Legal, Ethical, and Wise: America's secret drone war is secret no longer

Jasper, Nixon actually considered overthrowing the government. He actually did try to have a political opponent killed. Obama's drone policy has disturbing implications, but it's just not in the same class, even remotely.

God, this shit again.

However, it doesn't take much of an imaginative leap to imagine what men like Nixon and Hoover would have done with the kind of powers Obama's administration has now claimed, and succeeded in normalising, for the executive branch. That's not the only problem with the drone campaign but its hardly comforting to be teetering on the edge of a dystopia, trusting in the wisdom of the American people not to elect another Nixon or worse. Especially given that it is only last year that we were having to seriously consider figures like Gingrich and Santorum as presidential material.

My only note here is that actually floating a trial balloon on overthrowing the government and killing your political opponents is quite a bit worse for the future of the Republican than Obama's policies potentially making it easier for someone to do in the future, if you grant a whole bunch of implausible scenarios. I didn't think "he is not actually the worse President ever in the area of disrespect for constitutional norms" would be so contentious.

The wikipedia version of Ellsberg's "planned" "assassination" seems more in the category of G. Gordon Liddy staring at goats, but maybe that's just wikipedia?

I don't think I'm saying he is the winner of the worst president of all time, ever competition but generally we, on the liberal side of the equation, do expect better of 'our' presidents. The expectation is greater on Obama simply because he doesn't rise from the primordial ooze of ignorance that comprises the other side. To be able to say that; when it came to eroding our civil liberties to such an extent that some of the key checks and balance against an authoritarian dictator have evaporated Obama was the best; is, to put it mildly, not what anyone sane was hoping for in 2008. It's no longer an exaggeration to say 'Worse than Bush' in this particular policy area. And that was a high bar to clear.

Meanwhile, one man's 'implausible scenario' is another's Europe & Asia in the last 70 years.

It's just wikipedia. Both Ellsberg (saying the prosecutor told him) and Liddy claim it was true. The only plausible question is whether Nixon explicitly signed off on it or not, or was doing the plausibly deniable thing, and exactly how badly they wanted them hurt.

Dan, this is what my response was to. There are much, much, much greater abuses of executive power possible, and some of them have actually happened. Bush killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis through a pointless war comes to mind. If you want to claim "Obama has pushed the civil liberties exemptions for terrorism farther than any other President, including Bush", go right ahead, but the Glenn Greenwald rhetoric about how he's somehow a radical depature is ridiculous.

Note that the US actually has tried to execute US citizens, caught on US soil, for fighting for a foreign country, without a jury trial; the only reason they weren't executed was FDR commuting their sentence to life imprisonment.

Obama's specific innovations here are:

1) Creating a formal policy for deeming US citizens terrorists/agents of a foreign power by executive decision, with arguable congressional support at best. The foreign power thing has been around forever, with ambigous standards. Bush expanded the US citizen foreign power determination to deemed terrorists, in an adhoc fashion. Obama created the latest step of setting up an executive branch "process" for it.
2) Extending the pre-existing standard of being able to kill US citizens who are agents of a foreign power to killing them when they're in the US. I'm not sure how much of this is new; it's an old standard that you don't have to do standard processes for a US citizen serving in a foreign army. Bush extended that to deemed terrorists. Obama extended that to deemed terrorists in the US - though actually I'm not sure if this claim is new. His fiddling with the imminent clauses appears to be.

If you're referring to the fascists in Italy and Germany and the communist revolutions this is strange. They either came from completely out of power to overthrow the government at gunpoint or outright eliminating the opposition on a pretext as soon as they got elected. Incremental expansion of executive power is a risk, but I have a hard time thinking of examples where it's led to dictatorship in Europe or Asia.

The reason I harp on this so much is "we should impeach them" and "this is a radical departure, and way worse than what came before" is an approach that doesn't work. It's what all good liberals fell into in the Bush years, and that didn't exactly work out, did it?

The national security state is an incremental ratchet of horribleness, supported by the public because virtually no effort is made to change their minds away from the veneration of foreigner killing and all the policies required to service that belief. Note that actually impeaching Nixon only improved things until 1982 or so, at which point it was back to business as usual.

I was referencing them to indicate that dictatorial style regimes that exercised enormous, and murderous, executive power leading to horrible results isn't an implausible scenario. Indeed it is all too plausible, and personally I think we do ourselves no favours by allowing a steady slide towards the kind of state apparatus that Stalin, who himself enjoyed a steady accumulation of effective personal executive power over time, would have found eminently comfortable.

So you're just engaging in Glenn funtime rhetoric?

I don't think impeaching is any kind of useful goal but this is 'way worse that what came before' particularly way worse that what came before Bush. I think an observer of US civil liberties from the year 2000 transported to the year 2013 would be amazed at the amount of backward changes and losses in such a short space of time.

Hopefully by raising enough noise about this kind of thing, whenever you can, you slowly change minds. If this was a significant vote losing issue I would hope that politicians would eventually come around.

I understand you are having a reflexive reaction to a 'Godwinning' style scenario but sometimes it's not inaccurate to make qualified comparisons. Obama is claiming the right to execute without due process any US citizen, on US soil, for reasons that the public is not allowed to know. Stalin exercised his accumulated power to actually do the same thing Obama is now claiming the right to in Soviet Russia when he had domestic 'terrorists' executed based on secret 'evidence'. Will the comparison be verboten until the next republican president actually racks up a domestic bodycount? Or will it only be permitted once he surpasses Stalin's total?

It's not that I'm offended by the comparision, it's that the two have virtually nothing to do with each other. Stalin didn't need a legal pretext to go kill people, from the start. It's not like he'd be "oh, shit, I can't find a legal justification or precedent for this, guess I better not kill anybody." The closet analogy I can think of is the Nazis using Reichstag fire to expand their power, but that wasn't based on incrementalism on top of Weimar legal authority; they just did it.

If you want to look at incremental executive takeovers the South American messes are probably more directly on point.

If there's one thing that's been shown, it's that the standard ACLU elite opinion-and-scandal playbook doesn't change those minds. You aren't going to end this without changing minds on the policy of US unlimited war; that's a policy without an organized constituency at all, at the moment.

The US left says it doesn't want Iraqs, but it dearly wants to intervene anywhere on earth given 1 days notice if there's a humanitarian or mass killing reason to do so. It's extremely difficult to get that without implicitly supporting the status quo on US foreign policy, and no mainstream organization is even trying.

So is it better to build and normalise a 'legal' process that enables Stalin-style purges and then engage in them, or to just engage in them without incrementally building a framework first? To really Godwin it up the Nazi campaign against the Jews was pursued through a series of incremental legal steps that gradually reduced the status of Jews and other undesirables further and further, year by year, until the holocaust was seen as 'normal'. Maybe Obama really is Hitler !?

What I'm getting at here is that preparing the ground for easily foreseeable terrible consequences in the future is rarely a good idea in practice or in theory. If you significantly lower the bar for a murderous authoritarian then don't act surprised if you get one.

Minds change slowly but they can change, sometime nothing seems to be happening in public for a while until there is a sudden explosion seemingly from nowhere. I thought the US had reached a comfortable consensus on spiralling inequality that no amount of elite opinion was going to disrupt. Then Occupy happened and suddenly everyone was talking about it and Obama was working those themes into his campaign rhetoric. The right trigger, or bubbling anger that suddenly erupts can trigger sudden attention on a topic and then the media, and by extension the public, picks up the elite ideas that are just lying around in easy reach.

Why? Because you know less about them and aren't personally invested in how they are judged?

Slate has a time lapsed map that provides a visual representation of just how many drone strikes the current administration has ordered under this logic. It also indicates relative casualty estimates. I really think the US citizen thing is something of a red herring; what's good for the world is good enough for US citizens, so have at it, and hopefully it engenders enough of a strong reaction when Joe Apple Pie gets hellfired in his bunker in Montana that the entire existing paradigm for authorizing strikes gets tossed out.

I've read a bit here and there about how the US three-branch system used in South America leads to a series of crises that tend to get resolved by executive power grabs, some of them ending in dictatorships - Chavez, for example. That at least sort of sounds like what Dan is talking about rather than the process for the fascist takeovers or communist revolutions.

The US public is substantially more socialist than than political outcomes; our political system and interest groups heavily waters down what anyone actually wants. In time of crisis or overwhelming political control that can change.

By contrast, the public's opinions on anti-terrorism civil liberty violations are entirely in favor. An amazing 49%-38% of the public actually goes so far as to support killing "suspected American terrorists." Poking around people did oppose Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, but depending on phrasing the highest opposition I can find is 60%.

One of the frustrating aspect of the continuing extension of Obama era civil-rights abuses is that it starts to make the bush era look positively liberal. "He only imprisoned people without evidence of due process?" What a bleeding heart.

It was Bush who began the policy of drone strikes in Afghanistan.

I don't agree with sweeping rhetorical turns about Stalinism and fascism for the drone program, but I also think you're missing some of the nuances of what Stalin did to solidify and consolidate his power. Stalin had a complicated blend of patronage, intra-party legalistic maneuvers, and a bold disregard for potentially setting horrific precedents when it came to getting what he wanted; in a way, because the Russian systems did not rely as heavily on precedent as ours does, his more extreme actions are more terrible in the particular but less significant as pattern changes. Perhaps you're just looking at Stalin differently, but it seems to me an oversimplification to pretend his use of legal ritual didn't play a significant part in how he got things done.

Chavismo is a significantly different phenomenon, and I would be wary of using it as an example without a specific grounding as to which factors you are going to reference, because otherwise it's just handwaving in vaguely understood "messes" as a distraction.

Regardless, I would agree that the analogies are not particularly useful relative to how incendiary they are.

I don't really understand your point in citing this. It's not news, and it doesn't in any way change that what Obama is doing is setting a serious precedent for which there will be hell to pay when an even more unscrupulous president inevitably takes office, or before then when similar reasoning is thrown back in the US' face. I guess if your point is that one should simply accept this because it's fundamentally unchangeable, well, I don't see that as any more compelling than extreme hyperbole about imminent tyranny.

Again, I'm unclear on why you think it's necessary to point this out. As the map I linked indicates, and as is generally known, this is also true for Pakistan. It doesn't mean that there stops being a difference between opportunistically working in a legal grey area and creating a procedure that provides a pseudo-legal justification for that work, and potentially makes it a permanent facet of American foreign policy that will be abused more extensively when even more ruthless executives take charge. That doesn't make Bush better, but it damned sure doesn't change anything about Obama's level of accountability for what he's sowing.

Even if you grant Stalin had constraints inside the party in terms of who he could and couldn't get away with killing, that ship had already sailed. The Bolsheviks started executing any Russian citizens they felt like who weren't Bolsheviks the second they took power; it's not like they were held back by decorum. I mentally bucket the fascists and communists are outright revolutions; they didn't need or care what institutions or norms had been previously set up.

I keep posting annoying stuff like "no, it goes way further back" because I feel like I need to warn where this goes. Back in the 2000s I, like all good liberals, was just where Dan was. Bush's behavior was shocking, it was awful, it opened the door for horrors, it was completely out of character compared to what came before, he should be impeached, we just need to convince the public, oh hey here's a guy who says he totally disagrees, we can go back to when things didn't suck.

It didn't work. Not only did it not work, it backfired spectacularly, as all that time and energy expended on getting rid of Bush had jack shit effect, as the new guy is the same as the old guy on foreign policy. Less stupid and definitely less crazy, but the agenda hasn't changed.

This isn't like Nixon where the President had so radically overstepped the bounds of what was acceptable and publically supported that getting rid of him moves things back into a safe space. This is more like racial politics in the 1920s, or union organizing in the 1890s - the bulk of the public is against you, almost all elites are against you, and you don't have any clearly bad outcomes that anyone outside the target zone has noticed.

As long as the public and elites are perfectly fine with the US stomping whoever it feels like throughout the world - the right for nationalism and money, the left for humanitarism and moral outrage - we're going to be trapped in this loop of incremental security state power increases driving blowback driving further increases. Fiddling with where exactly the line is drawn on who the President can blow up or protest votes against the boring median party isn't going to change much. More radical steps are needed.

Again, I'd love citations when everything gets all Oliver-Stone-y. It isn't that I don't think Nixon was hilariously Queeg-like enough to do all this stuff, it's just my past reading on the subject was never quite so sexy (DoD being told to ignore him having other explanations, eg.)

Googling turned up this (long) article in the Atlantic which covers some of it, basically his secretary of defence thought Nixon might bypass the chain of command and try to surround the Whitehouse with the 82nd airborne because of the crazy way he was talking. So he (Schlesinger) spent a few weeks covertly investigating how to stop that from happening:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1983/08/the-pardon/305571/

The implication I'm reading in the (1983) article is that Alexander Haig was the once-and-future evil homunculus there using it to wangle his way into the Ford administration, which isn't quite the same as Richard (or Patricia) Nixon proposing paradrops on Congress.

Again, while I have no trouble seeing Nixon in such a role - and there's always the missing tape - we don't even have Henry II level basis for the rumour/worry. We've got some vague talk from Henry you-can-totally-trust-my-gossip Kissinger, a clearly rattled Secretary of Defense, which certainly says something about the sketchiness of the White House but still doesn't lead anywhere very firm, and thinner stuff besides. And what concrete talk there is of the 82nd Airborne is tied to entirely in-character worries about hippie-based coups-d'etat.

Sexy one-liners about the craziest shit Nixon ever did require a better evidentiary basis imo, even if I agree with the basic concept that he's one of presidential history's most plausible Richard III-figures.

Conservation Drones.



No word on how legal, ethical, and wise their drone protocols are just yet, but I bet they have their top people on them. Poaching, like drugs, is something that should be dealt with by addressing the problem of demand first, and providing alternatives for the suppliers, and working on lawfulness and infrastructure at a core level. I'm sure the temptations that have utterly demolished American institutional safeguards yet again will work wonders in the developing world.

"Drones accidentally kill all endangered species"

I can't for the life of me find the link right now, but 3ish weeks ago I heard a story on NPR about some wildlife preserve/sanctuary in south Africa (not South Africa) using drones to keep tabs on animals and watch for poachers. Having two or three drones for research and surveillance over endangered animals is not the even the same game as US drones. I don't see any downside to this, other than unexpected costs making it unfeasible. This isn't a method to stop poaching as a phenomenon but to keep better track of wildlife sanctuaries, or so it seems to me.

This looks one of the cases where just the use of the term " drones" muddies the discussion for little apparent reason.

http://www.watergate.com/stories/spyring.asp
Actually the whole Vietnam War era was really batshit insane.
Especially if you consider the numbers of arsons and bombings as part of a terrorist campaign by disparate leftist radicals.

Edit: I haven't heard of Nixon trying to overthrow the government before. I've read that Nixon was a bit unhinged during watergate and the secretary of defense was worried Nixon might launch armageddon.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/...i-was-told-to-deny-the-drone-program-existed/

That may be true for the article you read, but I don't think it applies to the one I linked, for a number of reasons.

First, we are talking about the classic problem of an already weak infrastructure of law and order being further undercut by external pressures; whether it's the drug market or the poaching market, we are talking about pressures stemming from the appetites of more powerful, wealthier countries who are unwilling to do more than lash out at their own underclasses to deal with it. I remain unconvinced that those problems can addressed fairly on the supply side. This then leads us to what drones represent, whether here or Pakistan, in terms of being a cheap band-aid with potentially terrifying effects depending on how far they are from lawful procedure and oversight. Whether they are killing or merely observing, and any time they are used as an extension of authority and control over humans, it should raise concerns about transparency, oversight, and due process.

Second, the approach in my linked article is fundamentally tied to passing on the data to a vague notion of "law enforcement" in the countries it will be practiced. That is, they are not tracking animals alone, they are tracking animals for the purposes of generating evidence against humans. This, in and of itself, is not a problem. Add in that the protocols for managing this capability are not front and center; that not-terrible but also not-trustworthy-in-terms-of-incentives Google money is driving it; that the relationship to the self-same law enforcement authorities that have been thoroughly corrupted by poaching is handwaved in...well, I think there's a lot of room for skepticism.

Third, I think it's important that we avoid pretending that our anxiety as a nation over being watched over by drones is unusual, or that people in developing nations can simply have their rights set aside in a manner that would require more than a conservation NGO's initiative in ours. There's a long, ignominious history of field-testing things you are less likely to get away with in a developed political environment on people that are disenfranchised into consent. I'm tired of relatively powerless people getting targeted to assuage the consciences of the people causing the problem in the first place, and I have a reflexive mistrust of things that reduce the cost of doing so to the point where we can essentially write it off in our own political arenas.

Well put.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/02/how-to-become-a-drone-target/

Our Attorney General has decided to respond to Rand Paul's question to John Brennan re: whether "the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a US citizen on US soil, and without trial."

If you were hoping the response would be a simple "no," well, sorry.

TL;DR: "We've never done this, we don't want to do this, it's entirely hypothetical, but Pearl Harbor and 9/11, so maybe."

That's not really true. The government has used or been prepared to use lethal force to put down sedition and insurrection since nearly the founding of the country.

Paul didn't seem to like that answer and is now filibustering.

He means this particular targeted assassination paradigm and its potential targets, not that the US has never done nasty things to US citizens or near-citizens which I doubt even a government representative would want to say. coldcontrol 's summary of their stance is actually pretty dead-on.

Right