We have previously discussed the President’s “kill list” policy under which Obama claims the right to be able to kill any American based on his sole judgment and discretion. A confidential Justice Department memo now sheds more light on that policy and states a broader basis for such killings than previously suggested by the Administration. It is also not clear why this memo was kept secret by the Administration since it deals only with legal interpretations — not classified operational information.
Last March, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared at the Northwestern University Law School to present the new policy, claiming that the President did not need any conviction or even a charge to kill an American citizen. While he stressed that this was based on a rationale that the citizen posed “an imminent threat of violent attack,” I noted at the time that any such limitation was purely discretionary under the theory of executive power being advanced by the Obama Administration.
It now appears that the Administration lawyers reached the same conclusion. The memo notes that there does not need to be an imminent attack in terms of an unfolding plan or operation: “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
In plain language, that means that the President considers the citizens to be a threat in the future. Moreover, the memo allows killings when an attempt to capture the person would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel. That undue risk is left undefined.
The memo, entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force,” is a tour de force of an imperial presidency. It was provided previously to both Democratic and Republican members of Congress on the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees. However, those members did nothing to stop such an extreme assertion of unilateral presidential power or to alert the public that the president was claiming far greater latitude in ordering the killings of citizens.
In an Orwellian twist, the memo insists “A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination.” It is more like a very pointed expression of presidential displeasure.
Here is the memo: 020413_DOJ_White_Paper
Source: NBC
The drone policy is unconstitutional. It is also immoral, bad foreign policy and bad domestic policy. I’ll have more to say later.
Doomsday Clock Overview
The Doomsday Clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction–the figurative midnight–and monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself. First and foremost, these include nuclear weapons, but they also encompass climate-changing technologies and new developments in the life sciences that could inflict irrevocable harm.
Nuclear
The nuclear age dawned in the 1940s when scientists learned how to release the energy stored within the atom. Immediately, they thought of two potential uses–an unparalleled weapon and a new energy source. The United States built the first atomic bombs during World War II, which they used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Within two decades, Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and France had also established nuclear weapon programs. Since then, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have built nuclear weapons as well.
For most of the Cold War, overt hostility between the United States and Soviet Union, coupled with their enormous nuclear arsenals, defined the nuclear threat. The U.S. arsenal peaked at about 30,000 warheads in the mid-1960s and the Soviet arsenal at 40,000 warheads in the 1980s, dwarfing all other nuclear weapon states. The scenario for nuclear holocaust was simple: Heightened tensions between the two jittery superpowers would lead to an all-out nuclear exchange. Today, the potential for an accidental or inadvertent nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia remains, with both countries anachronistically maintaining more than 1,000 warheads on high alert, ready to launch within tens of minutes, even though a deliberate attack by Russia or the United States on the other seems improbable.
…
http://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/timeline
bigfatmike,
Bravo!
I’ve made that argument several times; i.e. how amazing it was that even when the atomic clock read 2 minutes to midnight we didn’t victimize the constitution out of fear.
http://youtu.be/Y4VQgF50NQA
ap,
I saw that and thought, “Now there is a ringing endorsement that indicates just how out of control the Federal government is and how far down the fascist rabbit hole both parties are.”
mespo,
Do you think the Chinese would really allow NK to use a nuke other than as a threat? No. 1) They are a target too. 2) They don’t want either us or NATO on their front steps. Again, the value is in the threat, not the use.
Former VP Cheney calls Obama administration’s drone strikes ‘a good policy’
By Associated Press, Updated: Tuesday, February 12, 7:59 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-vp-cheney-calls-obama-administrations-drone-strikes-a-good-policy/2013/02/12/fc06bc4c-7513-11e2-9889-60bfcbb02149_story.html
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney says the Obama administration’s policy of targeting terrorists abroad with unmanned drone strikes is “a good policy,” even though he disagrees with most of President Barack Obama’s views on national security.
In an interview that aired Tuesday on “CBS This Morning,” Cheney dismissed the need for “checks and balances” against the drone program. He says Obama “is getting paid to make difficult, difficult decisions.”
Bob,Esq:
“Oh yes, I forgot all that overwhelming evidence you’ve shown us that the fate of the country hangs in the balance; outside of your imagination.”
**************************
Events have a funny way of proving me right sometimes:
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/02/12/north-korea-detonates-third-nuclear-bomb-test/
It’s a safe world for Western democracies indeed. Now let’s neuter ourselves in service to some secondary principle that could quite possibly leave us all dead. The first lesson of self-defense is to acknowledge you need it and the second is to avoid underestimating the threat. You need work on both.
Another lesson of self defense is to maintain situational awareness and not become focused on a particular issue, technique or threat.
We have, maybe, 50 years of successful experience dealing with nuclear armed nation states. To the best of my knowledge, during that time, no one claimed that the US had the legitimate power to assassinate civilians – certainly not outside of a declared war, on the battlefield, holding a weapon.
The difficulties we have with North Korea, which many view as a potential adversary, offer no support for the drone program or the claim that the executive has legal authority to assassinate anyone.
I view the knot of questions related to assassination, and indefinite detention as serious issues because asymmetrical, unconventional warfare presents real threats with few historical lessons for success.
But it is important to be clear about what counts as data. North Korea with its nuclear bombs and missiles is irrelevant in the discussion of the newly claimed powers of the executive branch.
http://youtu.be/t8tMlFTk6Nk
DOJ kill list memo forces many Dems out of the closet as overtly unprincipled hacks
Last week’s controversy over Obama’s assassination program forced into light many ignored truths that were long obvious
by Glenn Greenwald
Monday 11 February 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/11/progressives-defend-obama-kill-list
Excerpt:
“Progressive willingness to acquiesce to or even outright support Obama’s radical policies – in the name of partisan loyalty – are precisely what ensures the continuation of those policies. Obama gets away with all of this because so many progressives venerate leader loyalty and partisan gain above all else.
What’s most remarkable about this willingness to endorse extremist policies because you “trust” the current leader exercising them is how painfully illogical it is, and how violently contrary it is to everything Americans are taught from childhood about their country. It should not be difficult to comprehend that there is no such thing as vesting a Democratic President with Power X but not vesting a GOP President with the same power. To endorse a power in the hands of a leader you like is, necessarily, to endorse the power in the hands of a leader you dislike.
Like Bob Herbert’s statement – “policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House” – this is so obvious it should not need to be argued. As former Bush and Obama aide Douglas Ollivant told the NYT yesterday about the “trust” argument coming from some progressives: “That’s not how we make policy. We make policy assuming that people in power might abuse it. To do otherwise is foolish.”
It is not hyperbole to say that the overarching principle of the American founding was that no political leaders – no matter how kind and magnanimous they seemed – could or should be trusted to exercise power in the dark, without checks. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1798: “In questions of power . . . let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Six years earlier, John Adams warned: “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” James Madison, in Federalist 51, explained: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
This is not just basic American political history. It’s basic human nature. And the greater the power is – and there is no greater power than targeting citizens for execution – the more applicable those principles are. Watching progressive media figures outright admit that trust in Barack Obama as Leader guides their unprincipled political arguments is only slightly more jarring than watching them embrace that mentality while pretending they’re not. Whatever else is true, watching the political movement that spent years marching behind the banner of “due process” and “restraints on presidential power” and “our Constitutional values” now explicitly defend the most radical policy yet justified by the “war on terror” – all because it’s their leader doing it – is as nauseating as it is dangerous.
[My Guardian colleague, Gary Younge, has a provocative column from Sunday headlined: “Barack Obama is pushing gun control at home, but he’s a killer abroad”]”
Forgot the link:
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/executioner_in_chief_how_a_nobel_peace_prize_winner_became_the_head_of
Executioner in Chief: How a Nobel Peace Prize Winner Became the Head of a Worldwide Assassination Program
By John W. Whitehead
February 08, 2013
“Much of our foreign policy now depends on the hope of benevolent dictators and philosopher kings. The law can’t help. The law is what the kings say it is.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing for The Atlantic
“If George Bush had done this, it would have been stopped.”—Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman and current MSNBC pundit
When Barack Obama ascended to the presidency in 2008, there was a sense, at least among those who voted for him, that the country might change for the better. Those who watched in awe as President Bush chipped away at our civil liberties over the course of his two terms as president thought that maybe this young, charismatic Senator from Illinois would reverse course and put an end to some of the Bush administration’s worst transgressions—the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, the torture, the black site prisons, and the never-ending wars that have drained our resources, to name just a few.
A few short years later, that fantasy has proven to be just that: a fantasy. Indeed, Barack Obama has not only carried on the Bush legacy, but has taken it to its logical conclusion. As president, Obama has gone beyond Guantanamo Bay, gone beyond spying on Americans’ emails and phone calls, and gone beyond bombing countries without Congressional authorization. He now claims, as revealed in a leaked Department of Justice memo, the right to murder any American citizen the world over, so long as he has a feeling that they might, at some point in the future, pose a threat to the United States.
Let that sink in. The President of the United States of America believes he has the absolute right to kill you based upon secret “evidence” that you might be a terrorist. Not only does he think he can kill you, but he believes he has the right to do so in secret, without formally charging you of any crime and providing you with an opportunity to defend yourself in a court of law. To top it all off, the memo asserts that these decisions about whom to kill are not subject to any judicial review whatsoever.
This is what one would call Mafia-style justice, when one powerful overlord—in this case, the president—gets to decide whether you live or die based solely on his own peculiar understanding of right and wrong. This is how far we have fallen in the twelve years since 9/11, through our negligence and our failure to hold our leaders in both political parties accountable to the principles enshrined in the Constitution.
According to the leaked Department of Justice memo, there are certain “conditions” under which it is acceptable for the president to kill a U.S. citizen without the basic trappings of American justice, i.e., a lawyer and a fair hearing before a neutral judge.
First, you have to be suspected of being a “senior operational leader” of al-Qaeda or an “associated force.” Of course, neither of these terms is defined. Making matters worse, the government doesn’t actually have to prove that you’re an “operational leader.” It simply has to suspect that you are. (Of course, if all it takes for the government to pull the trigger and kill a U.S. citizen is a hunch, then the rest of the conditions set out in the memo are moot.)
Second, capturing you has to be “infeasible.” Easy enough, since “infeasibility of capture” includes being unable to capture someone without putting American troops in harm’s way.
Third, you must pose “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” whether or not you can actually execute an attack on our soil. Before you breathe a sigh of relief that perhaps your neck is safe now, keep in mind that the imminence requirement “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” The Bush administration should get some credit here, since it was their creative parsing of the “imminent” threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his so-called weapons of mass destruction that inspired the Obama lawyers to play footloose with the laws on killing American citizens.
In short, by simply asserting that an American citizen is an enemy of the United States, the Obama administration has given itself the authority to murder that individual. This pales in comparison to George W. Bush’s assertion that he could detain an American citizen indefinitely simply by labeling him an enemy combatant.
Compounding this travesty, the Obama administration also insists that the power to target a U.S. citizen for murder applies to any “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government,” not just the president. Therefore, any bureaucrat or politician, if appointed to a high enough position, can target an American for execution by way of drone strikes.
It’s been done before. Without proving that they were “senior operational leaders” of any terrorist organization, the Obama administration used drone strikes to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, both American citizens.
So now we find ourselves at this strange, surreal juncture where clear-cut definitions of right and wrong and the rule of law have been upended by legal parsing, government corruption, corporate greed, partisan games, and politicians with questionable morals and little-to-no loyalty to the American people.
It’s a short skip and a jump from a scenario where the president authorizes drone strikes on American citizens abroad to one in which a high-level bureaucrat authorizes a drone strike on American citizens here in the United States. It’s only a matter of time. Obama has already opened the door to drones flying in American skies—an estimated 30,000 by 2015, and a $30 billion per year industry to boot.
Yet no matter how much legislation we pass to protect ourselves from these aerial threats being used against us domestically, either to monitor our activities or force us into compliance, as long as the president is allowed to unilaterally determine who is a threat and who deserves to die by way of a drone strike, we are all in danger.
This is surely the beginning of the end of the republic. Not only are we upending the rule of law, but killing people across the globe without accountability seriously undermines America’s long term relationships with other nations. The use of drones to kill American citizens demonstrates just how out of control the so-called “war on terror” has become. A war that by definition cannot be won has expanded to encompass the entire globe. This confirms the fears of those who have been watching as the American drone program has slowly expanded from targeting members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan to include any person the president cares to see eliminated, not to mention the countless civilians killed along the way.
Retired general Stanley McChrystal has said that drone strikes are “hated on a visceral level” and feed into a “perception of American arrogance.” By attacking small time jihadists, as well as innocent civilians, the American government further inflames populations where terrorist groups are embedded, exciting anti-American sentiment among those who may have previously been an asset to America’s relationship with Muslim countries. In fact, McChrystal and former CIA director Michael Hayden have both expressed concern that American drone strikes are “targeting low-level militants who do not pose a direct threat to the United States.”
For example, Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, a Muslim cleric in Yemen gave a long sermon in August 2012 denouncing Al-Qaeda. A few days later, three members of Al-Qaeda showed up to his neighborhood, saying they wanted to talk with Jaber. Jaber agreed, bringing along his cousin Waleed Abdullah, a police officer, for protection. In the middle of the conversation, a hail of American missiles rained down upon the men, killing them all.
Incidents such as these are the exact reason that America cannot seem to bring an end to its myriad military commitments abroad. By undermining our potential allies, we simply further endanger American lives. According to Naji al Zaydi, an opponent of Al-Qaeda and former governor of Marib province in Yemen, “some of these young guys getting killed have just been recruited and barely known what terrorism means.” In direct opposition to the stated goal of the “war on terror,” we are creating enemies abroad who will gladly look forward to the day when the United States falls in on itself, like the Roman Empire before it.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no exit from this situation. Too many high-level officials, both Democrats and Republicans, either don’t care, or actively champion the murder of American citizens and innocent civilians alike by the president. As journalist Amy Goodman put it, “the recent excesses of U.S. presidential power are not transient aberrations, but the creation of a frightening new normal, where drone strikes, warrantless surveillance, assassination and indefinite detention are conducted with arrogance and impunity, shielded by secrecy and beyond the reach of law.”
ARE,
Agree. There is a very good reason the FAA has imposed an absolute ceiling of 400 ft. AGL on radio control model airplanes.
Monday, Feb. 11, 2013
Drone Home
By Lev Grossman
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2135132,00.html
Excerpt:
…
The GAO report also mentioned “privacy concerns over the collection and use of UAS-acquired data.” A lot of people share those concerns. Drones are the most powerful surveillance tool ever devised, on- or offline. A Reaper drone equipped with the Air Force’s appropriately named Gorgon Stare sensor package, for example, can surveil an area 2½ miles across from 12 angles at once. Its field of view swallows entire cities. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has produced an imaging system called ARGUS that can pick out an object 6 in. long from 20,000 ft. in the air. In a story worthy of the Onion, USA Today reported in December that Air Force officials were so swamped with the 327,384 hours of drone footage taken last year, they consulted with ESPN about how to edit it down to the highlights, à la SportsCenter.
Imagine how Americans would feel if the Gorgon Stared at them. It’s not a hypothetical. In June 2011 a county sheriff in North Dakota was trying to track down three men, possibly carrying guns, in connection with some missing cows. He had a lot of ground to cover, so — as one does — he called in a Predator drone from a local Air Force base. It not only spotted the men but could see that they were in fact unarmed. It was the first time a Predator had been involved in the arrest of U.S. citizens.
Exactly how often Predators have been seconded to local law-enforcement agencies in this manner isn’t known; that information is the object of a pending Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But there’s at least one Reaper equipped with Gorgon Stare at large in the U.S. Legislators from both parties, in North Dakota and elsewhere, are scrambling to throw legal restraints around the domestic use of drones. In Virginia, the relevant bill is supported by both the ACLU and the Virginia Federation of Tea Party Patriots.
(In case you’re worried that drones lack allies in Congress, rest easy: there’s a Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus with 60 members. With global spending on drones expected to nearly double over the next decade, to $11.3 billion, industry groups like the AUVSI are rapidly ramping up their lobbying budgets.)
Until actual legislation is passed, it won’t be completely clear what information the government can and cannot gather using drones. There are certainly precedents: the Supreme Court has ruled that the police can, under the Fourth Amendment, fly an airplane over your fenced backyard and check out whether you’re growing pot back there. It’s not a giant leap to imagine them flying a drone instead. But where does it stop? The framers didn’t anticipate technology that could hover for days, keeping an eye on exposed backyards and porches, that could work in networked swarms, see through walls with thermal imaging, recognize faces and gaits and track license plates. “If we have a bad guy named Waldo,” Singer says, “and we have to find Waldo somewhere in that city, we will naturally gather information about all the people around Waldo, not out of malice but just because that’s the way it is. What happens to that information? Who owns it? Who stores it? Who shares it? Big questions.”
All the police officers I spoke with were, if anything, extravagantly conscientious in the use, storage and disposal of information their drones had gathered. But the potential for mission creep and outright abuse is great. In September a report by the Congressional Research Service, titled “Drones in Domestic Surveillance Operations,” came to the following non-conclusion: “the sheer sophistication of drone technology and the sensors they can carry may remove drones from [the] traditional Fourth Amendment framework.” Well, that settles that.
And that’s just the government. Drones don’t care who they work for. They’ll spy for anyone, and as they get cheaper and more powerful and easier to use, access to military-grade surveillance technology will get easier too. Voracious as they are for information, drones could take a serious chunk out of Americans’ already dwindling stock of personal privacy. It’s certainly not legal to fly a drone up 10 stories to peer through the curtains into somebody’s bedroom, but it’s just as certain that somebody’s going to do it, if they haven’t already. Last February an animal-rights group in South Carolina launched a drone to watch a group of hunters on a pigeon shoot on private property. The hunters promptly shot it down. It might be America’s first case of human-on-drone violence, but it won’t be the last.
…
Whatever happens on the civilian front, the ongoing dronification of the U.S. military is barreling ahead. The Predator has already been superseded by the larger, faster, more powerful Reaper, which is in turn looking nervously over its shoulder at the even larger, jet-powered Avenger, currently in the testing phase.
The U.S.’s skunkworks are disgorging drones in a bizarre profusion — like Darwin’s finches, they’re evolving furiously to fill more and more operational niches and creating new ones as they go. Already soldiers carry hand-launchable Raven surveillance drones and kamikaze Switchblade drones for targeting snipers. The K-MAX unmanned helicopter ferries cargo around Afghanistan for the Marines. The Navy’s SeaFox, a single-use underwater drone, is hunting for Iranian mines in the Persian Gulf. The Army is testing a Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, essentially a 300-ft.-long unmanned blimp designed to squat over a battlefield at high altitude for weeks at a time. (Its manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, promises “more than 21 days of unblinking stare.”) DARPA has fielded a tiny drone that mimics the flight of a hummingbird, and it’s mulling a network of deepwater drones that would dwell on the seafloor but — like Godzilla — rise to the surface in times of need.
Drones are learning to think for themselves. Those University of Pennsylvania drones are already semiautonomous: you can toss a hoop in the air and they’ll plot a trajectory and fly right through it. (Whether or not you count Google’s self-driving cars as people-carrying, highway-borne drones seems like a question of semantics.) They’re also gaining endurance. In June, Boeing tested a liquid-hydrogen-powered drone called the Phantom Eye that’s designed to cruise at 65,000 ft. for four days at a time. Boeing’s Solar Eagle, which has a 400-ft. wingspan, is scheduled for testing in 2014. Its flights will last for five years.
This technology will inevitably flow from the military sphere into the civilian, and it’s very hard to say what the consequences will be, except that they’ll be unexpected. Drones will carry pizzas across towns and drugs across borders. They’ll spot criminals on the run and naked celebrities in their homes. They’ll get cheaper to buy and easier to use. What will the country look like when anybody with $50 and an iPhone can run a surveillance drone? Last fall the law schools at Stanford and NYU issued a report, “Life Under Drones,” which was based on 130 interviews with Pakistanis. It makes for unsettling reading. “Drones are always on my mind,” said a man from Islamabad. “It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them. You know they are there.”
Right now the U.S. is the only nation that operates drones on a large scale, but that will change: flying drones is hard, but it’s not that hard. Singer estimates that there are 76 other countries either developing drones or shopping for them; both Hizballah and Hamas have flown drones already. In November, a Massachusetts man was sentenced to 17 years for plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol with remote-controlled planes. (The drone equivalent of the Newtown, Conn., atrocity is simply beyond contemplation.) The moral ambiguity of covert drone strikes will clarify itself very quickly if another country claims the right under international law to strike its enemies in the U.S. There may come a day when the U.S. bitterly regrets the precedents it has set.
Americans are great and heedless adopters of new technologies, and few technologies are as seductive, promise so much at so little political and financial and human cost, as drones. They give us tremendous new powers, and they seem to ask very little of us in return. Obama captured the singular quality of drone warfare precisely in a remark that appears in Mark Bowden’s recent book The Finish. “There’s a remoteness to it,” he said, “that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems.” That illusion is just what makes drones such a challenge, especially as we introduce them into our own country. Drones don’t just give us power, they tempt us to use it.
I think the FAA will have some nasty things to say about drones and their conflict with manned aircraft. There is already a problem with tethered aerostats that carry radar to watch the border and they are clearly marked on charts. Drones will be a major threat to pilots.
You’re welcome, Bob.
Someday I hope to have as luxurious a goatee as Dr. James too.
Looks like the politicians are playing catch-up to JT’s blog:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/world/obamas-turn-in-bushs-bind-with-defense-policies.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130210&_r=0
Mespo: “And people like Bob, Esq. live in a fairy land where the most fundamental law of them all, self-preservation, means holding the barrel straight at you while spouting irrelevant platitudes about your evil nature even as your enemy pulls the trigger.”
Aw, do you always throw tantrums in this world where a little thing called the law gets in the way of your paranoid plans?
Mespo: “Bravo Bob, the country will be dead but the rights and principles of its good citizens like you will somehow be miraculously intact.”
Oh yes, I forgot all that overwhelming evidence you’ve shown us that the fate of the country hangs in the balance; outside of your imagination.
Mespo: “Pragmatism be damned!
Thank you Gene for that William James moment regarding this comment above.
Mespo: “It’s all about some duty to some prophylactic philosophy of being “good” that matters. That’s certainly looking out for the country and paying no heed at all to the already proven fears of its leaders. We’ll all die but we’ll be moral to our last gasp!”
Oh, are you referencing Kant; because I didn’t.
Mespo: “Constitution as suicide pact –which categorical imperative is that one?”
It’s always a suicide pact when it gets in the way of what you want; isn’t it?
And per the categorical imperative in law? My my, what is this stare decisis anyway? The foundation of law itself?
Nah.
Carry on Mespo; you juristic clown.
“He Was The Agency”: Ex-CIA Analyst Questions Brennan Claim He Couldn’t Stop Waterboarding, Torture
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/8/he_was_the_agency_ex_cia
“CIA nominee John Brennan was repeatedly questioned about torture at his CIA confirmation hearing, including the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques. He refused to say waterboarding was a form of torture, but said he has come to oppose the technique. Under George W. Bush, Brennan served as deputy executive director of the CIA and director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. “Remember he was the cheerleader for some of these onerous policies — particularly renditions and extraordinary renditions. So for John Brennan, today, to say he read the Senate committee intelligence report on torture and he learned things he never knew before and that he was shocked with what he learned — this is a case of incredible willful ignorance,” says Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst. [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]
Melvin Goodman, Former CIA and State Department analyst. He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and director of the Center’s National Security Project. His latest book is “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism.””
Jeremy Scahill: Assassinations of U.S. Citizens Largely Ignored at Brennan CIA Hearing
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/8/jeremy_scahill_assassinations_of_us_citizens
“President Obama’s nominee to run the CIA, John Brennan, forcefully defended Obama’s counterterrorism policies, including the increase use of armed drones and the targeted killings of American citizens during his confirmation hearing Thursday. “None of the central questions that should have been asked of John Brennan were asked in an effective way,” says Jeremy Scahill, author of the forthcoming book “Dirty Wars.” “In the cases where people like Sen. Angus King or Sen. Ron Wyden would ask a real question, for instance, about whether or not the CIA has the right to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. The questions were very good — Brennan would then offer up a non-answer. Then there would be almost a no follow-up.” Scahill went on to say, “[Brennan has] served for more than four years as the assassination czar, and it basically looked like they’re discussing purchasing a used car on Capitol hill. And it was total kabuki oversight. And that’s a devastating commentary on where things stand. [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]”
“Jeremy Scahill, producer and writer of the documentary film, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield,” which premiered last month at the Sundance Film Festival. He is national security correspondent for The Nation, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” and the forthcoming book, “Dirty Wars.””