect’ for drones/manned flights anyways? it doesn’t exactly scream ‘i’m a big bad-ass’ when you get blown up by what’s essentially an overgrown radio controlled plane.
MomSense
@Joey Giraud:
The debate that I would like to have is about whether or not the use of drones creates more terrorists/enemies and therefore whether it undermines the perception of us and our presence in the places where we use drones.
Here’s the thing–this debate is also heavily influenced by the biases we bring to the use of force in general.
I used to be of the opinion that the use of drones was not a smart tactic because it caused so much fear in the population. I am now of the opinion that this is a misperception on my part based on my own biases against the use of force.
Yes, young men are inspired to become terrorists by the use of drones. But guess what–they were before we started using them. Young men are inspired to become terrorists by the use of missiles launched from naval ships, from the dropping of bombs, and from completely unrelated things as well! The fact is that we are dealing with places where there are huge numbers of young people–and there is poverty, lack of education, inadequate health care, lack of opportunity (hopelessness is very powerful), and lack of basic services. Government is not competent. So you have all of these young people who feel hopeless, who do not see anything better in their future, who do not have a functioning society/infrastructure. The most ordered, functioning organizations are some of the radical religious institutions. They provide education. Learning is attractive. You can learn, be provided with direction, be a part of a community, belong – and you are not necessarily aware that there is a very dark side to some of the teachings.
I think it is simplistic to try and see drones as the cause for terrorism and lack of respect of the enemy for us. And here is another thing to consider. The debate is largely being held by people and about people who both ignore the most important people. Women and children and the elderly and vulnerable are completely ignored both by the terrorists we target AND by the progressives who portend to defend them by opposing drones.
The same people we target in Yemen and Pakistan and other places are abusing and terrifying innocents to a much greater extent than we are by the use of drones. There are many people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen etc who approve of our tactics even though innocents are killed as well. It is horrible and tragic that we have to make these choices. But let’s not pretend that these choices are simpler than the reality.
Joey Giraud
@MomSense:
and then you have that debate, making very reasonable points about the topic you want to debate, not what I was talking about.
that’s what happens here; people have the debates they want to have.
I debate some scepticism regarding government and news reporting about terrorism, and since terrorism means 9/11, some shrieking monkeys debate Trutherism.
Joey Giraud
@chopper:
Soonergrunt has made it clear that he doesn’t give a shit about whether the enemy respects us or not. Any concern about that is the mark of a pussy or a fool.
Cassidy
@Joey Giraud: Your point was silly and not based in anything remotely close to reality.
Ben Franklin
@Joey Giraud:
It is a chore getting this discussion going at BJ, what, with all the shrieking about THE LAW, because, you know, people are here to serve the law, not vicey-versey. But they telll me it’s getting better since the Host decided Iraq was a bad move.
Joey Giraud
@Cassidy:
“silly” doesn’t say much. Could you please insult me with a bit more specificity?
Cassidy
@Joey Giraud: Silly about covers it.
chopper
@Joey Giraud:
SG has made it clear that this enemy will never, ever respect us. and he is right. a difference in the type of piloting of a bomber is not going to change their opinion.
seriously, did AQ ‘respect’ the US and the president more when they found out O sent in a seal team to ice bin laden instead of call in a drone strike?
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne: Okay, so basically you’re down to accepting whatever the “Commander in Chief” says without question because he surely has evidence, but it’s secret. That doesn’t work for me.
I also go along with the standard in Western justice systems: that the burden of proof is on the prosecution, not the defense. Not to mention that you’re asking me to prove a negative.
And if the secret kill list isn’t secret, tell me who is on it.