Because due process, naturally, is intended only for captured enemy combatants — Islamist terrorists, if I may be so gauche as to recall an outlawed descriptor for those who have as their stated mission to bring down the Great Satan, and all its hellish minions — not for colonialist pigs and fat, capitalist oppressors who live in a country that our new Secretary of Defense agrees is the world’s bully, and that our new Secretary of State ran down before a Senate committee many years ago as a bunch of torturers and baby murderers, the philosophical and military heirs to Genghis Khan.
Welcome to Ameritopia, the fascist wetdream of the progressive orthodoxy that has now insinuated itself fully into the very heights of power.
Attorney General Eric Holder can imagine a scenario in which it would be constitutional to carry out a drone strike against an American on American soil, he wrote in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
“It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States,” Holder replied in a letter yesterday to Paul’s question about whether Obama “has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial.”
Paul condemned the idea. “The U.S. Attorney General’s refusal to rule out the possibility of drone strikes on American citizens and on American soil is more than frightening – it is an affront the Constitutional due process rights of all Americans,” he said in a statement.
Holder noted that Paul’s question was “entirely hypothetical [and] unlikely to occur,” but cited the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as the type of incidents that might provoke such a response.
[…]
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, an attorney and Judiciary Committee member, told The Washington Examiner last month that the drone policy so far outlined by the administration is too vague.
“That has the potential to swallow the rule,” Lee said after the drone program white paper was leaked. “If you’re going to regard somebody as presenting an imminent threat of an attack on the U.S. simply because you have concluded that they are an ‘operational leader’ or they are involved in planning an attack in one way or another, you find yourself giving way to much discretion to the government.”
Lee said that the White House should release the formal legal analysis underpinning the drone program. “We know that in some instances where the government has released its legal analysis, it gets it wrong,” he said.
Look, I can see extraordinary circumstances arising in which an imminent attack, discovered at the very last instant, could only be thwarted by one means — that of a drone strike — as being something we shouldn’t take off the table as a matter of Constitutional debate: after all, the Constitution, as has been noted time and again, is not a suicide pact.
However, I’d want any such potential hypothetical spelled out specifically and any policy constrained to that very singular use — with absolutely nothing left vague or open to reinterpretation or expansion. That is, it must come attached with all its legislative history and an agreement that the courts have no latitude beyond that legislative history to do anything other than, if they see fit, strike down the law as unconstitutional.
What’s troubling is that it took the badgering of certain TEA Party conservatives in the Senate, along with pressure from libertarian groups, to finally force this concession out of an Administration that was prepared to act in unusual circumstances in the way it saw fit, without any open discussion at all on the matter.
This is beyond disturbing. It is a visible symptom of the authoritarian disease that has overtaken the federal government — particularly, the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies — under this Administration. From Fast and Furious (and its offshoots) to the potential that we were using ambassadors to run guns to rebels to the mission creep of the EPA (who is maneuvering itself into de facto control of industrial policy) to assaults on the first, second, fourth, ninth, tenth, and fourteenth amendments, to the attacks on our energy sector and border security through law, we have watched as piece by piece the progressives have worked to remove Constitutional safeguards, weaken individual autonomy, and attack the private sector in order to destroy the middle class and expand the influence of centralized government.
And we watch all this knowing that the feckless GOP leadership either doesn’t have the will to stop any of this, or else they’re secretly okay with such an expansion, being themselves political animals who, even as a (Potemkin) “opposition party,” will still enjoy the spoils and the increased power — and will likely themselves some day, as a matter of statistical certainty and electoral inevitability, regain control for a brief time over the whole lucrative apparatus.
But then, to even speculate on such things marks one as a “conspiracy theorist” — akin to the “black helicopter” crowd — who Karl Rove and the nuanced pragmatists are seeking to relegate to the fringes so that they can reinvent themselves as “conservatives”, not by adopting and defending conservative principles, but rather by usurping the label and moving the entirety of national politics leftward as a result.
Which, go team!
Sorry. No more. The next time we have the deadrody’s of the world showing up here to excoriate us for not showing a unified front, I will invite such a creature to blow me.
The time has come. And it must be done.
(h/t Blake)
Paul is an obsolete constitutionalist, an antique crank-in-waiting.
…and Holder is a seasoned pragmatist whose deep experience with sovereignty concerns on both sides of at least one border provides him the nuance to seek progressive solutions.
Rand Paul. Doing the job the GOP will not.
National Soros Radio used to shit itself when Bush had policies not even close to this
my god the caterwauling we unnerving
*was* unnerving sorry
O/T but related to potential gov’t overreach:
Montana lawmaker Krayton Kerns warns that President Obama’s recent executive orders on gun control could lead to a chilling future scenario where Americans are forced to hand in their firearms in order to receive critical hospital treatment under Obamacare.
http://tinyurl.com/cd5qr8c
Greetings:
And Eric Holder is an honorable man.
I’m just a bit worried if Americans are included in Mr. Holder’s concept of “My people”.
Statewide anti-drone legislation in progress.
FWIW.
http://tracking.tenthamendmentcenter.com/drones/
*shrug* /gloomtingedwithfear
Only think of the furor that would have been had should Flight 93 not been brought down by passengers in revolt at the highjack, but by air to air missiles over a suburb as it approached Washington D.C., albeit not air to air missiles fired from a UAV but from an F-16, say.
But waterboarding a captive alien enemy in order to learn of such an attack prior to being forced to undertake such an extraordinary measure is taken to be the pinnacle of immorality? Seems like there’s a screw loose in ObaZma’s morality, doesn’t it?
The little god-king’s morality is held together with Silly String and unicorn farts. The only screws in it are meant for me and you.
Heh.
On reflection, it’s surely a fault that I so readily (unreflectively!) reach for the commonplace machinery metaphor to describe the deepest inner work of the soul, but then faulty is what I do. Machinery was, in a sense, the aim of the modern moral project though, so maybe the authors got it right anyhow and I just don’t fully understand their triumph, and surely not if ObaZma is the necessary result of that triumph.
The Holder letter was released online as a PDF image file. I’ve printed it out and scanned it to a text file to post below.
“Look, we had good intelligence that Jeff Goldstein was on the verge of bombing the state capitol. That smoking crater where his home used to be should serve as an example to all other insurrectionists that We Mean Business.”
I wasn’t as upset by the “kinda sorta maybe” as Beck and the Blazers were, simply because the letter, by itself, didn’t say anything that Bush or Cheney or Reagan might have said.
I kept thinking how of COURSE we can’t “authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.
“But that doesn’t rule out using Homeland Security or the National Guard or the EPA or the Department of Education any damn way we please.“
might have said.
Might not have said.
Bush or Cheney or Reagan might not have said.
What can we make of the nut of the distinction between Reagan, W. Bush, and Cheney on the one hand, vs. ObaZma on the other?
I’d venture the difference between one who intends to preserve the Constitution and therefore uses its means to that end vs. one who intends to replace the Constitution and therefore uses its means to that end. But good luck getting the “replacer” to admit as much.
Sen. Paul is conducting a standing speaking filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan on the floor of the Senate at this moment.
One of the most troubling things about Holder’s (undefined) hypothetical is that it *presumes* armed drones are going to be overhead, cocked and locked.
They aren’t fast like fighter jets at your nearby AFB/ANG base, said fighters being designed to respond to inbound threats in a hurry. Drones are meant to quietly loiter, spy, and destroy.
Ponder that for a while.
Now that the cops have been militarized, how long is it before “Uncle Sugar” and the military offer drones capable of carrying missiles to LE? Since a lot of police departments get their military hardware through the DOD, I think it’s only a matter of time before the military decides it has an extra drone of 2,000.
“drone of 2,000” should read “drone or 2,000”
Uggh.
Interesting article at the HuffPo by Radley Balko: Link
Kind of answer to Dicentra about GW Bush:
Bush actually started shrinking the militarization of LE, while Obama dramatically increased funding and Biden championed a militarized police force.
Then there is this:
What gets me is that Holder didn’t even bother to make the European argument. I.e., “Of course we would never do such a thing! Unthinkable! Sacre bleu!”
Of course they’d ignore any strictures in exactly the same way they ignore every other limit they run up against. But they should at least have the common decency to lie about it! Holder’s just giving us all a big cockslap: “Yup. We’ll murder you in your sleep, if we feel we have to. Sleep tight, Princess.”
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