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Military Drone Attacks Are Not 'Hostile'
sanzibar writes "Not satisfied with the legal conclusion of the DOJ, the Obama administration found other in-house lawyers willing to declare a bomb dropped from a drone is not 'hostile'. The strange conclusion has big implications in determining the President's compliance with the law. If drone strikes are in fact hostile and the Libyan campaign continues past Sunday, he may very well be breaking the law."
"You know, you can call a shovel an ice-cream machine, but it's still a shovel, Mom and Dad"
This is even worse than claiming that waterboarding isn't torture. WTF? I can't believe that I donated money to this douche in 2008.
The use of explosives by anyone on this forum would be considered "hostile" and would land them in jail. They can label it whatever they want, but you drop a bomb somewhere, you better expect a "hostile" reply.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It is a coercive, destructive, military act, 100% consistent with what our Founding Fathers meant when they wrote "war". Therefore I don't give a crap whether somebody re-defines it as "hostile" or "friendly" or a "love tap". It's illegal as hell.
"But we can't just agree to ignore the law for presidents we like."
I voted for Obama because he said he would end the presidential lawlessness, end the wars, end the abuse of "state secrets" to block justice through the courts, close Guantanamo Bay and end the 4th and 5th Amendment violations that it represented, and protect whistleblowers. But since he was elected he has done the exact opposite, attempting to assassinate US citizens simply by declaring them enemies of the state with no process whatsoever, escalating the wars and even claiming the power to start more wars without consulting Congress, increased the abuse of state secrets to even prevent cases from being heard, refused to do anything about Guantanamo Bay and even opened up the greater black hole at Bagram, prosecuting whistleblowers to a far greater extent than any previous president ever did, and trying to prosecute Wikileaks under the Espionage Act. All of this is the exact opposite of what he said he would do when we elected him.
The only power citizens have to punish presidential lawlessness is to refuse to reelect them, and when possible, elect the candidate who says they will undo the lawless behavior. And when the country did that, the guy we elected broke every one of his election promises and proved to be much, much worse. And Congress, as well as both parties, have proven to be enthusiastic supporters of all of this. Senator Russ Feingold, the only one who really cared about the rule of law, lost reelection last year. When both parties support government lawlessness, in Congress and the White House, when we elect those who promise to stop it and they turn around and expand upon that lawlessness instead, what option do we have?
The precedent, I'm afraid, has already been set. Nobody who matters supports the rule of law any more; not Congress, and not the courts, nor the mass media, who are all too deferential to presidential power to want to do anything about it, not the parties who both want that power for themselves when they win the White House, and certainly not the executive who reaps the benefits. That sort of unanimity among the branches of government is what establishes precedent for a very long time, generations if not indefinitely.
This President is 100% - after all, he's won a Nobel Peace Prize, how can he be wrong about what is hostile and what is not?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"The "terrorists" (let's be specific, Al Qaeda) have killed way more than 3,000 innocents."
Sure, they've killed many thousands of innocent Middle-eastern Muslims too, and a few hundred other Americans before and since, but it was the 9/11 dead, and only those 3000-ish, that motivated the US to war. But they've killed thousands, and the US has killed hundreds of thousands. It's orders of magnitude more.
"your assertion that "we've killed something like 300,000" is an irresponsibly nonspecific charge."
See the estimates for yourself. In Iraq alone the numbers are astonishing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Terror#Casualties
It's impossible to be more specific because the US has refused to bother counting the war dead beyond its own soldiers, which has left us with independent estimates that partisans then assail for also being partisan. It also doesn't help the US' credibility or good will among their victims' families that they don't bother track the number of dead.
And yes, when it comes to aggressive wars, it is absolutely reasonable to blame the aggressor for all the war dead, even those killed by the enemy, because without the aggressive war none of those people would have died.
"Moreover, it is silly to compare numbers that way when many (most?) of the deaths it seems you are saying we are responsible for are also the responsibility of those terrorists."
Do you have an estimate? I can find none on Google. Every number I've ever heard has been in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands, not even tens of thousands.
But the idea that you could possibly attribute most of the war dead in the US' wars to al Qaeda is utterly ridiculous. al Qaeda numbers in the few hundreds, that's an estimate the US DOD freely admits. While the US has hundreds of thousands of soldiers and spent hundreds of billions of dollars on its wars. The wars are asymmetrical, al Qaeda are few and very ill-equipped. It's just incomprehensible to imagine how they can possibly be responsible for anything even approaching the numbers killed by the US.
The point I'm trying to make is that the US has responded to a terrorist act of death and destruction by indiscriminately raining down death and destruction a hundred or thousand-fold on innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, and now - or soon - Libyans. It's far, far more death and destruction than can be attributed to al Qaeda on 9/11, or since, or even "the enemy" if you want to include "militants" or "insurgents" - which are basically people who want us to stop killing them and leave their countries. If the US is justified in that, what are those countries, and their allies, justified in doing to the US?
If they bombed the US with drones would it be okay because it isn't "hostile"?
I expect you're one of those that argue dropping bombs are Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist acts over a military one.
Even if you excuse the first bombing, the second has none. You don't save the lives of soldiers by deliberately killing hundreds of thousands of civilians if you wish to keep the moral high ground, and especially not twice in a row without even giving them the opportunity to surrender after the first.