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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"
Pullleeez! If one was used on the US we would absolutely consider it a hostile act.
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
... a federal court just ruled that a gun fired with your gloves on is not "lethal", finally exonerating O.J. Simpson from the murder he was found guilty of in a civil trial.
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.
Enough (of the right) lawyers and you get to modify reality.
That's pretty neat.
"No, dropping a cinder block thru your windshield was NOT a hostile act,
just clumsy, oopsie!"
In all seriousness though, he's exploiting a loophole
it seems, because the law was written in 1973, before
drones existed.
"It should come as no surprise that there would be some disagreements, even within an administration, regarding the application of a statute that is nearly 40 years old to a unique and evolving conflict. Those disagreements are ordinary and healthy," he added.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
At some point we're going to get another irrationally warmongering hawk president. Can we get an iron-clad precedent set that in matters that matter the president isn't above the law, and can't just run around making stuff up?
It's too bad that would have to happen with this president and not the previous one, who happened to be Houdini of inventing BS from thin air. Free-speech zones. WMD. Blocking Scientific Papers. Etc. But we can't just agree to ignore the law for presidents we like.
The ______ Agenda
Other than the size of the delivered bang?
You're wrong, it is a law.
War Powers Resolution
It's called the War Powers Resolution for a reason... it was a resolution, of Congress... which does not have the signature of a President... it was not vetoed... or even pocket vetoed... because it was never presented to a President for his signature... preventing any possibility of a veto override.
As much as I loathe this President... I do have to give him credit for standing up against the WPA... it’s a shame he’s not competent enough to recognize the reality of the WPA and state it... rather than playing these games.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.
It passed the House on July 18, 1973.
It passed the Senate on July 20, 1973.
President Nixon vetoed it on October 24, 1973.
His veto was overridden by the Senate on November 7, 1973. Thus immediately the bill became law, without the need for Nixon's signature.
And this is a high resolution scan of the final bill.
not only does he have some awesome lawyers, he is an awesome lawyer.
jim - "dude i just blew up starbucks"
laywer obama -"its OK! not hostile!"
jim - "but like, eleven people died"
lawyer obama -"chill. did i ever tell you about that time i was bombing libya? well, starbucks is a little bit like libya."
I am at a loss for words. That has to be one of the stupidest thoughts I have ever read.
I can't wait until the first poor defendant goes before a judge as says "If crack was in fact a drug" then of course id be a drug dealer.
It makes me sad to begin thinking that the set of birthers who think Obama never went to law school may be on to something.
hos-tile /hästl/ /hästl/
adjective
Unfriendly; antagonistic
- a hostile audience
- he wrote a ferociously hostile attack
Of or belonging to a military enemy
- hostile aircraft
Opposed
- people are very hostile to the idea
Is this even debatable?
Would the republicans actually vote against war in Libya? Why would they do that?
He knows this Congress is particularly spineless about taking initiative to deny him - so he'll just continue doing whatever he wants to further his own agenda.
How's that Hope & Change working out for y'all?
i heard that Bush's people were harassing journalists, specifically Greg Jackson, a research assistant for Ron Suskind, who was writing Way of the World, a bit if an expose about the pre-Iraq war intelligence.
they, according to suskind, detained Jackson, took his notes, and confiscated some of his stuff.
i voted for Obama so that kind of thing would stop.
and so the war would stop. and so that the assault on civil liberties would stop.
im a 100% fucking idiot. i am voting for uhm... oh wait, we don't have write-in ballots here, and we barely have 3rd parties allowed on the ballot.
While this particular episode seems bizarre in isolation, it's just part of a larger battle (no pun intended) that has been happening for a long time now - the battle between the legislative branch and the Executive branch regarding ultimate control over the military. It is up to Congress to declare war - however presidents, as the head of the US armed forces, have the right to deploy troops into hostile situations without declaring war. Congress has voted that these deployments can only last a certain number of days before they must be declared an act of war (or, more accurately, before Congress must approve the continuation of the deployment). No president has been willing to recognize that congressional act as valid.
It doesn't matter whether Congress and the Presidency are of opposite parties or of the same party - in this situation the two branches have consistently disagreed.
#DeleteChrome
Maybe you were unaware that "the previous guy" disagreed on this point, and took a very careful view of complying with the "War Powers Resolution". In other words, unlike Obama, Dubya got congressional approval for his war(s). Whatever vague point you were trying to make, your post is factually misleading.
Well, yes. Remember that the US government is very pro freedom - the freedom of the US government to do whatever it wants and the freedom of everyone else to shut up and like it.
America, Fuck Yeah!
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
This is not surprising in the least. The United States government once went into a fisheries dispute with Canada claiming the scallops were a migratory species of marine life because they could propel themselves using water squirts.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
He's not going to Congress because the majority of Congress won't support it. It seems also that the majority of Congress won't come out and oppose it, as they know that it basically condemns the Libyan rebels to stalemate at best and death at worst; they're generally more upset that Obama is skipping past them. Obama's position is little different from every president since Nixon vetoed the measure, though they have provided reports "consistent with" as opposed to "as required by" the War Powers Resolution. Obama is trying to work with a technicality of language and the separation of powers, whereas previous presidents have tried to be a little more friendly.
I agree with the action in Libya. We can't help everywhere, but we can help here. I'm not sure how I feel about deliberately targeting Qaddafi as the head of another sovereign nation, but he has few friends anymore aside from perhaps Hugo Chavez (numerous countries have already recognized the National Transition Council as the legitimate government and expelled diplomats who continue to back Qaddafi), and not many people will shed a tear over his death, whenever and however it comes. If he's still in power when NATO ceases operations, odds are that a huge swath of the Libyan people will bear the brunt of his anger. Without ground forces, which no one wants to send in, it's only going to be a lucky bomb or someone in his inner circle that takes him out. Otherwise, the rebels remain a poorly-trained force with little discipline whose front-line members think that simply grabbing a gun and shooting in the direction of highly-disciplined, well-trained, pro-Qaddafi forces is sufficient.
It may go a bit better. The rebels have made a few gains recently in western Libya, with pro-Qaddafi forces pulling back rapidly enough that they've left behind clothing and ammo. The major problem now is money and lack of arms flow, something that Tripoli has less of an issue handling.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
This demonstrates how Obama's presidential behavior is in reality not significantly better than the behavior of Bush. He talked a very different game, but in practice he winds up making the same sort of unethical choices as Bush. Political parties are irrelevant when they both breed and foster this same bad behavior.
To fuck over Obama, same reason they do everything. They demanded that he intervene in Libya specifically so that they could use it against him. If he had refused to intervene, they would have used that against him too. Their one and only goal is to destroy him. They've come out and said so on multiple occasions. People just tend to assume it's a joke, or something.
That's what liberals consider the Constitution. If they are willing to bend the Constitution on matters such as interstate commerce or or various amendments, you knew it was only a matter of time when they redefined what a war was (ie its only a war when we say its a war).
Pres. Bush never lied to Congress, at least about either Afghanistan or Iraq. I'm not saying whether or not I think either war was justified and a good idea, but at some point we need to stop repeating the mantra about Pres. Bush lying to get support to start the Iraq War - it simply is not true. He said nothing more than what every major intelligence agency around the world had been saying for over a decade - that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and was actively developing more. We didn't find any WMDs in Iraq but we did find evidence of active development of them. Anyway, this is getting way too off topic.
Obama isn't trying to 'stand against' the WPA, he's trying to say it doesn't apply to him. He supported it in the past, and if he said it didn't apply, he would look like a hypocrite.
The constitution says that only congress may declare war, but from the beginning, the US has engaged in conflicts without declaring war. In fact, congress has only declared war five times. The original words in the constitution draft were that only congress could "make war," but it was changed to say only congress could "declare war," in recognition of the fact that sometimes the president should be allowed to fight without declaring war.
No one knows where the line between what the president can do and what congress must authorize exists, though. The WPA is nothing more than congress's opinion, because they don't have the right to restrict the president further than the constitution.
Now, if congress really cared, they could bring the matter up to the Supreme Court, and get an injunction prohibiting the president from further action in Libya. But they haven't, which is how you know their words are nothing more than an attempt to win cheap political points.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
some of his (former) supporters are intellectually honest/consistent enough to not support the libyan quagmire.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Harold Koh is one of the big lawyers supporting the air strikes for the Administration. He condemns Republicans for going to war without authorization when in academia, but was brought into the Administration with President Obama, and since has changed his tune a bit. It should be interesting to see (1) if a Republican president keeps him on whenever one next gets elected and (2) whether he will return to academia and try to walk back his current position.
There are some interesting theories as to whether the air strikes are legal or not. The question isn't whether they are hostile, it's whether they are "hostile" as that word is used in a particular context--probably the war powers resolution, IIRC. But there are some interesting end-runs you could potentially do around that, such as through the UN--maybe Congress approved the UN charter, which validates the security council resolution authorizing the action, for example. That shouldn't work--there are limits that the Supreme Court puts on how far Congress can delegate its powers, and there's no way they can delegate the declaration of war, particularly if they do so ambiguously.
Ultimately, if the House wants to stop it, they can always cut the funding.
On the upside, $10M a day is going mostly to our military industrial complex, which pumps some money into the economy. Also on the upside, getting rid of tyrants.
Still, I get the image of a big freeciv display in the situation room...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I donated significant money to the Obama campaign. If this doesn't stop by Sunday, and congress hasn't approved this action, I'd think that congress should file articles of impeachment. Sorry, but the President cannot be above the law.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
"That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?"
Who indeed? The law is, de facto, not what's on the statute books, it's what's enforced. With actual force.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
While Obama should've gone back and gotten authorization from Congress to extend the mission in Libya, he acted properly initially, because otherwise there'd be a lot of blood on our hands (see: Bush Sr. in Iraq) as the resistance capital Benghazi was about to fall had we not intervened.
Of course, as far as I know we never declared war on Pakistan either, but Congress has been happy to sign checks for drones to fire missiles inside Pakistan territory. Is this not also "putting US Armed Forces into hostilities"? And if you want to be technical, Congress has not passed a bill declaring war on anyone since World War II. It's all "authorization to use force", which is more of the kind of Orwellian terminology in use post-WWII, such as changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
In my opinion, this is not "hostilities" in the sense of invading a country. We are in Libya at the request of the Libyan people to prevent a humanitarian disaster. Obama may have slipped up on the technicalities, but the technicalities are only being brought up now because of politics. The cause is a just one.
In other words, unlike Obama, Dubya got congressional approval for his war(s).
Dubya fed us a huge pile of lies for his favorite war, and completely dropped the ball on his less favorite one.
Did Bush seek and get Congressional approval for both wars, or did he not? You're trying to deflect the issue with a "yeah, but...". Bush sought approval, and didn't move until he had it. Obama claims that he doesn't even need it. That's the issue here. You can hate Dubya's guts, but if you're honest, you have to admit that Bush complied with the WPA, and Obama is flaunting it. In other words, Barack Obama is governing in a manner that both he and his supporters condemned Bush for.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Paul voted to end affirmative action in college admissions.
Yep, to the betterment of all students.
Anti Same-Sex marriage, Paul calls himself "strongly pro-life" and anti-abortion
This is the one thing that is somewhat evangelical, but so what if his position is to remove all power from the federal state? Then he can't say boo about any of those issues, it's up to the states (as it should be).
People get that confused about Palin too, even though she also is against abortion she has said before in an interview that it should be up to regions to decide about abortion for themselves.
Paul has asserted that he does not think there should be any federal control over education and education should be handled at a local and state level.
That's not evangelical. That's common sense, when you look at the hash the feds have made of education. That's $40m that could be going to students or even weed for the needy, all money better spent than paying a bunch of buerocrats to dictate how education is to be handled exactly the same from beverly hills to the inner city of NYC. Her's a thought, perhaps different regions have different approaches that would better serve students. Break up the NEA and send that money out to the states for education that makes sense.
Anti-EPA
I am a staunch environmentalist and think the EPA is past its prime, too much absurd regulation.
Anti-Civil Rights Act
Hmm... really?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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!
Other than the size of the delivered bang?
They'll now be classified as "weapons of mass non-hostility".
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
I don't understand why you're complaining, it's the best government money can buy.
At this point, it is rather questionable whether NATO activities in Libya are still within the boundaries of the original UN mandate. Both Russia and China are saying that what's going on is not what they had in mind when they let the resolution pass. Originally, any "necessary force" must be used only to ensure the safety of civilians, and not to help one side of the civil war win; the moment NATO started supporting rebel advance from the air and handing out weapons to them, any pretense of that has been dropped.
Bush has complied with WPA, but he obtained the requisite consent with fraud. If Congress had any balls, they should have retroactively revoked any consent and charged him accordingly.
That said, at least he did gave outward respect for the law, whereas Obama pretty much openly flaunts his non-compliance. So both are dickheads on that count, but Obama is a bigger one for sure.
the difference is that we(US forces) don't specifically target civilians, they(terrorists) do. you need to pull your head out of you ass and get the facts. the ROE i'm deploying under this month are absurdly restrictive. i guarantee AQ doesn't give two shits as much about civilians as we do.
300,000? where are you getting that number?
AQI targeted more then just US/Coalition forces in IZ. they targeted anyone that didn't agree with them.
Samarra, IZ 2007-2008ish, as an example. the second the US started paying more then AQI, and actually backing the locals up and gave them free reign to do what needed doing, the locals turned on them(AQI). heads were rolling in the streets(literally). because, AQI was killing them if they didn't take up arms with and support them.
a portion of that civilian death total, IZ at least, is civilian on civilian(non terrorist/insurgent) killings. grudges, tribal and criminal issues being settled. not US/Coalition Forces. that's what i saw anyhow.
we(US) are by no means clean and infallible(*cough* Libya ). but to implying that we are some how targeting more civilians then AQ... you're just being silly.
They gave Bush these powers with Card Blanche, and he put us into two war fronts, one of which he should be prosecuted for. (Iraq) Obama uses it for legitimate purposes and they flip flop like a fish out of water.
Last I checked, Bush got approval for his little wars. He lied a lot to get it, but he still took the effort.
In the mean time, I hope Obama can hold the course. This a break for the free world and a chance for Democracy to break out in the Middle East.
Are you serious? You do understand that rebels are violently racist (look up all the stories about lynchings and expulsions of Black Libyans from regions controlled by the rebellion), and a good chunk of them are Islamist fundamentals. What more, al-Qaeda has already signed up to fight on their side, and some of the people now being supplied by weapons and provided air support by NATO in Libya are the same people who have shot at NATO soldiers in Afghanistan a few years ago.
I have no doubt that once rebels, with NATO air support, finally steamroll over the last loyalist strongholds, we'll hear a lot about how the new Libya will have become the shining beacon of democracy and human rights - just like it happened in Afghanistan. Of course, if you actually go and look it up, "liberated" Afghanistan is still a theocracy where "apostasy" is punished by death, other human rights are pretty bad even by the letter of the law, and where most of the society simply disregards the written law in favor of the customary one which is misogynistic and pedophilic in practice.
Why do you think "democracy" in Libya will be any better?
The Constitution at no point defines what constitutes declaring war. It is a perfectly reasonable argument that the Congressional act authorizing the use of force against Saddam was legally a declaration of war. It is certainly a stronger argument than the one that the Obama Administration is trying to use here.
I have noticed that no one has mentioned another element of Obama's argument: that he does not need Congressional authorization in Libya because he has UN authorization.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
MCCONNELL: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/10/25/126242/mcconnell-obama-one-term/
There's one for you, though it's pretty easy to tell if you follow American Politics much.
They are firing shells, missiles, burning fuel, and consuming resources including time and attention. Once, shells, missiles strike their target, they are gone for good: burned up. The fuel is burned up. The time is burned up. None of these things can then benefit us or anyone else in the future.
If we spend money on tools that we need to make more things in the future, then spending the money may help our economy. But only if the amount of money we can draw from those added resources exceeds what we spent.
Every time the US declares war (or fails to declare it), its really a war against its own people. Its an excuse to funnel billions of dollars down a rat-hole that has no oversight, and no end in sight. Can you think of another country just before WW1 and WW2 that was addicted to war? Look what happened to them.
Our leaders think they can gamble at any stakes and take all the winnings for themselves. And if they lose, they can parachute out to some haven and leave the people with the crushing debt of their mistakes.
WAR IS PEACE
That is all.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They told me if I voted for McCain, we'd bomb a muslim nation who never attacked America... and they were right!
TL;DR parent needs to take off his tinfoil hat.
We have freedom, and the love and admiration of the surviving family members of the bombed. We are bombing the Love into them.
If they kill the wrong people, are you going to hold them accountable? Are you personally going to close the doors on their cells? No? Do you know the individuals who are? No? Then exactly how careful do you think they need to be when they have to account to nobody for anything?
'
US Presidents do this sort of thing which is why they get to be called "Commander in Chief". Congress didn't vote for Panama, Grenada, the stupid waste of marine's lives in an impotent "show the flag" exercise in Lebanon, or the Navy escort of Iraqi oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. I'm sure there's a few from Clinton's time as well (Somalia etc) - Reagan set the bar low and that's what every President since has followed. There's no real need for LBJ or Bush trickery to attempt to fool the world when it's only a small war.
A bomb dropped from a drone is not hostile in the same way as water-boarding is not torture.
I guess it must be a special reality bending field once you are the commander in chief of the military of a nation involved in non-war conflicts against hostile unlawful fighters and on humanitarian missions to protect civilians.
If what you said were true, then most private consumption would also be bad for the economy: it's spending that only produces stuff to be consumed which will be gone later.
So it's not quite as simple as that. War spending creates jobs, which is good for the economy. The Second World War is how the US managed to get out of the Great Depression.
That said, "good for the economy" as measured with traditional indicators like GDP does not necessarily translate directly to "good for the people". Probably everyone outside the military-industrial complex would agree that the money going towards military spending could be used for much better spending instead.
However, simply cutting military spending will destroy jobs. So you need to have a plan for what you want to do instead of military spending.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
They are firing shells, missiles, burning fuel, and consuming resources including time and attention. Once, shells, missiles strike their target, they are gone for good: burned up. The fuel is burned up. The time is burned up. None of these things can then benefit us or anyone else in the future.
If we spend money on tools that we need to make more things in the future, then spending the money may help our economy. But only if the amount of money we can draw from those added resources exceeds what we spent.
This is a good argument, but it is not true. Munitions have a shelf-life. When they reach the end of their shelf life they need to be disposed of safely. Doing so is about ten times as expensive outside a war than inside one. For some reason, nobody cares about the environment in a war.
I have no idea if the munitions used are actually end-of-life.
freedom is slavery ?
Slipping shoelaces ?
The value of goods produced and held is, as a whole, the wealth of the participants in the economy. Everything has some value to the holder, but it varies over time, often decreasing as things get old, eaten, worn out, etc.
The interesting part is the allocation of resources towards producing that which maximizes the perceived wealth created and held, and when it comes to munitions they tend to be very expensive for the perceived wealth; using those resources for basically any other production would create more value and make the economy wealthier.
The second world war was not essential to getting out of the depression, basically any other production on the same basis would have accomplished the same.
Another misconception is that jobs are intrinsically good for the economy. Make-work jobs are in themselves merely a covert wealth redistribution scheme. As far as the wealth of the economy is concerned, although less palatable, simply taxing the employed and paying the unemployed to sit around doing nothing would be neither more or less valuable (if we assume that munitions have near zero value to the participants in the economy).
Redistribution through building infrastructure or various public works is slightly less wasteful, but ultimately the least inequitable method of managing reduced demand would be to divide the actual work through more general reduced working hours, rather than the binary employed-unemployed tax-makework structure. In the end, as the whole point of an economy is to generate the most wealth for as little work as possible, it would be good to have a method to deal with the end-game in that function, just in case it turns out that demand for goods isn't infinite but balanced against the value of free time.
You're missing his point. People say that spending money on warfare is good for the economy, because it pumps money in some sectors. It's true that this is good at least for those people working in those sectors, and for those people who can sell them stuff, and so on.
But it's still a poor investment; in the same way as buying a bridge that leads nowhere or having people dig holes and then fill them again. It buys you nothing of worth, pumping money into the economy is, basically, the only thing you gain. You do get the research and development results, but you could also get interesting results from R+D into bridge building or hole digging.
What constitutes a better investment is a matter of debate, but you'd want something where the end result of the work is something that is useful to society, instead of just the work process itself being useful. Education is something that is often brought up, as are all kinds of infrastructure works (power distribution, internet, roads, railways, sustainable energy).
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
The U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt
Corruption appears to be an intrinsic part of any government beyond a certain size.
If remote drone attacks, inherently less trustworthy than operating manually, is not hostile, then flying aircrafts into skyscrapers are not hostile either, rendering the entire Afghanistan war built on hypocricy, deceit and lies. Wait, that was Iraq and the lies about WMDs and Saddaim Hussein-Al Qaida connection wasn't it?
Why aren't these criminals caught and properly punished? What is wrong with you America?
This is hypocricy of the worst sort, even if "hostile" is per international treaty definitions, BECAUSE it's per the same definition of "hostile" in both circumstances!
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"SURVEILLANCE IS PRIVACY"
-Norwegian politicians trying to defend DRD.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
When they swoop down and fire a hellfire missile into your house, it's just their way of saying, I love you.
War spending creates jobs, which is good for the economy. The Second World War is how the US managed to get out of the Great Depression.
Why not simply pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in again? Far fewer deaths and less destruction of real things.
Your argument is the broken window fallacy. The depression was caused by debt. It would have been much better to simply turn the printing presses on and repudiate the debt. That is effectively what they did, but killed millions in the meantime.
Deleted