But let's face it, Code Pink isn't protesting the sadistic policies of Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld. They're not reminiscing about Abu Ghraib or Bagram. Fallujah or Baghdad. The kangaroo trial of Saddam Hussein. The murder of his two sons. They're going after our guy and his C.I.A. His Joint Chiefs. His Pentagon. It has been long enough. The policy of American exceptionalism has to end now. It is not moral to hold the world to one standard of justice and fair play and wholly exempt ourselves from any responsibility to international laws and treaties.
My friend, Che Pasa, has offered an affectionate criticism of Obama and the policies of his administration entitled, "Documenting the Atrocities." It's a good starting point. He always has something important to say. He doesn't say it in a way calculated to hurt other people.
I'm not really gifted in the same way. I need your help. I don't fucking get it. Obviously we have all been tolerating these assassinations with their uncontrolled collateral damage as somehow necessary or possibly even justified; the dark underbelly of the insensate beast that is the C.I.A./Pentagon. Maybe you haven't been so passive in your acceptance. I don't think I ever anticipated that we would still be talking about this in a second term for Obama. I understand that one man, not even the president, can really change the trajectory of U.S. national security; the forces that are at play with powerful government and military agencies. No more than the captain of a large vessel can throw himself in the path of the rudder or challenge the monarch that has commissioned him. But it is time for the American people to weigh in. Make our voices heard. And it is time for the United States of America to take part in international treaties that insure justice and humane treatment for all peoples of the world.
It's not right. It's not acceptable. It's probably not legal. If it happened to us, we would massively retaliate.
Under Bush, the U.S. refused to ratify Kyoto and claimed exception to the International Court. That's because they were the bad guys, right? The fucking war criminals. Obviously there would have been dozens, if not hundreds of cases brought before the Hague. It's time for a new Geneva Convention or some equivalent meeting of the United Nations. If drone warfare is not something to be condoned, this needs to be agreed upon by the nations of the world. Is it right to conduct assassinations in countries that are not engaged in warfare, declared or undeclared? If the rights of innocent civilians are already protected in Geneva Convention Protocols, should not the U.S. be prosecuted for indiscriminately violating these protections?
I hate this monster John Brennan. I hope he goes down like a Viet Cong company engulfed by a flame-thrower. Like the little girl hit by napalm. Like the innocent Iraqi young men rounded up and shoved into prisons that practiced torture like it was all in good fun. I hope the son-of-a-bitch never works again as long as he lives. Carl Levin asked him quite simply if he believed that waterboarding was torture. His response was a torture of slowness. He said something like the word "torture" is politically inflammatory. What a dumb, fucking monster.
In a related moment of American shame, whatever select Senate committee that is privileged to the deepest, darkest secrets of the American exceptionalism model was just subjected to some kind of horrifying legalistic logic that somehow justified drone strikes. Irregardless of all that has happened in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. I recall the tortured legalistic logic that John Sununu and Alberto Gonzalez used to justify torture, extraordinary rendition and illegal detention.
We can do better. America doesn't have to be the dragon. Killing muslims and their families only creates more terrorists that hate the United States and their allies. I thought that we learned that painful lesson ten years ago.
After reading this hatred of the USA it it time to take flight. Anyone who thinks the rest of the insane world is more ethical than this country is delusional.
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ReplyDeleteYou should tell us how you really feel about John Brennan :-) Good read. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of those public policy debates that leave me conflicted. On one hand, I understand the legal and moral issues surrounding these drone strikes – innocent civilian casualties, the targeting of U.S. citizens without due process, the costs to and resentments of people in faraway places, and the diplomatic damage done in our name.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, terrorists are thugs who have also murdered innocent civilians, left collateral damage, and targeted not just American citizens everywhere but often Muslims too. Yes, we forget that far more Muslims have been killed by terrorist attacks than Americans, and we do a very poor public relations job in pointing this out. Notwithstanding another fact: The asymmetric nature of terrorism with no war zones and no front. Finally, this sacrifice in treasure: Our men and women in uniform, and the impact of war on their families and American taxpayers.
We had a similar debate in this forum when Bin Laden was buried at sea. Some friends and colleagues argued that it would have been better to capture Bin Laden alive and hold a trial. Others argued that the case against Bin Laden was so solid, that Bin Laden and extremists everywhere would turn any such trial into a mockery, and the most efficient dispatch of justice was burial at sea. Again, I saw validity in both viewpoints.
Michael Scott is right. This a very good post, not that I necessarily agree with every point, but because it is forcing us to think.
" The policy of American exceptionalism has to end now. It is not moral to hold the world to one standard of justice and fair play and wholly exempt ourselves from any responsibility to international laws and treaties. "
ReplyDeleteI refrained from commenting for some time because I wasn't sure and I'm still not sure what you're saying. Of course I agree with the quote above, but to determine what is and what isn't moral is often impossible, at best, there being no moral axioms that do not produce contradictions or ambiguities -- at least in my opinion, because moral certainties are in themselves opinions and are not amenable to proofs. Things get more ambiguous as you get closer and what seems obvious in principle, becomes a jumble up close. In principle, I agree with you, but you can't always avoid making exceptions to principle.
Yes, Agree that torture is close enough to being always abhorrent that we can act as though it always is, yet. . . . the things life hands us can't always be forced into the moral mode. Sometimes we have to choose to live rather than to die.
I agree that we acted wrongly as concerns Iraq, not that Saddam's government wasn't pretty much as abhorrent as any, but we didn't set the kind of example that would foster respect for us as a nation that gives a damn about any interests but it's own while lecturing about "human rights." We've always been supremely hypocritical as a nation. It's not new, but we're also hypocritical when we criticize it and by that, I don't agree about either the use of unmanned aircraft or about sending Osama a subpoena or reading him his rights. Yes, I know that "they're worse" or "they're just as bad" isn't a justification, but one either wins or loses: we win or they win and the sooner we do, the fewer people die.
We didn't need to invade or to "shock and Awe" tens of thousands or more or exile millions or level the infrastructure of Iraq -- I agree. The trial of Saddam was disgusting as well as the botched execution. I hold Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the others to be criminals for a host of reasons and I'm as angry as you are that they got away with it. I'ts hurt us perhaps irrevocably and I think many of us still would rather be feared than respected and no, they haven't learned.
ReplyDeleteI think we botched the 'war' in Afghanistan and I remember that its purpose was to force them to give up Osama and chase out his henchmen but yet, Osama had left Afghanistan a while ago and we didn't. Did we have a pressing need to build a Western style nation there? I'm not so sure.
No, Qaeda isn't a country and yet it did engage in multiple acts of war in the US and Spain and England and Scotland, inter alia. When someone is holding hostages with the intention of harming them, one does not seek to arrest, one seeks to kill lest many be killed and only when the offender surrenders, has he a right to have highs right read and due process respected. I think this is far too obvious to warrant an argument.
Drones, as the public is taught to call remotely operated aircraft, actually are far less likely to produce the kind of pilot errors that happen when a fighter bomber is flying past the target at hundreds of miles per hour. The drone operator has a long time to examine the targets and can refer the case to others before needing to fire. Is it more moral to put a pilot in danger? I don't know why.
Yes, I also regret the civilian casualties and in a way I regret any casulties, but you should know that the Pentagon's plan A was to drop hundreds of 2000 pound smart bombs that would have destroyed a great many lives. The president's cabinet preferred to act on the CIA's info by using the SEALS, which got none of them killed and although there were a handful of casualties in the compound, many were firing on the SEALS. Do I have sympathy? Yes, and no. Their deaths were unavoidable and they all had an ocean of blood on their hands.
I'm sorry, but there are no moral wars in that someone is always killed that didn't deserve it, but then that's how bad people start wars and continue wars and do not end wars until they themselves are ended. Wars need to be ended, as I'm sure you agree, lest we all die. Terrorists of this sort torture, murder, rape slaughter children without conscience and they certainly don't deserve the protection of conventions between "civilized" nations to which they are not signatory. To say, if you are saying, that to be moral, we owed kind treatment and a fair trial to Osama Bin Laden, I'd have to see that as some kind of shaky casuistry I can't understand.
Thanks Bros,
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I am bewildered. That's why I was asking for your help. I got off of work Thursday evening at about 9:00 p.m. only to hear Ray Suarez's report in my car. It has become a little bit more clear with the points that you have raised. The NYT Op-Ed was titled "A Long Overdue Discussion." The editor went on to urge confirmation.
Mad Mike himself. What an honor. Lurkers are invisible in the murky waters of the web.
I was fortunate enough - actually by design, since I have been deliberately tuning out politics because I just can't take it any more - to miss the news that set you off. Perhaps I'd have been angrier, but as I said, I am irate about much of the way we, the US act here and abroad. We've allowed the government to use fear to erode our freedom, our civil rights and our privacy. I'm more concerned about drones hovering over our heads and saddened that we've lost sight of the fact that a government's license to rummage among our papers and letters looking for dirt was one of the things that fueled our revolution. We're afraid of everything, but when we call for dismantling the CIA are we being used once again?
ReplyDeleteI'm so cynical about popular passions I put my hand on my wallet every time I hear a call to get rid of anything, to be afraid of something, from financial industry regulations to the FED, to the illegal immigrants to drugs. Yes, Obama has perpetuated some things we don't think he should have, but let's not let them pull our strings and go after him as being "just as bad" because he isn't. Let's not be tricked into disbanding and dismantling every agency that breaks the rules or proves inadequate. Let's not be "just as bad." The CIA has done some horrible things, but who is it really that wants us to get rid of it? What would we be like without an intelligence agency? Liberals are supposed to be reformers not anarchists and I think we need a better CIA not a defenseless country.
I grew up with Liberals raging about unilateral nuclear disarmament and "better Red than Dead" and with the other side calling for preemptive nuclear strikes against the USSR and China. We aren't much different today except that we're better at pulling people's strings and enraging them. The centrifugal forces are still here and always have been.
We got rid of Osama because of the CIA and the decision to use "assassins" if you will and it's a better world for it as it would have been had we had assassinated Hitler or Admiral Yamamoto ( come to think of it we did shoot him)
The Republican alternative would have been a horror and the Republicans bankrupted our economy and ruined our prestige and killed perhaps 100,000 or more and Obama didn't. Let's cut him some slack and remember that no president, no administration has not had grievous faults. We can work toward a better country without all the extremism and to an old man like me, it's a much better country than it used to be even if we have very far to go and our liberty is always at peril.
And as to targeting American citizens actively engaged in fighting the US. We had many American citizens of German extraction returning to Germany to fight against us during WW II and I don't think too many of us recommended special treatment for them. I am not a constitutional lawyer, but I think there's a point at which someone's actions against our country deprive him of the right to due process and the observation that this is otherwise because war hasn't been declared by Congress is, as I said before a kind of casuistry and is irresponsible.
ReplyDeleteI find this ongoing discussion to be both thoughtful and necessary. I'm not certain as to any absolute beliefs of my own.
ReplyDeletePhilosophically, I am opposed to war, to torture to anything that makes it easier to kill one another. I find such things to be immoral and inhumane. Yet, I feel consumed by a certain amount of hypocrisy because I do intellectually concede that there may be a legitimate need for force, for violence against those who offer violence as a solution.
As several of you have alluded to, perhaps the important thing is that we never become complacent about the use of violence, the wielding of power. We need to constantly check our moral parameters, to never fall into the pattern of fully accepting violence as a necessity. Maybe the best that we can expect of ourselves is that we continually critique our own actions and examine our decisions to determine where they fit on the scale of ethics and morality.
I don't have answers, but I suspect that it is imperative that we continue to ask the difficult questions.
Here it is...
ReplyDeleteBecause we are the biggest dog on the beach, an honor which we all enjoy as a birthright. Nothing we ever did or contributed, ? We have a special responsibility to make it right. If it's not right, we will still be okay. But the responsibility falls to us. Not only to prevail and prosper, but to a certain extent to lead. To lead the world. We can pick up where we left off twelve years ago and still claim some moral higher ground if nothing else goes wrong.