There has been some more talk recently in regard in the
legality of the use of armed-drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan—as if deploying
bombers, helicopter gunships, fighter jets and artillery-propelled cluster bombs
are more “palatable” to tender sensitivities. Drones are just a little too
“sneaky.” Those on the left engage in peace-not-war platitudes, but coming from
the right, I find the hypocrisy of their complaints considerably more difficult
to swallow. Take, for instance, that of Fox
News “analyst” and former judge Andrew Napolitano, who wrote an op-ed in a
recent edition of right-wing Washington Times entitled “Obama demands
unquestioning acceptance of his ability to kill.” You don’t actually have to
read any further, because Napolitano has just shot his credibility on whatever
the topic is, but we’ll humor him for the moment.
It seems that 10 years’ worth of war and thousands of U.S.
service member fatalities and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq
have not aroused questions of legality and culpability from certain political
demographics. But the use of drones
instead of soldiers in at least one respect has given some on the right a
rationalization to pass kind of “moral” judgment on Barack Obama; they don’t
care about the millions of people in this country who are paid poverty wages by
companies that make billions in profits, but Napolitano lets us know that at least
one one person cares about the “constitutional rights” of an al-Qaeda leader—if
only because he is a useful tool to attack the president with.
Napolitano appears to believe that Obama is sitting there in
the Oval Office, calling generals and telling them to launch drones and kill
people with the same ease that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
sent real live people to do, perhaps get killed themselves in the process. We are not allowed to demonize
the soldiers sent to do that; they were just "following orders." Of course, it
isn’t Obama telling commanders in the field where and when to use drones, any
more than he tells anyone when and where to shoot their guns. They have their
objectives, and use the best available means. You’re being fired on by the
enemy? Oh, wait, we have to call the president and find out it if it’s OK to
fire back. Commanders in the field, with
the assistance of intelligence services, identify enemy targets and engage
them. That’s what they do. Go ask them. If you didn’t want them to do it, they
shouldn’t have been sent there in the first place. As I have enunciated before,
we should never have started a war in Iraq, and we should have “cleaned-up”
Afghanistan with all available force and speed early, instead of giving the
Taliban and al-Qaeda time to regroup.
“Legal experts” like Napolitano for years have had no
problem at all finding “legal” justification for torture and lying that led to
thousands of dead Americans, so long as it was someone from his political
perspective who was finding it. Now, Napolitano laughably talks about the Constitution,
conveniently forgetting the times it was repeatedly violated when Republicans
are in office (i.e. Nixon, Reagan, Bush, etc.). He now demands to know what “legal
authority” Obama has to deploy drones, and makes incendiary comments like “President
Obama (is) killing Americans and refusing to divulge the legal basis for
claiming the right to do so” and asking who gave him “the power to decide when
to suspend constitutional protections guaranteed to all persons and kill them
without any due process whatsoever. This is the power claimed by kings and
tyrants. It is the power most repugnant to American values. It is the power we
have arguably fought countless wars to prevent from arriving here. Now, under
Mr. Obama, it is here.”
Of course you could ask this guy where he was when much
worse was happening under the tyrannical reign of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, who—as the
new book The Untold History of the United States makes abundantly clear—were so
single-mindedly intent on war with Iraq that they ignored overtures from Saddam
Hussein that would have met their “demands,” repeatedly pressured the CIA to
make false claims about WMDs and al-Qaeda links, and having failed to do so, simply
made-up their own “evidence.” The result was the deaths of over 4,000
Americans and the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians—which was
on American hands, not Hussein’s. If this was Obama’s doing, no doubt
Napolitano would be calling him a mass murderer. But for the present, he will
just call Obama someone who “murdered” Americans—al-Qaeda members Anwar al-Awlaki,
his son and his “American friend,” killed in drone attacks in Yemen.
Napolitano claims that “we” have reached the “boiling point”—not
for the detaining and torturing without charge for years U.S. citizen Jose
Padilla by the Bush administration—but with
Obama’s “flouting” of the law and the Constitution in regard to a man who resided
for years in Yemen’s al-Qaeda-controlled backcountry, preaching jihad and the killing of Americans
and other foreigners. The “we” that Napolitano is talking about are apparently
those on the fringes of the political left but mostly on right. It must be remembered
that al-Awlaki was considered to have terrorist predilections long before Obama
became president. Long considered a top al-Qaeda recruiter and anti-American
jihad propagandist, he was implicated in the 9-11 terrorist attacks, with Fort
Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, and with the “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab; he went as far as to claim
credit for the latter two attackers as their “teacher.”
Britain had al-Awlaki on its terrorist watch list, and a
Yemen court sought to try him in absentia after the killing of a Frenchman,
declaring that “al-Awlaki today has become the catalyst for shedding the blood
of foreigners and security forces. He was chosen by al-Qaeda to be the lead in
many of their criminal operations in Yemen. al-Awlaki is a figure prone to evil
devoid of any conscience, religion, or law.” In 2010, Republican Rep. Charlie
Dent called on the U.S. State Department to issue a “certificate of loss of
nationality” to al-Awlaki for “effectively renouncing his citizenship by
engaging in treasonous acts.”
Napolitano seems unaware of any of these factors. He
hypocritically opines “The president cannot lawfully order the killing of
anyone, except according to the Constitution and federal law. Under the
Constitution, he can only order killing using the military when the United
States has been attacked, or when an attack is so imminent that delay would
cost innocent lives.” Like, people who have proven records of engaging in
terrorist activities and tell you so—but don’t give you the exact time or place—should
be allowed to carry out their murderous deeds in the name of the Constitution? The
U.S. was not under attack or threatened with “imminent attack” by Iraq, and
there never any evidence that Saddam Hussein was planning on anything of the
sort or supporting those who did; the evidence actually showed that he was more
concerned with internal security and with Iran. The rationalizations in the
2002 congressional resolution authorizing military action was mostly fiction. 4,000
American servicemen and women, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed
due this “oversight” of the Constitution and the laws of war. Yet Bush and
company are not murderers a thousands of times over than Obama? Or is it the
bigger the crime, the more we have to deny its existence?
Napolitano goes on “Unless Mr. Obama knows that an attack
from Yemen on our shores is imminent, he’d be hard-pressed to argue that a guy
in a car in the desert 10,000 miles from here — no matter his intentions —
poses a threat so imminent to the United States that he needs to be killed on
the spot in order to save the lives of Americans who would surely die during
the time it would take to declare war on the country that harbors him, or
during the time it would take to arrest him.” Why does he limit such attacks on U.S. shores?
The USS Cole bombing that killed 17 Americans occurred in a non-combat zone in
Sudan, and I don’t believe the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are
located in this country.
Again and again Napolitano applies a moral standard that he
didn’t seem to think was important to adhere to during the previous
administration; he doesn’t seem to realize that applying a double standard for
partisan political reasons does nothing to enhance the credibility of his
message. Was not the purpose of the so-called “war on terror” to “anticipate”
attacks and stop them before they occurred? The first two directives of Bush’s
“war on terror” were “Defeat terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi and destroy their organizations” and “Identify, locate and destroy
terrorists along with their organizations.” I think most people understand what
was meant here. During Bush’s final year in office, 122 CIA drones were
launched into Pakistan, killing eight al-Qaeda leaders; 10 were killed in 72
drone strikes in 2011, according to the Pakistan-based The International News.
With al-Qaeda and its Taliban supporters continuing to make
threats and carry-out suicide attacks, al-Awlaki was long considered to warrant
being on this list; the only fig leaf Napolitano has left is if it mattered if
he was an American citizen who should not be deprived of his “due process”
rights (of course, police in this country don’t always take into consideration
“due process” when they shoot unarmed citizens, but that is another story). The
truth was that he had so long been radicalized in Islamic jihad ideology that
he did not consider himself to be “American”—so much so that he encouraged the
like-minded to carry out killing Americans and other “infidels.” Does it matter if like many
leaders of his ilk he was too cowardly to personally punch his own ticket to
“paradise” in the same grisly manner? His culpability was just the same.
It is useful to remember that with the extreme right and its
spokespersons, Obama is in a no-win situation. How often have we heard him
referred to in frightened or hysterical tones as a “Muslim” and.or a
“terrorist”? How often have we heard wrinkled buffoons like John McCain accuse
Obama of endangering American security? We would hear even more of this and
worse if he didn’t order the military to “take out” threats to American security
like al-Awlaki. Whether or not this is even a moral issue is beside the point; no
one involved in this “war” can be accused of behaving morally.
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