02.15.13
The Day of the Drones — no debate
As mentioned yesterday, the state of the debate on drone use is zero. There is no debate, none is allowed. While you don’t have to go three yards in the grass roots web media to hear one, all the very important people and the US government cannot be influenced by it.
Excerpts from a Daily Beat piece tell you all you need to know:
Yet despite the testy exchanges and the theatrical protests [by Code Pink ladies who were ejected], it’s worth noting that not a single senator said he or she opposed targeted killings. It was perhaps a recognition that drones are here to stay—a permanent part of America’s hi-tech 21st-century arsenal. Indeed, instead of a dramatic moral showdown, the hearing showcased evidence that Congress and the Obama administration could be moving toward pragmatic compromises …
Consider the lethal targeting of Anwar al Awlaki, the American citizen and al Qaeda member who was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Awlaki was actually placed on the kill list before the Justice Department had finished its opinion, though Obama’s lawyers had already weighed in orally. As for due process, it was far more informal than anything Feinstein envisions. One example: before State Department legal adviser Harold Koh was willing to give his blessing to the deliberate killing of an American, even one who had joined an enemy force, he wanted to scrutinize the intelligence himself. So in March 2010, he holed up in a secure room in the State Department and pored over hundreds of pages of classified reports detailing Awlaki’s alleged involvement in terror plots. Koh had set his own standard to justify the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen: he felt that Awlaki would have to be shown to be “evil,??? with iron-clad intelligence to prove it. After absorbing the chilling intel, which included multiple bombing plots and elaborate plans to attack Americans with ricin and cyanide, Koh concluded that Awlaki was not just evil; he was “satanic.???
In one paragraph, the meretricious rationalization cited yesterday, the line of allegation always used to steamroll thoughtful discussion:
Technology has advanced so far, the little tribes of really poor people, even single individuals, can develop weapons of mass destruction.
In this case, the old boogieman, Anwar al-Alaki — now dead, elevated to “satanic power,” out in the desert wastes of Yemen, virtually dead broke and without any infrastructure, allegedly capable of making a ricin WMD.
Castor seeds, which are where one gets ricin, cannot make a weapon of mass destruction. Indeed, no one has ever made a WMD from ricin, or even made a convincing stab at one.
Yet these are the types of horrendous distortions, now used as received wisdom, for the virtual justification of pre-emptive attacks in the desperate and destitute places of the world.
There is no way to see an end to it.