A star speaker Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference was Senator Rand Paul, whose picture fills out a Mt. Rushmore-like tableau atop the CPAC home page next to portraits of Marco Rubio, Sarah Palin, and Paul Ryan. The freshman Republican from Kentucky devoted most of his speech to his dream of rolling back everything the American people have done for themselves through their government since the McKinley Administration. But the first third was a gloss on the civil-liberties themes that, on March 8th, had handed the Rand brand a brand-new burnish. That was when the Son of Ron mounted a filibuster to beat the band—the talking kind, an old-fashioned bladder-busting blabfest—of President Obama’s nominee for director of the C.I.A., John Brennan. In that one thirteen-hour talkathon, the 2008 McCain campaign guru Steve Schmidt told the “Meet the Press” audience, “Rand Paul arrived as a national figure.”Senator Paul held up the Brennan nomination because he wanted to know if the Obama Administration claims the right, at its discretion, to use predator drones to kill American citizens on American soil—citizens like, oh, Jane Fonda, for example. “It’s one thing if you want to try her for treason,” Paul said, with what passes for sweet reasonableness in certain circles of his Parties, the Republican and the Tea, “but are you going to drop a drone hellfire missile on Jane Fonda? Are you going to drop a hellfire missile on those at Kent State?” (In 1970, when ill-ordered militiamen of the Ohio National Guard killed four college students, drones were not required.)
Several hours after Paul’s filibuster, the Administration, which has been obfuscating about drones for months, finally delivered a pithy response, in the form of a hand-delivered letter to Paul from Attorney General Eric Holder. The full text:
It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.
Paul was mollified enough (and tired enough) to join eighty of his colleagues in voting to end his own filibuster, and Brennan was confirmed. Along with thirty other Republicans, two Democrats, and one Independent, Paul still voted “no” on the confirmation itself. But it wasn’t personal. “It isn’t so much about John Brennan,” Paul said. Nor was it about the President. “I don’t question his motives.” What it was about, he said, was “having rules so that someday if you have the misfortune to elect someone you do not trust, someone who might kill people that they disagree with politically.”
Of course, the Jane Fonda question is the easy one. Realistically, the American government is not going to deliberately (in both senses) target and extrajudicially execute “an American not engaged in combat on American soil” anytime soon. Nor, as far as we know, has it ever done so. The only time the American government has adopted a formal policy of killing American citizens on American soil was during the Civil War, and the citizens it set out to kill were most definitely “engaged in combat.”
The real questions, the important questions, were ignored in Holder’s curt little note. Nor have they ever been satisfactorily answered, by Holder or by anyone else in the Administration, up to and including the President. What these questions have in common is that they are hard—extraordinarily hard, hard from every point of view: constitutional, legal, moral, practical, prudential. What, exactly, does it mean to be “engaged in combat”? Under what circumstances, if any, may “the government”—i.e., the military or the C.I.A., with the consent, tacit or express, of the President—order the killing without trial of a citizen not on American soil? What about the killing, also without trial, of a specific person who is specifically believed to be a dangerous terrorist but has the misfortune of not being a citizen of the United States? Or a person of whatever nationality whose habits and associations conform to a circumstantial “signature” suggesting that he is, or probably is, a dangerous terrorist? How certain must those who dispatch the drones be that their “target” is who they think he is? What safeguards, what checks, what procedures, short of a full legal process, but greater than the mere say-so of the drone dispatchers, are required or appropriate? Given the brutal methods of “modern” war, whether “conventional” (invading armies, aerial bombing and strafing, “force-protection” thoroughness, “shock-and-awe”) or “asymmetrical” (suicide bombings, terror attacks, “improvised explosive devices”), all of which tend to kill and maim civilians in greater numbers and at higher ratios, don’t drone attacks represent a somewhat less inhumane alternative—“the worst form of war, except for all the others,” as Will Saletan put it recently? Because drones carry no physical risk to the attacker, don’t they create a temptation to use them simply because they can be used? Whatever the legal, constitutional, and moral merits or demerits of drone warfare, is it wise in the Machiavellian sense, simply as a matter of statecraft? How should its success or failure be measured? Does it advance or retard the goal of making the nation and the world safer?
Outraged liberals and hypocrisy-sniffing conservatives alike have likened the Obama Administration’s use of drones to the Bush-Cheney Administration’s use of torture. Yet almost everyone agrees, or admits, that torture is unconstitutional, that it is absolutely forbidden under American and international law, and that it is immoral and dishonorable. The defenders of torture either deny that it is what it is (hey, it’s just “enhanced interrogation”) or argue that its alleged ability to elicit otherwise unobtainable intelligence justifies its moral and political costs.
Drones are different. Apart from austere pacifists who reject war or violence in any form, hardly anyone rejects drones as a matter of principle, the way much larger numbers of people reject torture. Nor are there many who maintain that drones are just another weapon whose use should be subject to no more checks or restraints than an infantryman’s rifle. The drone debate has for the most part been conducted in a remarkably earnest and nuanced manner—in the press, in Congress, online, on campuses and in churches, and (not least) in these pages and pixels.
Conspicuously absent from that debate, that conversation, has been the drone-dispatching U.S. government itself. There is at least one way in which torture and drones are alike: the shroud of official secrecy in which the government cloaked and cloaks them, or tried and tries to. Even the existence of the program is classified, as was the torture program. The basic facts about the drone strikes have had to be cobbled together by citizen organizations like the New America Foundation and Britain’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, whose heroic work must necessarily rely on sources of uncertain reliability. The Obama Administration has made no public accounting of the program, and it has gone to considerable lengths to deny Congress and the public access to the documents that explain its legal rationales and operating details.
In Wednesday’s Washington Post, John Podesta wrote that despite the Holder postcard, “the White House is still bobbing and weaving on whether to share with Congress the legal opinions and memorandums governing targeted killing, which include the legal justification for killing U.S. citizens without trial. The Obama Administration is wrong to withhold these documents from Congress and the American people.” And Podesta accused the President of “creating secret law to guide our institutions.”
John Podesta is not exactly one of the usual anti-Obama suspects. He was President Clinton’s White House chief of staff. He was co-chair of President Obama’s transition team. He founded and chairs the Center for American Progress, Washington’s leading liberal think tank, which has provided the Obama Administration with personnel, research, intellectual muscle, and a torrent of friendly policy advice.
In January, in the State of the Union Address, Obama made no mention of drones. But he did say this:
I recognize that in our democracy, no one should just take my word that we’re doing things the right way. So, in the months ahead, I will continue to engage with Congress to ensure not only that our targeting, detention, and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world.
“Even more transparent”? Hearing this, I couldn’t help flashing back to the summer of 1978, when my then boss, President Carter, who wanted to do the right thing but was worried about North Carolina in the upcoming midterm election, infelicitously pledged to make cigarette smoking “even safer than it is today.” That aside, this is one promise that President Obama can keep whether John Boehner or Mitch McConnell like it or not.
A common thread that runs through many of the American foreign-policy misadventures of the last couple of generations—the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran and of Allende in Chile, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Vietnam War, the Iran-Contra debacle, the catastrophic Iraq war that was launched ten years ago this week, the torture scandal—is the manipulation of secrecy, deceit, and unchecked executive power. The Obama Administration’s so-far-unaccountable drone war may never rival the damage of any of those. But isn’t it bad enough that it has somehow managed to cast Rand Paul—who would abrogate the American social contract, consolidate the country’s transformation into a merciless plutocracy, and destroy the global power of the United States not just for ill but, in both senses, for good—as the conscience of a nation and the hero of its enlightened youth?
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Hendrik Hertzberg
No comments:
Post a Comment