Justice Department's legal case for drone strikes on Americans

Cohete Rojo · Feb 9, 2013

Clinton era missile strikes kept the vague threat of Iraq conscious; surprised similar action was not taken against Enron?

rhadamanthus · Feb 11, 2013

Drones are now being used in the manhunt for Christopher Dorner.

thadeus · Feb 11, 2013

It's sad that every technological advance essentially just provides powerful people with another method of consolidating that power.

bongman · Feb 11, 2013

thadeus said: ↑

It's sad that every technological advance essentially just provides powerful people with another method of consolidating that power.
Click to expand...

Not sure if you noticed but throughout mankind's history, technology was always spearheaded by the military so "they can use it". It was true then as it is now.

Kojirou · Feb 11, 2013

As multiple people have observed, what's the difference between a helicopter looking for a suspect and a drone?

Cohete Rojo · Feb 11, 2013

bongman said: ↑

Not sure if you noticed but throughout mankind's history, technology was always spearheaded by the military so "they can use it". It was true then as it is now.
Click to expand...

That sounds like revisionist history. It is as if saying "if the military did it, nobody else could have done it", or somehow because it happened before makes it acceptable now.

I am sure someone can stretch arguments that make it sound like the military is responsible for all science and technological advances in human history, but I believe it is either completely false or a half-truth.

cml750 · Feb 11, 2013

Eric Holder is easily the worst AG we have ever had. The man is a complete and total embarrassment. Anything that comes from a "Justice Department" or is that "Injustice Depertment" led by such a man does not surprise me.

rhadamanthus · Feb 11, 2013

cml750 said: ↑

Eric Holder is easily the worst AG we have ever had. The man is a complete and total embarrassment. Anything that comes from a "Justice Department" or is that "Injustice Depertment" led by such a man does not surprise me.
Click to expand...

*snicker*

cml750 · Feb 11, 2013

rhadamanthus said: ↑

*snicker*
Click to expand...

I agree, Eric Holder is so pathetic he is comical

basso · Feb 21, 2013

liberals: criminally naive, intellectually empty.

--
A Bad Idea Gets Worse
By Charles P. Pierce
at 12:30am

Ed Kilgore is a good man. He's been very kind to the blog since its toddlerhood. Which makes it something of a surprise that he's trying so very hard to kill me. He calls attention to this horror in the New York Times and then steps back, as if to distance himself from the explosion and subsequent cranial shrapnel.

Rather than agreeing to some Democratic senators' demands for full access to the classified legal memos on the targeted killing program, Obama administration officials are negotiating with Republicans to provide more information on the lethal attack last year on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, according to three Congressional staff members.

Please tell me this is just mischievous disinformation from anonymous Republican congressional elves. Because, if it isn't, as a distillation of the administration's unique brand of neo-liberal suckitude, this one takes home the House Cup. (Sorry, Simpson and Bowles. You have to give it back now.) First, we have the ongoing charade of "transparency" as regards the president's assumed right to kill Americans anywhere in the world including, absent a clear statement from this administration, which has not been forthcoming, within the borders of the United States. Then we have the drone program itself, which is a constitutional abomination no matter how effective you presume it is. Then, we have another attempt to reach a kind of bipartisan consensus with the various vandals and predatory fauna in the other party. And then, last, as part of the attempt at bipartisan consensus, a deal is struck in which the president's hit list is kept in a vault while more fuel is fed into the Benghazi!, BENGHAZI!, BENGHAZI!!!!!!!111!!! infernal machine just as it was so sputtering to a halt that even John McCain was calling a cab to pick him up by the side of the road. I swear, if this deal goes through, Lindsey Graham is going to have a woody you could see from space.

This is what happens when you elect someone -- anyone -- to the presidency as that office is presently constituted. Of all the various Washington mystery cults, the one at that end of Pennsylvania Avenue is the most impenetrable. This is why the argument many liberals are making -- that the drone program is acceptable both morally and as a matter of practical politics because of the faith you have in the guy who happens to be presiding over it at the moment -- is criminally naive, intellectually empty, and as false as blue money to the future. The powers we have allowed to leach away from their constitutional points of origin into that office have created in the presidency a foul strain of outlawry that (worse) is now seen as the proper order of things. If that is the case, and I believe it is, then the very nature of the presidency of the United States at its core has become the vehicle for permanently unlawful behavior. Every four years, we elect a new criminal because that's become the precise job description.

Read more: A Bad Idea Gets Worse - Esquire http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Outlaw_In_The_Oval#ixzz2LZx9TxMm

gifford1967 · Feb 21, 2013

basso said: ↑

liberals: criminally naive, intellectually empty.

--
A Bad Idea Gets Worse
By Charles P. Pierce
at 12:30am

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Outlaw_In_The_Oval#ixzz2LZx9TxMm
Click to expand...

So glad you're posting Charles Pierce now. Reminds of this brilliant piece he wrote right after the election-

The Greatness of Barack Obama Is Our Great Project
By Charles P. Pierce

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — There is a story that they tell in Georgia politics about the first time that Barack Obama was inaugurated as this most improbable president of the United States. Shortly before the ceremony, they say, he met with John Lewis, the congressman and American hero who was nearly beaten to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama as he marched to demand the right simply to vote. The two huddled in the corner and the president-elect wrote something on Lewis's inaugural program. He walked away, and Lewis showed the program to the friends who had come with him.

"Because of you," it said. "Barack Obama."

Part of what drives people crazy about him — and if you wanted to see crazy, you should have seen the fugue state that overcame the Fox election all-stars last night, because I've seen jollier police lineups — is that he so clearly understands his own genuine historical stature, and that he wears it so easily, and that he uses it so deftly. It is not obvious. He does not use it brutally or obviously. It is just... there with him, a long and deep reservoir of violence and sorrow and tragedy and triumph out of which comes almost everything he does. He came into this office a figure of history, unlike anyone who's become president since George Washington. The simple event of him remains a great gravitational force in our politics. It changes the other parts of our politics in their customary orbits. It happens so easily and so in the manner of an immutable physical law that you hardly notice that it has happened until you realize that what you thought you knew about the country and its people had been shifted by degrees until it is in a completely different place.

Change, he talks about.

Change is the force around him when he walks into the room.

But the history that propels him is not the history that many of us learned in school. It is the underground history of the country, buried deep in the earth, over and over again, but stubbornly rising, over and over again, until it gathered all of its momentum behind him and made him the event that he was in 2008 and that he remains today. It was the history that was behind John Lewis as he walked over that bridge. It is the history that was behind him in his first campaign and then, rather late in the day, in his second campaign as well. And it is through him, maybe, that the underground history is fully integrated at last into the history of the country, that it is acknowledged at last as what it always has been — an important element to be used in the constant re-creation of our political commonwealth. He as much as said so late last night, pushing toward two in the morning.

"The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote," he said, calling, again, for the country to engage fully in "the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's the principle we were founded on." That underground history that is behind him, the history that he wears so easily and wields so subtly, ultimately is a history of an ongoing demand to be included in the creative project of self-government. That was all the civil-rights movement ever was. That was what all the bloodshed and horror and death and glory were all about. It was a demand to be included in the great project simply because, if some Americans were not included in the project, it never was so great in the first place.

In terms of pure politics, he ran a great campaign. He was strongest as his voice weakened. He plays to the final whistle. He is, as Jimmy Breslin once put it about someone else, a terribly fierce fifteen-round fighter. There was something undeniably elegaic about his last round of speeches, in Florida and in Wisconsin and in Iowa, where it all started four years ago. There was a sense of the great unspooling of time and history, a sense that the beginning of the end of his moment had come upon him. But, even then, amid all the emotion, he found a very hard place from which to throw the last few punches. You know where I stand. You know what I believe. You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say. It was a combination, right-left-right, and he threw it all the way to last bell. And, in the end, it was more than enough.

Nothing became Willard Romney's campaign like the ending of it. His concession speech was simple, almost perfunctory. Best wishes to the president and his family. A nod to some staffers. A blessing bestowed upon Paul Ryan even though the zombie-eyed granny-starver brought almost nothing to the ticket. "The election is over," he said, "but our principles endure." And then he was gone, as vague and evanescent a figure as he always was, a strange and out-of-focus politician who surrounded himself with a baffling opacity that, within six months, I predict we will barely remember his campaign at all. He does not wear history as well as does the man who defeated him because history has not surrounded and powered his every public moment. That is a deficit he never could overcome.

The creative project of self-government — hard and frustrating but necessary — is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene. This whole campaign has been a referendum on that project, as though the political commonwealth were a sewer bond or a school construction bill that was submitted to the voters for their approval. That was the entire campaign. That was the issue underlying all the others. That was the fight that Romney and his party quite deliberately picked, reckoning that we had tired of all that hard and frustrating but necessary work the project involved. That was the question that was settled so definitively last night.

The long creative project of America has been to engage all its citizens in that work. That is the history that he wears so well, and that he wields so subtly. That is the truth that he represents. That is the great silent thing that has been there through all the debates, and the ads, and all of that preposterous money. We are working on ourselves. We are incomplete. We are never finished. Elections come and go. The political commonwealth is a work in progress. We work with the tools that time and circumstance provide. As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politic...-2012-14524219
Click to expand...

basso · Feb 21, 2013

gifford1967 said: ↑

So glad you're posting Charles Pierce now. Reminds of this brilliant piece he wrote right after the election-
Click to expand...

ts(mall);dr

basso · Feb 21, 2013

4,700 killed by drones?

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/02/graham-drones
--
The government says you can’t know how many people U.S. drone strikes have killed, because that’s a state secret. But one of the most hawkish members of the U.S. Senate just said the strikes have killed 4,700 people. And his math raises questions.

That’s what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) approvingly told an Easley, South Carolina, Rotary Club on Tuesday afternoon. It’s the first public death toll provided by a U.S. government official for the signature method of killing in the U.S.’ sprawling, global counterterrorism campaign.

“We’ve killed 4,700,” Graham said, according to an Easley website. “Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida.” Graham did not evidently offer an estimate of how many innocent people the drones have killed.

Graham staffers did not return voicemails and e-mails seeking elaboration. (We’ll update if they do.) But that’s a very high figure — at least as it pertains to the CIA’s drone strikes, outside the declared battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is what the context of Graham’s remarks make it seem like he’s referring to. As Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations blogs, that’s on the highest end of the drone-death estimate compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from publicly available news reports. Zenko’s compilation of the averages of non-governmental organizations’ guesstimates for drone casualties is about 1,700 people lower.

The CIA declined to comment about whether Graham revealed classified information. Counting the death toll from drones is a notoriously imprecise, murky business.

Graham’s death count would raise questions about the much-vaunted precision of the strikes. Using the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count, the U.S. has launched between 416 and 439 drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia since the U.S. first successfully weaponized an MQ-1 Predator a decade ago. If Graham’s right, each strike would have to kill more than 10 people. It’s certainly possible — the 100-pound Hellfire missile carried by the drones is capable of it — but U.S. counterterrorism officials typically describe the drones as a tool geared for the targeting of a specific terrorist at a time, with minimal civilian casualties. (That isn’t necessarily the case: Sometimes the CIA kills people with drones without knowing who exactly they are.)

Yet Graham’s count is simultaneously low. Judging from the context of his remarks, he’s evidently not counting the U.S. military’s drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the real number of deaths from the strikes between the covert CIA drone program and the U.S. military’s still rarely acknowledged efforts is likely even higher.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a U.S. senator has offhandedly revealed specific and unacknowledged information about the drones. In 2009, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, blabbed that the Pakistani government was hosting CIA drones for strikes on Pakistanis.

But Graham’s disclosure underscores the extraordinary secrecy around the centerpiece of U.S. counterterrorism efforts — a military action in all but name, operated by an agency that need not explain to the public how it carries out the program. Even Feinstein, a big advocate of the CIA and its drones, acknowledged to Danger Room earlier this month that the CIA has a history of being deceitful with Congress about its other highly valued programs. And even after the CIA’s likely next director, John Brennan, acknowledged that the CIA performs such lethal strikes, the Justice Department still maintains that even the existence of its drone program is a state secret, so that it need not disclosure information about it in court. Whatever Graham’s intentions in stating a death toll — regardless of its accuracy — that secrecy is the most prominent, visible fact about the drones.

gifford1967 · Feb 21, 2013

basso said: ↑

ts(mall);dr
Click to expand...

Just for you.

The Greatness of Barack Obama Is Our Great Project
By Charles P. Pierce

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — There is a story that they tell in Georgia politics about the first time that Barack Obama was inaugurated as this most improbable president of the United States. Shortly before the ceremony, they say, he met with John Lewis, the congressman and American hero who was nearly beaten to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama as he marched to demand the right simply to vote. The two huddled in the corner and the president-elect wrote something on Lewis's inaugural program. He walked away, and Lewis showed the program to the friends who had come with him.

"Because of you," it said. "Barack Obama."

Part of what drives people crazy about him — and if you wanted to see crazy, you should have seen the fugue state that overcame the Fox election all-stars last night, because I've seen jollier police lineups — is that he so clearly understands his own genuine historical stature, and that he wears it so easily, and that he uses it so deftly. It is not obvious. He does not use it brutally or obviously. It is just... there with him, a long and deep reservoir of violence and sorrow and tragedy and triumph out of which comes almost everything he does. He came into this office a figure of history, unlike anyone who's become president since George Washington. The simple event of him remains a great gravitational force in our politics. It changes the other parts of our politics in their customary orbits. It happens so easily and so in the manner of an immutable physical law that you hardly notice that it has happened until you realize that what you thought you knew about the country and its people had been shifted by degrees until it is in a completely different place.

Change, he talks about.

Change is the force around him when he walks into the room.

But the history that propels him is not the history that many of us learned in school. It is the underground history of the country, buried deep in the earth, over and over again, but stubbornly rising, over and over again, until it gathered all of its momentum behind him and made him the event that he was in 2008 and that he remains today. It was the history that was behind John Lewis as he walked over that bridge. It is the history that was behind him in his first campaign and then, rather late in the day, in his second campaign as well. And it is through him, maybe, that the underground history is fully integrated at last into the history of the country, that it is acknowledged at last as what it always has been — an important element to be used in the constant re-creation of our political commonwealth. He as much as said so late last night, pushing toward two in the morning.

"The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote," he said, calling, again, for the country to engage fully in "the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's the principle we were founded on." That underground history that is behind him, the history that he wears so easily and wields so subtly, ultimately is a history of an ongoing demand to be included in the creative project of self-government. That was all the civil-rights movement ever was. That was what all the bloodshed and horror and death and glory were all about. It was a demand to be included in the great project simply because, if some Americans were not included in the project, it never was so great in the first place.

In terms of pure politics, he ran a great campaign. He was strongest as his voice weakened. He plays to the final whistle. He is, as Jimmy Breslin once put it about someone else, a terribly fierce fifteen-round fighter. There was something undeniably elegaic about his last round of speeches, in Florida and in Wisconsin and in Iowa, where it all started four years ago. There was a sense of the great unspooling of time and history, a sense that the beginning of the end of his moment had come upon him. But, even then, amid all the emotion, he found a very hard place from which to throw the last few punches. You know where I stand. You know what I believe. You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say. It was a combination, right-left-right, and he threw it all the way to last bell. And, in the end, it was more than enough.

Nothing became Willard Romney's campaign like the ending of it. His concession speech was simple, almost perfunctory. Best wishes to the president and his family. A nod to some staffers. A blessing bestowed upon Paul Ryan even though the zombie-eyed granny-starver brought almost nothing to the ticket. "The election is over," he said, "but our principles endure." And then he was gone, as vague and evanescent a figure as he always was, a strange and out-of-focus politician who surrounded himself with a baffling opacity that, within six months, I predict we will barely remember his campaign at all. He does not wear history as well as does the man who defeated him because history has not surrounded and powered his every public moment. That is a deficit he never could overcome.

The creative project of self-government — hard and frustrating but necessary — is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene. This whole campaign has been a referendum on that project, as though the political commonwealth were a sewer bond or a school construction bill that was submitted to the voters for their approval. That was the entire campaign. That was the issue underlying all the others. That was the fight that Romney and his party quite deliberately picked, reckoning that we had tired of all that hard and frustrating but necessary work the project involved. That was the question that was settled so definitively last night.

The long creative project of America has been to engage all its citizens in that work. That is the history that he wears so well, and that he wields so subtly. That is the truth that he represents. That is the great silent thing that has been there through all the debates, and the ads, and all of that preposterous money. We are working on ourselves. We are incomplete. We are never finished. Elections come and go. The political commonwealth is a work in progress. We work with the tools that time and circumstance provide. As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politic...-2012-14524219
Click to expand...

basso · Feb 21, 2013

gifford1967 said: ↑

Just for you.
Click to expand...

bbtb;dr

blinded by the bright

<iframe width="640" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JNi6EFJU8E8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Nextup · Feb 21, 2013

Its hilarious some of you think this is an Obama issue or some kind of liberal vs conservative issue. The truth is that this is a system issue. This is how the USA operates. Conservative vs liberal is nothing more then a smoke screen used to distract us from the real issues at hand. The issue is that the world is built for the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is here to serve the one percent. Wake up the numbers don't lie the gap in wealth has never been wider.

MoonDogg · Feb 22, 2013

Nextup said: ↑

Its hilarious some of you think this is an Obama issue or some kind of liberal vs conservative issue. The truth is that this is a system issue. This is how the USA operates. Conservative vs liberal is nothing more then a smoke screen used to distract us from the real issues at hand. The issue is that the world is built for the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is here to serve the one percent. Wake up the numbers don't lie the gap in wealth has never been wider.
Click to expand...

Nextup · Feb 22, 2013

MoonDogg said: ↑

Click to expand...

Your hilarious buddy.

rhadamanthus · Mar 1, 2013

Texas wants to outlaw drones...but only those drones owned by citizens and used to perhaps spot naughty things being done by our corporate overlords.

This country is so bought and paid for it's r****ded.

magnetik · Mar 1, 2013

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