The Intercept is breaking a major story about the use of drones in targeted assassinations. I’m off to some appointments, but this will be my afternoon reading.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.
Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.
Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.
Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.
Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
Tick tock motherfuckers!
Peak wingnut was a lie.
Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.
It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.
Hot air and ill-informed banter
Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.
T R E 4 5 O N
… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact
Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.
The revolution will be supervised.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.
Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?
if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.
“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”
Second rate reporter says what?
Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.
piratedan
and apparently… we’re lingering in Afghanistan a bit longer than expected…. what has changed?
Face
So the worst-kept “secret” in all of DC’s military circles is now considered “breaking news”? What’s next? An expose on how many of these drone strikes hit civies? How drones are making need for so many fighter jets pointless? How drones could so easily go Skynet by the wrong operator(s)?
Chris
@piratedan:
Bleargh.
Tim C.
@Face: This. It’s a thing and I’m curious if there’s anything new here, but it sounds like what we’ve been doing since about 2002.
Mandalay
The OP has been there for over 20 minutes and not a soul is having a tizzy tantrum meltdown and pissing their pants about linking to the site of “Griftwald”.
Maybe BJ is growing the fuck up at last?
Sloegin
This article today is also worth the read: re EU ruling on safe harbors and the sharing of electronic data — potentially upsetting all sorts of international treaty shenanigans.
geg6
@Mandalay:
No. At least, not for me. GG is still a worthless asshole and I won’t click on the grifter’s site, but I really don’t think there’s anything new about targeted assassinations using drones. Why does it always seem that, much like at Jim Hoft’s site, GG’s breaking news is always some old piece of news he’s trying to drum up the rubes over or gets the story completely wrong or is a complete exaggeration/misunderstanding?
Roger Moore
@Mandalay:
More of Greenwald being so pathetic he’s barely even worth mocking anymore.
Chyron HR
@Mandalay:
Apart from you, you mean?
Frivolous
Oh, that was Greenwald’s site? I regret looking then. Don’t want to give him any clicks.
bystander
If Obummer were a real leadery leader, he’d have droned Putin by now. But he’s too skeered of him.
Mike J
What’s the difference in a “targeted assassination” and a military strike against a command and control center?
MomSense
@geg6:
I’m pretty sure the difference is that Sanders said he would continue the drone programs, so the drone wars of 2009-11 have ended.
Redshift
Other BREAKING NEWS: Hastert to plead guilty in plea deal.
I hope they sentence him to be Speaker of the House.
Amir Khalid
@Redshift:
But in America, don’t you have a Constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment”?
D58826
ot. Dennis Hastert has coped a plea to money laundering scheme. He will be sentence to serve as speaker of the house for two years.
rikyrah
I don’t mean to be smartass, but we’ve been hearing repeated reports for a few years now of this leader in Al Qeda being killed by a drone. Was I supposed to believe that they just shot drones willy nilly and ‘somehow’ they got these folks from Al Qeda?
OF COURSE THEY WERE TARGETED!
Roger Moore
@Mike J:
“Assassination” sounds more nefarious.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: For Hastert or the members of the House?
srv
@Mike J: One is typically done by the CIA and the other by the military.
If you think that doesn’t matter, then you’d probably think John Yoo and a JAG would oversee dronings the same way.
As always, it’s OK if Obama does it.
Gin & Tonic
Targeted assassinations have been a component of statecraft and warfare for millennia. The tools change, the aims don’t.
gvg
one of the lower other stories that I normally never click on, mentions the aunt who sued her nephew side of the story is really about homeowners insurance only giving her $1 so she had no choice but to sue for medical bills for 2 surgeries. Too superficial a story for me to tell but a co worker of mine had speculated that it was really something like this yesterday.
Punchy
Now that’s fuckin’ funny.
TG Chicago
Is it okay for the president to unilaterally target and kill an American citizen who has not been convicted of any crime? Or even charged with one?
Is it okay for the president to unilaterally target and kill, say, Edward Snowden? Or, if she was free and on foreign soil, Chelsea Manning? Bowe Bergdahl before he was returned to US custody?
patroclus
Dennis Hastert is gonna plead guilty in the pedophile hush money case.
Mike J
@Redshift:
I’m not sure the court will allow him to be around children.
Cacti
Thankfully, Bernie will use just the right amount of Dr0nez!
Anoniminous
From the recesses of my little brain wanders the vague thought the US isn’t supposed to “assassinate” people for Reasons. And – a-HA! – it’s because that Pinko-Commie appeaser Ronnie RayGuns said we can’t.
Except if they are terrorists, then it’s OK.
kc
@Gin & Tonic:
LOL.
Cacti
@TG Chicago:
Just what do you think happened during the Civil War?
kc
Obama can do no wrong.
MattF
News you can use from the WaPo (from a list of ‘Best’ things voted on by readers):
Cacti
Another GOPer Congressman acknowledges that Benghazi select committee was for the purpose of damaging Hillary Clinton politically.
Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) had this to say on New York’s WIBX 950:
The rats are scurrying from Capt. Ahab Gowdy’s sinking ship.
benw
I didn’t know it was Greenwald’s site, but he can have a few of my clicks for this. For those who don’t want to click through, they’ve gotten 3 top-secret powerpoint presentations reviewing US drone warfare in Yemen/Somalia and Northern Afghanistan from roughly 2011-13. The slides actually contain quite a bit of nut-and-bolts descriptions of how the drone strikes are planned, approved, conducted, and analyzed. They also have actual numbers, including how many strikes, targeted people killed or captured, and other people killed. They also have several case studies of timelines and details from actual strikes (bottom line: if the US government wants you dead, don’t use your fucking cell phone).
They didn’t tell me anything new about the big picture of US drone warfare (hey, sorry, collateral damage people!), and they’re probably not going to change anyone’s mind, but I think these are mandatory for anyone who wants to know how the US is killing people with drones. If anyone want to see the raw slides, you can get them all directly from this page in the Intercept article. I’d recommend doing that instead of reading the many attached articles, which have lots of bells and whistles but are a little confusing compared to just reading the actual slides.
Note: assuming all of this is legit, of course. Know your source.
Mike J
In warfare, given a choice between targeted and Dresden, I’m going with targeted.
Betty Cracker
People who are automatically dismissive of this report because they dislike Greenwald should know that The Intercept has some serious journalists on staff, including Jeremy Scahill. I haven’t read the whole thing, but I plan to when I have time.
I’m glad people are investigating stuff like this; even if you trust the Obama admin 100% (and I think it would be foolish to trust any administration 100%), programs can go sideways under good presidents, and we won’t always have a good president.
That said, just from what I’ve read so far, I’m seeing some sensationalism that I wish the report could have avoided. For example, in the intro, Scahill writes:
And that’s true. But if you read the details of the case (Objective Peckham section), you’ll see that Berjawi went to Somalia in 2009, and the British government revoked his passport in 2010. The US had been monitoring him since 2006, but it appears from the report that they only got the goods on him after he was in Somalia and not traveling back and forth. So it doesn’t appear that the US let opportunities to arrest him go by so they could just drone him instead, which happened in 2012.
I’ll read the whole thing. But the agenda shines through, and that undermines the reporting, IMO.
patrick II
@piratedan:
The more extreme Taliban soldiers are moving to ISIL in Afghanistan. Evidently the Taliban wasn’t crazy enough for some, and in some sections of the country the new ISIL force is killing and maiming well beyond even what the Taliban was willing to do.
ISIL’s extreme Wahhabism is a derivative of Wahabi Islam sponsored by Saudi money throughout Arabia and Northern Africa. Oil money not well spent.
Amir Khalid
@Cacti:
The Republicans’ only chance of doing Hillary any damage now is to disband the committee, and then accuse her of doing her evil manipulative thing to avoid testifying.
kc
@benw:
I can see how it’s not in the US’s interest to keep track of all the innocent people we accidentally murder, in countries with whom we’re not at war, whilst attempting to kill bad guys.
TG Chicago
@Cacti: Robert E. Lee was killed by a drone strike?
More seriously: that was a hot war with an army that had declared war on the United States. The Confederates were declaring themselves NOT to be American citizens.
kc
@Mike J:
What “warfare?” You must be referring to the Eternal War on Terror.
Anyway, there are options other than “targeted and Dresden.”
Keith G
@piratedan:
The lack of a reelection?
benw
@kc: while it may not be in the US’s interest to release those numbers, one of the important things in these particular slides is that the US does count them, and these docs give the numbers. They also taught me a new acronym for the innocent people accidentally killed in the drone strikes: EKIA or Enemy Killed in Action. Yuck.
Frivolous
@Betty Cracker:
I am not necessarily dismissing it because it is on Greenwald’s site.
I still do not want to give him any clicks, because he is nasty and hateful. I do not want him or his site to succeed.
gocart mozart
@patroclus:
But he’s pleading guilty to the money part to hush up the pedophile part.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
That’s basically my complaint about just about everything Greenwald touches. The goal is to advance the agenda, not to report fairly and honestly. If that means ignoring inconvenient contradictory facts and presenting everything in the worst possible light, so be it. I don’t want to go through every article looking for how it’s being dishonest without telling any flat-out lies, which makes me reluctant to read anything from The Intercept.
Paul in KY
@Mike J: Ha! Good one!
Betty Cracker
@Frivolous: Fair enough. Greenwald himself visited this site once and was a big jerk to me, so he’s not my favorite person either. But it is an important story. I’m pretty sure the editors of the NYT and WaPo are assholes too, but occasionally they publish stuff that is worth reading all the same.
Keith G
@gocart mozart: Not that it matters much, but if he engaged in illicit actions with one(?) of his h.s. students, the criminal activity involved would likely not be described as paedophilia.
Cacti
@TG Chicago:
There was no war declared by the US Congress.
“The Confederate States of America” were not given diplomatic recognition as a nation state by any other nation on earth.
Lee and his subordinates were U.S. citizen domestic insurrectionists.
Abraham Lincoln sent the United States Armed Forces out to quell this activity with lethal force. None had been charged with or convicted of a crime, and more than 90,000 were killed.
Lincoln is U.S. history’s greatest monster.
Frivolous
@Betty Cracker:
Ouch. I didn’t know he was a jerk to you personally. I’m sorry to hear that.
Paul in KY
My problem with the drone strikes is when a heavily armed bad guy that we are tracking goes in a hut, we have no idea who is in that hut. The people in that hut (if just regular hut-dwellers) cannot refuse these guys entry. Then we assume they are ‘enemies’ and send a missile into the hut. Kills the bad guy, but also wipes out 5 or 6 completely innocent people (in some cases).
To me, that’s not cricket & could be called ‘evil’ (to have that lack of empathy for non-combatants in wrong place at wrong time). To me, this is different than killing civilians at Dresden (for example). Those people at least knew they were in a total war situation & had (in many cases) supported Hitler, etc. whereas the poor hut dwellers might not even know that the hairy guy & his gang are on our hit list.
Bottom line, though: The killing of children is always wrong. Even Nazi children, so I do mourn & regret any children killed in allied air actions in WW II.
Finally, the killing of the innocent hut dwellers just promotes more people to take up arms against us to avenge what we did, etc. etc.
gussie
Didn’t read any of the comments above, because some may have been written by people I find abrasive on the internet, but I still find the pervasive juvenile idiocy disheartening.
Nutella
Notice how the first comments here said that
a) This is not news because it’s been going on for years and everybody knows about it, and
b) This is all wrong because it’s from Greenwald and he’s always wrong.
For those of you who nodded at both of those: this is tribal ‘thinking’ and you should cut it out.
Keith G
@Cacti: the problem I have with the Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War argument as being used a couple times above, is that certainly what we expect from society in general and our government in particular has changed quite a bit since the 1860s.
Not only have expectations of the public changed, but also what often times is considered our soft Constitution, the body of judicial and legislative decisions about the conduct of government, have absolutely changed since Honest Abe was sitting in the White House.
No, Abraham Lincoln is not history’s greatest monster, but we would never today have a president who viewed the people who became black citizens the way he did.
Thus, I’m not so sure that “That’s the way Abe did it” is the best argument to make.
Mike J
Drop, cover, and hold. Washington earthquake/tsunami drill time.
Tim C.
Greenwald is to drones as PETA is to Animal rights. He’s got a point and a good one, but takes it to a level that can be counterproductive at best and stupidly ignoring facts that don’t line up with his agenda. That doesn’t make him wrong and it doesn’t make him right, it just means I read him with a skeptical eye.
Also too, anyone who thinks the “Libertarians” are anything but morally bankrupt near-sociopaths is suspect to me.
Betty Cracker
@Paul in KY: That risk would bother anyone with a conscience. But what do you do about people who are unreachable absent a large-scale military operation who are engaged in terrorist operations that will end up killing many more innocent people? I’m not defending the US drone program altogether and find some of the stuff I’ve read on it deeply troubling. But if we oppose it, it seems like we need an alternate solution, and I’m not sure what that is…
David Koch
I don’t understand what the story is — don’t we already know dronze are used to kill people?
I don’t get it.
We’ve known and debated this for years now. Haven’t we?
Why is anyone reacting like this is a new story.
Even Sanders commented on the issue saying he likes dronze and will continue dronze strikes as President.
How is this a new story?
TG Chicago
@Cacti: If the best targeted killing-proponents can do is make specious comparisons to the Civil War, no response is required.
Mike J
@Nutella: Either you’re reading a different site or you need to cut your dose.
Cermet
@Cacti: You are the worlds biggest idiot making such stupid claims. Hard to believe anyone can be that stupid. Congress can’t declare war on American States – it was a rebellion and by even international law then, Lincoln acted legally. Lee, however, was a mass murderer and meets your definition of a monster – besides be an incompetent war general.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
FYWP keeps eating my comment. My basic problem with Greenwald isn’t that he’s a jerk but that he’s a shitty reporter. A reporter is supposed to go out and find all the facts, and present those facts to the reader. Greenwald, following his training as a lawyer, starts with a conclusion and then finds only facts that support it. Inconvenient facts are ignored or downplayed, and gaps between what his facts will support and what he wants to conclude are plastered over with rhetoric. It’s a great way of rallying the faithful, but a lousy way of becoming better informed.
Renie
@gvg: What I don’t understand is why she had to sue anyone? Doesn’t regular health insurance cover her medical bills for a broken bone?
chopper
@Betty Cracker:
that seems so out of character for him. did you, perchance, disagree with him over something, however slightly?
Cacti
@Cermet:
Lighten up, Francis.
And adjust your snark filter while you’re at it.
My post was skewering the ahistorical position that a POTUS has never used military force on U.S. Citizens who haven’t been charged with a crime.
No less than two of the faces on Mt. Rushmore have brought military force against US citizens not charged with crimes (Lincoln and the confederate rebellion, Washington and the whiskey rebellion). In Washington’s case, the rebels disbanded when the news reached them that Washington was headed their way with 13,000 militiamen. Had they not, there would have been bloodshed.
Cacti
@TG Chicago:
If you choose to disregard the ample precedent for the use of military force against domestic belligerents in U.S. history, you have no serious argument to make.
Paul in KY
@gussie: Abrasive people on the Internets & Balloon Juice?!?!?! Shocking ;-)
Cervantes
@Face:
If a “worst-kept ‘secret'” is something everyone knows but no one talks about openly, then encouraging people to talk about it openly can be a good thing.
Your tone suggests you disagree. Feel free to elaborate.
Another Holocene Human
@Redshift:
Mothers, lock up your Pages.
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: My alternate solution would be to drop in a ‘kill team’ where at least a competent soldier can eyeball the situation & hopefully make a more informed decision.
Now, that would cause more of our troops to be killed/captured. I would consider that a downside of being in the military. To me, our national honor means more than the lives of members of the military (but I’m not the one who has to meet their survivors, etc.).
Another Holocene Human
@gvg: Yeah, that’s what I thought it was as well. I wish a lawyer could weigh in because it’s a case where you’d think she’d do better in front of a judge or judges than a jury. Why the jury trial?
Turgidson
@Roger Moore:
Greenwald is such a frustrating fellow. I consider him to be strictly an activist and read his work from that point of view. I find his sanctimony and thin skin insufferable. But that doesn’t discredit all his work, which I consider valuable when viewed as activism rather than straight journalism. He has brought attention to some things that really, really need some sunlight/disinfectant. But it’s frustrating when he makes himself the story (while adamantly denying that he’s doing it). Nobody’s perfect, I guess. But don’t tell him or his devotees I said that. They don’t take kindly to such disrespect.
Another Holocene Human
@benw: Kind of embarrassing for the US gov’t if recent-ish secret documents like that are getting out.
I kind of wish they would burn CIA to the ground and start over. FBI needs to be completely rethought (and reauthorized … right now, per Congress, they serve the stupidity of our nation’s most podunk, Klanified, ignorant, and misguided police departments). FBI continues to be a swirl of looking busy, ooga-booga mystery mongering, mid-20th-century DERP, and that’s NOT getting into the divisions that were 0wned by one organized crime ring or another.
FlipYrWhig
@Paul in KY: I don’t think “the problem with drone strikes is that too few American soldiers die” is an argument destined for a lot of traction.
Another Holocene Human
@TG Chicago: Everybody’s cause celebre out there in Yemen had signed on with the declared enemy of the United States and was actively trying to sign on more English speakers to the cause. I mean come on, if the one is justifiable, so is the other.
bystander
Wake me up when the targeted citizen is hit while shopping at Marshall Field. If the targeted American is hanging out with AQ or ISIS in the ME, I don’t really get how anyone thinks the citizen is deserving of being arrested and charged. It just doesn’t work that way. The analogy to the Civil War misses the fact that all those Confederates were on a battlefield. I don’t think Honest Abe was concerned with showing them how he still considered them to be citizens entitled to due process.
The issues surrounding mistaken attacks that take out innocent people is the only real issue in this to me. In addition to the patent injustice, there’s also the issue of perpetuating the hatred of the US. I don’t see any easy answers.
Roger Moore
@Renie:
Medical insurance probably covered most of it but:
1) There are always deductibles, copays, etc.
2) The health insurance company may require customers injured in accidents to try suing people who might be liable so that the insurance company can recover its cost. I remember getting a questionnaire from my health insurance company after some kind of procedure asking if there were anyone else who might have been liable who they could sue to recover costs.
IOW, legally the case is the aunt suing her nephew, but in practice it’s the health insurance company suing the homeowners insurance company.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@TG Chicago:
How is that different than al-Awlaki and other American citizens joining up with Al-Qaeda to make war on the US?
I think your question about Snowden and Manning is silly, because neither of them threw their lots in with armed militants that were specifically seeking war with the US. Even assuming the very worst about Snowden, he would be double-agent spy, not a soldier.
I think there’s a very good case to be made that Al-Awlaki and others who joined armed militias made themselves into enemy soldiers. Trying to make the same claim about Snowden or Manning is laughable on its face.
Cervantes
@Amir Khalid:
We do — but we violate it quite frequently.
gvg
@Renie: RE the aunt who sued, I could not tell from the tiny little article with few facts. If there is something to it, we may find out in the future if we are watching for more detailed stories. I am prepared to believe that insurance companies don’t always follow what I think is common sense, that various people may have skimped and bought lousy insurance they didn’t think they would need or couldn’t afford, that lawyers might exagerate for their clients, that “journalists” might slant a story for clicks….etc.
Another Holocene Human
@Keith G: No, criminal charges run along the lines of “SEXUAL ASSAULT OF A MINOR”. So what is your point?
The term pedophilia shares an etymological history with the term pederasty, which referred specifically to grown men fucking adolescents (perhaps intercrurally, scholars can duke that one out). This cute little ephebophilia term as far as I can tell was popularized in the late 20th centuries by wannabe lawbreakers who figured if only they explained that they weren’t wannabe kiddididdlers, they just want to fuck with the heads of teenagers (and maybe give them a few nasty diseases and make them unwanted parents), screw them up emotionally, trash their self esteem, and then dine and dash to the next naive young paramour, and everybody hates teenagers, right, they could make their preferred form of non-consensual BDSM socially acceptable.
It hasn’t worked.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: I’m being honest here. Anyone who gets into the military & doesn’t think it is about killing people & maybe being sent off to die themselves is naïve, at best.
I served 4 years.
Cervantes
@Mike J:
Two excellent comments!
catclub
@Face:
Those are secret! Just like the secret bombing of Cambodia was secret! [I think the Cambodians knew about it.]
Archon
@bystander:
Couldn’t agree more. I’m ambivalent over drones because I wonder if it creates more enemies then it kills because of the inevitable collateral damage.
The last thing I’m concerned about is an American citizen signing up with AQ or ISIS and being targeted and killed. I assume these people knew the risks, and if they didn’t they should have.
Cervantes
@FlipYrWhig:
Except that’s a ridiculously dishonest way to frame the argument.
TG Chicago
@Cacti: Anything regarding “domestic belligerents” should be ignored, since that’s not the issue being discussed. Al-Awlaki can be called many things, but not a “domestic belligerent” (at least not vis a vis the USA)
Cacti
@Another Holocene Human:
Bottom line, Al-Awlaki was acting as a recruiter for a foreign belligerent, covered by an authorization for use of military force, duly enacted by Congress.
A philosophical argument about targeting him for a drone strike can be had. But arguing against its legality isn’t supported by the facts, the law, the constitution, or historical precedent.
Mandalay
@David Koch:
Well here are a couple of specific examples:
[1] They show our government has been dishonest about the extent of civilian deaths from drones. For example:
[2] They show the military is cooking the books, and covering up civilian deaths:
Perhaps some folks always suspected this was the case, but Scahill & co. have the hard evidence that proves it. Some also said that Snowden didn’t reveal anything new, but even if that was true (which it wasn’t) he also had the documents to back up his claims.
So what these articles do (assuming the documents are real) is to prove beyond doubt that our government is lying to us. They hold our government accountable for its actions and its dishonesty.
Cacti
@TG Chicago:
As a U.S. citizen, a domestic belligerent is exactly what Al-Awlaki was. His expatriate status didn’t not make him a foreigner at the time of his death.
Bill
@Keith G: If your intent is to draw a distinction between pedophilia and pederasty you’re probably right as a matter of semantics, but damn that’s a weird argument to bring up.
I assume you do PR work for the Catholic Church.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@benw:
Yep. The story isn’t OMG we’re doing drone strikes, who knew?!? It’s that specific information and statistics about how those operations are being carried out have been uncovered.
TG Chicago
@bystander:
Bowe Bergdahl was “hanging out” with the Taliban in Afghanistan for many years. Some think he was collaborating with them; some think he was captured by them. Are you saying that he should be killed regardless?
I’m not saying that targeted killings are always wrong. I’m pointing out that these are usually not clear-cut cases. I believe that there should be a process for determining the guilt or innocence of the target before they are killed, and that the process should have more checks and balances than “the president says this guy dies, so he dies”.
Brachiator
@Mandalay:
Please select your preferred military weapon which will absolutely guarantee no civilian deaths.
Paul in KY
@Bill: The check from Big-Catholic never bounces.
FlipYrWhig
@Cervantes: As ever, there are three issues: one, civilian casualties. When drones cause them, it is very bad. When any weapon causes them, it is very bad. Two, oversight so that use of the weapon isn’t indiscriminate. Also true for all other weapons. Three, the psychological effect of the drone as instrument of terror that kills unexpectedly and without warning. Less true for other weapons.
Another Holocene Human
@Cacti: Tell that to the lady who rammed the White House fence.
eta: not saying I agree with the police response, actually, but being a US citizen is not a “get out of a defensive response free” card
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
So that’s what will stop a president from ordering them killed? The fact that you think it is silly? That does not strike me as a meaningful constraint of presidential power.
In what way was Al-Awlaki a soldier? I’ve seen no evidence that he was directly involved in any attacks.
What is the codified legal distinction that allows a president to kill Al-Awlaki, but not to kill Snowden?
Another Holocene Human
@TG Chicago: What’s clear cut is that the guy was making Al Qaeda recruitment videos and he was out of the reach of a US arrest.
In the middle goes intelligence work.
Yemen actually had a judicial proceeding in absentia and convicted him. Something that conveniently gets forgotten it seems.
Apparently American exceptionalism means that you as a US citizen should be able to go anywhere in the world, cause any sort of havok, no laws apply to you and nobody should lay a hand on you.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@TG Chicago:
FWIW, only right-wing Obama-hating nutjobs think Bowe Bergdahl was collaborating with the Taliban. The US government and US Army have said from the very start that he was captured by the Taliban and held prisoner. The only question about that was raised by conservative assholes who wanted to deny Obama a win when Bergdahl’s release was finally negotiated.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Which only excites the OMG we’re doing drone strikes, who knew?!? crowd.
Another Holocene Human
@FlipYrWhig: The MSF bombing was pretty fucking unexpected; I thought that was a manned air raid. Either way, it flies through the air and a human releases the bomb. And a human makes the mistakes. And a human has commanders. Who also fuck up royally.
The terror is the not rare enough strikes on completely innocent civilian targets. Great topic of discussion. Dr0000000nes is a derail when the fuckups happened on the chain of command, in the CIA, etc, etc.
While true lefties are chanting about drones, nobody is ever held accountable for getting civilians killed unnecessarily. No, it’s NOT collateral damage WHEN YOU BOMB THE WRONG TARGET. Fuck.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: See, to me, having our soldiers die in a valid National Security action is less-bad (overall) than killing innocent civilians (including children).
They are both bad, but if I had to weigh them, that’s where I personally come down.
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
Sadly, I think whatever your problems are with the CIA would reoccur quickly in whatever agency replaced it. The wingnuts in this country have a long tradition of disliking the Company for being not wingnutty enough; the Bushies’ solution was to start their own little intelligence bureaus, usually under Rumsfeld’s direct authority, who would “fact check” the CIA by producing exactly the reports Rummy and the others wanted to hear.
(Point of interest; the original CIA, the WW2 era OSS, was shut down, in large part because of a successful campaign by J. Edgar Hoover, who didn’t like the competition. Restarted two years later when the government realized a foreign intelligence agency really was a good thing to have).
Personally, my main question about the IC is how – other than the popularity of James Bond books and movies – it became so commonly accepted that intelligence agencies are supposed to do covert ops. The basic function of a spy is to collect information. Even if you assume that a Department of Covert Operations is a good thing to have, why would that automatically go to the intelligence community? The British in WW2 kept them separate – MI6 did the spying, SOE did the “setting Europe ablaze.”
FlipYrWhig
@Paul in KY: SEALs and Special Forces and whatnot are glamor jobs in the services, right? But aren’t there places that even they can’t really get? Sometimes I feel like a drone attack is more like a robotically assisted sniper than anything else. And if course if a sniper’s bullet hits the wrong person, that’s tragic too. But the drone qua drone doesn’t seem to need to be part of the discussion. Seems like the question for all weaponry is ultimately “are you SURE you know where [deadly object] is gonna come down, and that there aren’t innocent people there instead?”
Cervantes
@FlipYrWhig:
Now with less Flip!
Taking your three issues: I agree with [1] and [2] precisely as stated. If they were better handled, [3] would be less an issue in this context.
There are other issues, but the three you identify are quite enough to go on with.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
I understand where you were going with this, but I think your number three is less distinct than you might want to admit when it comes to many types of weapons and how they are used.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@TG Chicago:
General Yamamoto planned the attack on Pearl Harbor but was not directly involved because he was not on board any of the planes or ships. So I’m guessing you think his assassination was wrong since he only planned the attack but did not execute it?
A spy is not a soldier, and the two have always been treated differently under the rules of war. Take a look at article 106 of the UCMJ, for one. You can also check out 18 US Code Chapter 37. (Note: IANAL, so these are things I Googled.) It would be very clearly illegal under both federal law and the UCMJ to use a drone on Snowden while he’s in Russia.
Al-Awlaki was operating in a legal gray zone because there was not a war declared by Congress. He knew it, and he exploited it to the hilt. But, hey, if you want to cry over the death of a guy who was responsible for the deaths of at least hundreds of people in the Middle East and Asia, a guy who was convicted of capital murder by Yemen, and argue that he should have been left alone to arrange the murders of even more innocent people because he found a legal loophole, be my guest. You’re not going to find a whole lot of sympathy for him once people do some really basic research like reading his Wikipedia entry. You did do that before going to the mat to defend him, right?
Cervantes
@Paul in KY:
You and me both.
FlipYrWhig
@Paul in KY: Of course! But that’s why the rule is “will using [deadly weapon] make it more likely for an innocent person to die?” whether the weapon in question is a drone or a catapult stone.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: As of right now, our sniper bullets do not kill everybody in the room & the sniper is looking thru a scope & would (I hope) have some positive visual ID of whomever he/she is trying to kill.
I do not consider these drones & the missiles they deliver to be like a ‘robotically assisted sniper’.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: What rule?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Chris:
Intelligence *gathering* is a vital function that the CIA seems to do pretty well. Covert ops always seem to be clusterfucks. Any military-type operation needed (like a drone strike) should IMO be legally required to be turned over to the military for action, where there’s at least a chain of command and responsibility.
On a related topic, it’s pretty clear now that the reason the whole Bengazi thing went south was that you had CIA and State Dept. operating out of the same facilities, and State has good and logical reasons for hating that, because it tends to get their staffers killed. I still think 90 percent of the secrecy about Benghazi is that it was a CIA post.
Larv
@Paul in KY:
I think the problem with using “kill teams” is more than just that it will lead to increased casualties which are politically less palatable. It’s also likely to lead to a ratcheting up of our involvement in trouble zones like Yemen and Somalia where we don’t have a defined military objective, as well as a potential diplomatic morass. The likelihood of a Black Hawk Down type of situation is high, and that was a fricking disaster which probably ended up killing at least as many civilians as a drone strike and probably quite a few more. The capture of any member of an insertion team would be a PR coup for any terrorist/jihadist group, and there would be tremendous pressure on the military and political leaders to mount a larger operation to rescue them or get revenge for them if they were later executed. Just think how much ammo that would give the hawks who think greater military involvement is a panacea for all foreign policy ills.
That doesn’t mean I’m wild about the current policy and practice of drone strikes, but I recognize that they’re an imperfect solution to a difficult problem.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: By and large I agree, but the way I wrote it is my best effort at trying to see the technology of the drone as potentially unique.
@Cervantes: Good! But I find it strange that we collectively don’t worry all that much about the military indiscriminately using machine guns or something. It’s like by saying the word “drone” we activate some otherwise long-dormant moral dilemmas about killing at a distance, like Ludovico Ariosto lamenting over how gunpowder is killing chivalry.
Archon
@Another Holocene Human:
I got to agree, it’s an interested variant of American exceptionalism being argued by some liberals. It boils down to the idea that Americans deserves specific and unique protections regardless of their actions, or the organizations they join, even if they are a declared enemy of the very country they are operating in.
I wonder if people who think we basically violated Al-Awkaki constitutional rights would feel different if Americans simply gave the Yemeni actionable intelligence and they carried out the operation they killed Al-Awlaki without American-style due process.
Larv
@Paul in KY:
I wish I shared your optimism that this approach would lead to fewer civilian casualties, but I see no reason to believe that. I suspect that extraction of such a team would be far messier than you think. Unless you’re proposing that they be suicide squads?
Paul in KY
@Larv: Good points, Larv. Bad situation all around. I still would do it the way I mentioned above, however.
Paul in KY
@Larv: Not suicide squads, but if captured they can’t expect a concerted effort to rescue them.
We would have to extract a team that was calling for extraction. that might be very messy, as you noted.
TG Chicago
@Another Holocene Human:
I’m not sure why making videos would be cause for arrest in any case.
As it should be, when discussing American law. Or do you think we should follow their precedent regarding child marriage?
That’s not been my case. My case is that American citizens are entitled some sort of codified legal process with checks and balances to determine guilt before they are killed. It should not come down to a president’s sole decision.
FlipYrWhig
@Paul in KY: The moral rule I think I’d apply.
@Paul in KY: If a drone strike caused no casualties beyond the target, it would be basically a very loud sniper shot. A “perfect” drone would be like that. What makes the imperfect drone different from a sniper shot is that it can cause mass casualties beyond the target. Ergo, the question to ask is “does it cause casualties beyond the target?” But you’d still ask that of a grenade or bomb or missile. Hence the drone-y-ness of the drone is immaterial.
Mandalay
@Brachiator:
A lame strawman. You are just ignoring the issue of our government lying about what they have done.
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
A right-wing Obama-hating nutjob will almost certainly get a minimum of 45% of the votes cast in the next presidential election. They might even win. Thus, I think it’s wise to have a system in place that prevents right-wing nutjob presidents from having the power to kill on their command.
TG Chicago
@FlipYrWhig:
Agreed. And if one manages to read the first two sentences of the first article linked at The Intercept, they will see that “drones are evil” is not the point. Obviously some in this thread — those who wish to derail the subject by talking about “DR000NEZZZ” — have not come to realize this.
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I think it’s quite clear that General Yamamoto was a soldier, given his uniform, rank, etc. It’s less clear to me that Awlaki planned any attacks. It’s even less clear to me that a formal process for determining his guilt took place, one that couldn’t simply be overridden by the president.
If you can make the unilateral assumption that Awlaki was a soldier in a war zone, then I’m not sure why we can feel comfortable that President Cruz will not declare that Snowden was a soldier, not a spy.
All I’m saying is that there should be some sort of process to make these distinctions. And that the process should involve more than “president says so”. Do you find this notion objectionable?
There’s a difference between “crying over” someone and saying that the process used to kill him was wrong. Let’s say he did in fact “arrange the murders of innocent people”. Who determined this? Shouldn’t there be a formal process for this beyond “president says kill”?
I hope you’ll forgive me for ignoring Yemeni legal proceedings.
Mandalay
@FlipYrWhig:
Based on your later comment about peripheral casualties you have persuaded me that a drone is more like a robotically assisted grenade than a robotically assisted sniper.
Frankensteinbeck
@TG Chicago:
I know this one!
It’s that Al-Awlaki received due process of law, with two different court cases, the first determining that he could not be tried, even though his family wanted to find some way of trying him in absentia – indeed, that he had deliberately given up his right to be tried. That is a thing you can do. In the second case, a federal judge confirmed that the administration’s targeting him for execution was completely legal. That was an interesting case, because the judge ruled it was legal, but wrote an opinion saying he found the whole thing disturbing. GG reported only the comment about disturbingness, thus implying there was unconstitutionality, when in fact it was completely constitutional.
As far as I know, Snowden is A) not in a combat zone, and the rebel areas of Yemen and Somalia both very much are, B) is not an active threat to American lives, and C) has not had a court rule that he has given up his right to trial.
Al-Awlaki received due process. His killing was 100% constitutional, confirmed by a federal judge. ‘Due process’ does not necessarily mean you get a trial, if you meet one of the rare exceptions like Al-Awlaki did.
Roger Moore
@Larv:
I think the fundamental problem with trying to handle these attacks with special forces is that they can’t get there in time. A lot of what they’re doing with drones is taking advantage of very short-term chances to find and attack people. For that to work, you need to have the forces needed for the attack in the air nearby. We can do that with drones, which can loiter around for many hours and whose pilots can take shifts. It simply isn’t practical to try the same thing with special forces; you’d have to have them flying around in helicopters all the time waiting for the enemy to slip up and expose himself.
Frankensteinbeck
@Roger Moore:
You also can’t send special forces into, say, rebel-controlled territories of Yemen.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes, I see your point, and I thought about the German V2 rockets, that were supposedly silent and launched randomly, vs supposedly targeted drone strikes. But is the use that much differen than, say a motorcyclist speeding past an unwary target and pulling a gun to shoot that person, a “standard” method of assasination that uses the element of surprise?
I ran across this while looking for references to the idea that the use of rockets on 19th century war ships was “bad form.”
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/sail-ammo.htm
New weapons and tactics seem to regularly shift from being seen as infernal to being seen as commonplace.
Cervantes
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t speak for any “we collectively,” nor do I accept your assertion that some half-cocked “we collectively” is terribly upset by drones per se.
Cervantes
@TG Chicago:
I don’t know why anyone would bother trying to “derail the subject” — pathetic if true — but other than that I could not agree more with your comment.
Cervantes
@Brachiator:
It is said that when the Pilgrims in New England went hunting, in order to confound pursuers animal or human, they left chunks of smoked herring leading the wrong way.
The herring was red.
Mandalay
@TG Chicago:
All of that. If you decide to run for president you have my vote.
Indeed. British PM David Cameron just employed that shabby conflation against Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had said of bin Laden’s death:
Yet Cameron claimed he simply said “He thinks the death of Osama bin Laden was a ‘tragedy’.”
Luckily Karma did some nifty video editing which came back to bite Cameron in the ass. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
FlipYrWhig
@Cervantes: Touché — “Flying Death Robots” haven’t been adduced this time.
lowercase steve
Regarding the Civil War…I think the distinctions is:
Rebel American shooting at you/running at you with bayonet vs. guy who is not actively engaged in combat but might be plotting to do harm in ways that are both credibly serious (not just some guy with fantasies but someone who can actually carry out this plan) and pose risk of imminent danger to the US and its citizens. So the issues are:
1. What counts as an imminent threat necessitating immediate intervention?
2. Are there steps that need to be outlined that demonstrate that there are no other alternatives (capture/extradition).
3. Who is reviewing this evidence and making sure the government is establishing an imminent threat with good evidence?
4. Is there oversight of the procedures taken to minimize death and destruction of innocents?
5. Whether or not this is done legally and with proper oversight…are we studying the side-effects/unintended consequences of the strikes and are we reasonably certain we aren’t making things worse (i.e. radicalizing more people/building more credible threats with every kill)?
You can ask all these questions without thinking that Obama and his administration are evil or that there is any skullduggery going on. And without focusing on “DRONES!” as some sort of uniquely evil device…really, proper oversight of our military death-dealing is something any Leftie can get behind whether it is missiles or drones or bombing campaigns.
Cervantes
@Roger Moore:
There’s a sort of (unintentional) bait-and-switch here. In theory the paragraph sounds fine, but when you look at reality, “a lot of what they’re doing with drones” — most of it according to certain documents — is killing innocent people. Yes, sure, “we can do that with drones.”
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@TG Chicago:
There is a process. It’s not an adversarial court process inside the US legal system, but there is a process, and it is far more than “the president says to kill this guy.” I don’t know why people persist in pretending there’s no process when it’s been widely covered.
Try this New York Times article about the Justice Department memo that was drawn up well prior to the assassination:
http://tinyurl.com/nmncq9m
Also, the Lawfare blog has a review of what sounds like a fascinating book about the whole process, “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone.” If you don’t want to read the whole book, the Lawfare review has a good summary of the legal issues.
I know that some lawyers like Greenwald still want to argue the case, but there have been several federal court decisions that it was legal (if “disturbing”) under current law to kill Al-Awlaki.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Frankensteinbeck:
Here’s a link to the Lawfare review of what sounds like a very interesting book about the case:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/how-anwar-al-awlaki-came-be-targeted-armed-drone
The writer makes a very good point at the end — Al-Awlaki always had the option of walking into a US embassy or consulate and turning himself in. He refused to do so, even though he knew he was a wanted man, and even though his family begged him to.
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): If you think that the Justice Department — which answers to the president — is an independent check on the president, then I assume you find the Yoo/Bybee memos as proof that torture is legal.
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): So after the US declares that it intends to kill him– and long after it has declared the right to indefinitely detain and torture “terrorism” subjects — we’re going to wave around the fact that al-Awlaki could have turned himself in?
Does that not strike you as Kafkaesque?
ETA: the US never even indicted al-Awlaki, yet he should have turned himself in?
TG Chicago
@Frankensteinbeck:
Could you provide links? I’ve been googling around without success.
Your assertions that Al-Awlaki was killed in a combat zone and that he was an active threat to American lives are exactly the points which I believe have not been properly determined. A determination that falls entirely under the Executive branch does not strike me as proper, not for the killing of an American citizen.
Was Al-Awlaki indicted? I’m not aware that he was, and I’m not sure how one gives up a right to a trial without having been indicted.
Brachiator
@Cervantes:
You like herring? A great story about how the industry grew because of a fluke.
http://gizmodo.com/how-fish-guts-launched-an-international-empire-1736071801
redshirt
I’m curious what you hippies would propose instead of drones – carpet bombing? Boots on the ground? An end to all war and violence?
This topic is so ludicrous, and yet so many get so upset.
Cervantes
@redshirt:
Well, since you asked: I propose sending you (your own fine self) to do the killing and the dying.
How about that?
Odd, isn’t it?
Cervantes
@TG Chicago:
Glad you caught that.
Bill Arnold
@Mandalay:
It won’t be very long before smaller drones with mounted aim-able small arms are commonly used for assassination. At some point they will be autonomous (even if autonomy is banned). Not trying to argue for surprise death from above, just saying that there will be an arms/defense race.
redshirt
@Cervantes: Which Cervantes are you? The nutball?
As a registered deadly weapon, maybe there would be less collateral damage if I did all the killing?
But really, you didn’t answer my question at all. Instead of drones, what do you propose? World harmony and universal peace?
Cervantes
@Brachiator:
Sure do — except not red ones served ostentatiously while naïfs like me are trying to sort out the intractable morality of killing and destruction.
De gustibus and all that, eh?
Brachiator
@Cervantes:
naïf?
Hardly
redshirt
@Cervantes: So universal harmony and peace is your answer then.
I’m sure that will happen with the election/coup of Jill Stein.
Cervantes
@redshirt:
@redshirt:
Don’t take this the wrong way — but I really can’t help you.
I trust you’ll have a great evening regardless.
redshirt
@Cervantes: No answers again.
I’m sure your “positive vibes” will end war and usher in a thousand years of Nader/Stein.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@TG Chicago:
As more than one person has pointed out to you, multiple federal judges have dismissed the various cases brought on Al-Awlaki’s behalf (mostly by his father) saying that it was neither illegal nor a violation of his civil rights for him to be placed on the “kill list.” Do you also think that the federal judiciary does whatever the Obama administration tells them to do and, if so, why would you trust our justice system to try him since it’s that corrupt?
The legal question was settled by the federal courts and, like it or not, your side lost. Again, read my Lawfare link above.
The moral question is still open, but I don’t think that’s as easy to answer as you seem to think. Is the life of one American citizen really more important than the lives of the people who were killed or injured by Al-Qaeda, so much so that we were morally obligated to allow him to continue to recruit suicide bombers and other killers rather than stop him by killing him?
mclaren
@piratedan:
As I reminded everyone here back in 2012:
Silly lad! America is not leaving Afghanistan in 2014. America will not leave in 2024 or 2040 or 2104. America is now engaged in a Forever War, like the one in Joe Haldeman’s science fiction novel, a war that goes on and and on without end, ever-ending, ever-increasing. Get used to it.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Here’s what I would personally recommend:
redshirt
@mclaren: Sounds like Pinko Commie propaganda!
Soonergrunt
@redshirt: You are an eponymous redshirt.
Ummmm, you won’t last long, if history is any guide.
redshirt
@Soonergrunt: We are legion.
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I’ve seen that cases got dismissed on national security grounds and on ‘lack of standing’ grounds. I’ve not seen any cases that said it was legal to put him on a kill list or even that he was guilty of anything. If you can share a link to your source, I would appreciate it.
No, I think judicial review of a target should be required before that target is killed. I don’t believe any such review took place.
I read the Lawfare link, and it does not indicate that there was judicial review of Awlaki’s guilt.
I also don’t believe there’s anything stopping President Cruz from killing any American on foreign soil whom he determines to be kill-worthy. I am not comfortable with that.
TG Chicago
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
If we’re so sure that Awlaki was operationally involved in terrorist attacks, then a judicial review of his guilt should be as difficult to obtain as a FISA warrant.
When these ostensibly easily-obtained things are not obtained — nor even sought — it makes me wonder why.
Donald
@FlipYrWhig: @FlipYrWhig: @FlipYrWhig: @FlipYrWhig: [email protected]FlipYrWhig:
I think the drone campaign deserves the criticism it gets because we have killed a lot of civilians and lied about it. I think the killing of civilians by other American weapons gets less attention because the military is a sacred cow in the US and the only politically acceptable way to criticize our killings is when they are done by remote control. Outside the far left, no American ever said one word criticizing what our military did to Fallujah, yet Iraq Body Count’s conservative figures say nearly 2000 civilians died in our two assaults. I think Americans have regressed in our willingness to criticize what our military does because everyone is afraid of being accused of Criticizing the military– everyone remembers the stories of anti war protestors allegedly spitting on soldiers returning from Vietnam. Criticizing drone strikes is actually the only way one can criticize the killing of civilians by America without being accused of hating vets. That’s my theory, anyway.
Donald
I tried to edit my previous comment, which needs a lot of editing, but just got booted out of the thread each time. Hopefully my point managed to make it through my clumsy writing.
Donald
Hmm– gonna try to clarify in what might be a dead thread. My points are–
1. The drone program deserves the attacks it has received.
2. It is odd that we don’t hear more about other civilians killed by America
3. I think this is because it is no longer acceptable to criticize ” the troops” in any way. Drone killings are via remote control, so there is no American risking his or her life involved, at least not the one operating the drone. It is therefore okay to criticize drones, except with people who think it is an attack on Obama and therefore blasphemy. But that sort of objection doesn’t intimidate anyone.
4. Point 3 is due to backlash against real or imagined excesses of the anti war movement of the 60’s.
Cermet
@Cacti: Since you are the rear end of Francis I will add that I never said anything about other presidents use of military force neither illegally or inappropriately; however, try learning facts rather than stating falsehoods. Lincoln absolutely used legal military force against rebels which, while US citizens, can by all American and international laws and norms at the time and even today be done. Your claim otherwise was a complete pile of nonsense based on willful ignorance. As for other people like Bush the stump, sure, they used illegal military force and were utter ass holes.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: That is a good point.