Finally some creeping legitimacy for the fucking retards.* According to Adam Serwer in Mother Jones, congress is considering 2 measures to mandate disclosure of internal memos outlining the legal justification for killing (by drone) Americans overseas without charge or trial. Problem is that the potus has yet to acknowlegde that such a memo exists. The NYT already has an FOIA suit seeking the memo. The ACLU already has a FOIA suit
seeking not only the legal justification for America’s targeted killing program, but the process by which US citizens suspected of terrorism are placed on its so-called “kill list.” The ACLU is also seeking the evidence the US government used to determine that radical American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in September, was actually a terrorist.
.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), (ok, not a fucking retard) initiated one of the bills requiring the administration to produce the memo, but it was shelved by the Dems on the Judiciary committee (surprise!)
“We’re not mere supplicants to the executive branch, we are a coequal branch of government,” Cornyn said during discussion of his amendment in the Senate committee hearing last week. “So it is insufficient to say pretty please, Mr. President, pretty please, Mr. Attorney General, will you please tell us the legal authority by which you claim the authority to kill American citizens abroad?”
There is a separate section of another intelligence bill that would compel the Justice Dept to share all legal opinions on intelligence committees, unless the White House invokes executive privilege. Dunno, that phrase is starting to sound just a bit too familiar.
Good series on the drone strikes in Mother Jones, The Atlantic, and the NYT. Chilling article in the NYT by Elizabeth Bumiller the other day if anyone caught it – Drone Pilots – A Day Job Waiting For A Kill Shot A World Away.
*(Rahm) Emanuel had a hand in war strategy, political maneuvering, communications and economic policy. Bob Woodward wrote in his book, Obama’s Wars, that Emanuel made a habit of calling up CIA Director Leon Panetta and asking about the lethal drone strikes aimed at Al Qaeda. “Who did we get today?” he would ask.
ok, i know that the fucking retard bit was initially about us libtards re: HCR. But as one who has had to listen to “blue dogs” condescendingly lecture me about collateral damage in warfare, (really? we’re at war with Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan? Apparently Congress missed that vote), i’m rather glad to see this is finally getting some air.
I do wonder about this. Some kind of transparency obviously is welcome; but doesn’t this rather look like a Republican device simply to embarrass Obama? And provide yet more “He’s a commie/fascist/whatever takeoverer hiding his real agenda from us?”
If there was a legal opinion that said, basically, “Stuff the Geneva Conventions we’re signed up to, who gives a fuck” (cf Dubbya’s regime) does anyone imagine a Republican Congress would have wanted to hear it then? Or publicise it?
I would be utterly astonished if the Republicans actually cared a tuppeny-halfpenny damn if there was or is any legal advice that said targeted killings, or torture, were actually against various international conventions the US has signed. (As I and a lot of others are pretty damn certain they are.) Or would do otherwise than cheer if the President was Republican and there was legal opinion that said they weren’t.
It’s all pure hypocrisy. What party, after all, pretty well unanimously supported legislation that can be used to incarcerate any American anywhere merely on ‘suspicion’ of terrorism with minimal, or no, proof?
I have to agree with Red. The guy’s heart ain’t in it. One will get you ten that this was cooked up for no other reason than to give Romney a retort to ‘when are you going to release your taxes?’
The answer to ‘When are you going to release the memo?’ is, alas, not any time soon. Certainly not before the election. And probably not ever.
That Republican senator is only one instance. For that specific legal memo, both the ACLU and NYT have filed suit under the FOI – hardly hotbeds of Republicanism. Also Squirrel, the key word there is that Republicans in congress supported legislation to incarcerate Americans. There is no legislation involved here, this is the problem. Not even any checks and balances. Feinstein’s (D) Intelligence committee has asked for more oversight, but what they do is watch footage of strikes after the fact. Without the memo, they have no idea as to the legal basis of what they’re watching though.
Without the memo, they have no idea as to the legal basis of what they’re watching though
Well, there are international treaties; there are commonly understood ‘rules of war’; there are international conventions on human rights; other countries are perfectly clear about the morality of it, and interpret both their own law and international law accordingly.
Is that so fucking difficult in the USA?
It was the NeoCons and Rumsfeld who said none of that mattered. And now the Republicans want to claim it might after all? Bollocks.
It’s not just Republicans.
Cronyn may have an R after his name, but he seems to be quite a stand up and on the level guy. He pushed for transparency during the Bush administration as well.
http://www.johncornyn.com/bio
If the quest for transparency and release of information is politically motivated, and i’m not saying that it isn’t, that doesn’t make it invalid. Jesus wept, i’ve been sick of Republicans for a long time, but i’m sick to death of Democrats too.
Porn,
No one wants transparent due process more than I do. I just don’t believe there is a rat’s chance in room full of terriers that we will see either, when it comes to drones over the Northwest Frontier, or Yemen, or anywhere else, anytime soon. Which, as you say, even if we doubt Cornyn’s motives and timing (which I do), doesn’t make the quest invalid. Almost certainly futile in the short to medium term, but not invalid.
Bluth -
Congressionally, chances are not. But there are still the court cases. I’m trying to find dates for them but can’t seem to as of yet.
At least the pending court cases are starting to get a lot of ink. That’s something in itself.
Porn,
Thing about court cases like that, any lawyer worth is fees should be able to drag things out at least past the election, but when it comes to ‘military secrets’ in the middle of what will be characterized as an ongoing conflict…. I sincerely doubt we will see any of that paper until it gets de-classified automatically x number of decades from now.
Or leaked, of course. but it just doesn’t seem like the kind of issue anyone deep enough on the inside to have access to it would ever have strong enough misgivings about it to do that.
Probably not Bluth, they’re just getting around to Bush’s papers now. But the papers and newshows are at least starting to bring it up a lot and hash it out. This is a good thing.
This is a political issue in the old fashioned electoral sense, in that nothing good can happen till an electorally significant number of people say, Hey, this thing has gone too far. The amazing abdication of responsibility on the part of the American press and media in general that began on 9/12 went way too deep (and lingers to this day) and its consequences on the public psyche are still way too pervasive for anything like an electorally significant level of public involvement in the fundamental issues to happen yet. So any sign of movement there, whether it comes from John Cornyn* (or Bill O’Reilly, for that matter), is as helpful as anything Bernie Sanders (or Glen Greenwald) has to say; more so, possibly.
What I mean: electoral politics. In this case, well-learned Democratic triangulation electoral politics**. Don’t want nine separate ground wars? Don’t want to be seen just walking away? Gentlemen, I give you…drones, the war that isn’t really a war. Can’t be effectively attacked from the left because the neighborhood kids aren’t dying (in any war we started, anyway). Can’t be attacked from the right because people are still being killed. That makes it the one politically impervious strategy, which is always to take the middle way — in this case, the evolving centrist definition of peace, half way between everybody’s people die and nobody’s do.
As long as it’s a political winner, it will win politically, and as long as it wins politically, it will go on. And to make a political loser out of it will need more than we — we here, and the rest of our kind — can hope to bring. It will take a whole lot of opportunistic harrumphing from folks whose hands are far bloodier than any we’d care to shake, and if we’re serious about being anything more than Nader-pure about this, we’re pretty much obliged to welcome that.
* Though coming from him, it is a little hard to swallow, I admit. “We’re not mere supplicants to the executive branch, we are a coequal branch of government,,,: My gut reaction is “give me a break, that’s too rich for words.” But if he can make that play in Texas then there’s a ray of hope***.
** May you rot in hell, Mark Penn.
*** Texas (Squirrel) being the state that doesn’t have to allow Mexican diplomats access to Mexicans accused of capital crimes, because the treaty requiring it was ratified only by the federal government and is therefore not binding on Texans.
Well said, Natty. And because it’s them, and over there, not us (even though a few of them were sort of us, but not enough us to rate due process), it’s a lot more dismissable than say, hiding American body bags flown into the US.
But we all know damn well that if it was Republicans pulling the same stunt, Tomasky would have 2 weeks worth of columns up on that as opposed to 2 weeks worth of Mittens’ faux pas. And i doubt we would have heard the likes of Chris Matthews saying that the phenomenon of increasing collateral civilian deaths from predator drones is the result of “them” just “trying to embarrass us”.
NYT article today -
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/john-cornyn-makes-sense