If you’re a liberal or an Obama supporter don’t expect a pass when you attempt to justify or support the administration’s drone policy. Not only are you under attack, but the issue is also being used to shine the images of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney retrospectively.
When Rich Lowry, Editor of National Review, wrote an opinion piece for today’s Politico, the editors of Politico pimped the piece with the front page tease “The left was furious at Bush for waterboarding but accepts Obama’s drones.” In the piece called Cheney’s Revenge , Lowry writes,
The left is still furious that the Bush administration waterboarded three captured terrorists in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Yet, with a few exceptions, it has blithely accepted the Obama administration’s extrajudicial assassination policy that has killed about 1,000 times as many people.
During the Bush years, a small army of former Democratic officials, law professors, op-ed writers and bloggers blasted the Bush administration as dangerous and un-American for asserting the executive branch’s war powers in the fight against Al Qaeda, aka “trampling the Constitution.”
Move over to the UK Guardian and Glenn Greenwald’s piece , where he says, in part,
The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.
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What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch – with no checks or oversight of any kind – but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president’s underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president – at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as “Terror Tuesday” – then chooses from “baseball cards” and decrees in total secrecy who should die.
Then there’s Jim Treacher’s opinion with the unsubtle title “It’s ok to pour water on a terrorist’s face if it’s dropped from an unmanned drone” which comes to us from the Daily Caller .
Here is part of Treacher’s take on liberals who support the drone program:
Water on the face: “You monsters. It’s the end of the republic!”
Hellfire missile in the face: “Whatever you think is best, Barry.”
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For what it’s worth, [Treacher’s] okay with both waterboarding and taking out terrorists with drone strikes, no matter where they were born. But then, I’m not the one who thinks it all depends on whether or not Bush did it. It’s almost as if lefties don’t really believe the things they harangue the rest of us about. It’s almost as if their only principle is obtaining and maintaining power.
The above is just a sampling. Best guess: This is just the beginning. See e.g. Kathleen McKinley’s piece just posted here at TMV.
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Contributor, aka tidbits. Retired attorney in complex litigation, death penalty defense and constitutional law. Former Nat’l Board Chair: Alzheimer’s Association. Served on multiple political campaigns, including two for U.S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield (R-OR). Contributing author to three legal books and multiple legal publications.