Imagine if at some point during the 1990s or 1980s the President of the United States had given a speech.  And this was his speech:

My fellow Americans, I’ve been regularly shooting missiles into people’s houses in several countries.  I’ve wiped out families.  I’ve killed thousands of people.  Hundreds of them have been little children.

I’ve killed grandparents, wives, daughters, neighbors.  I’ve targeted people without knowing their names but because they appeared to be resisting an occupation of their country.  I’ve killed whoever was too near them.  Then I’ve shot another missile a few minutes later to kill whoever was trying to help the victims.

I don’t charge these people with crimes.  I don’t seek their extradition.  I don’t even try to kidnap them.  And I don’t do this to defend against any imminent threat.  I don’t make you safer by doing this.  It goes without saying (although the people in the countries I target keep saying it) that I’m generating more new enemies than I’m killing.  But I urge you to remember this: All but four of the people I’ve killed have been non-U.S. citizens.

So here’s what I’m going to do for you: I’m going to start applying the same standards I use for killing U.S. citizens to my killing of non-U.S. citizens, at least in certain countries, at least after another 18 months or so goes by.  Sound good?  I know, I know: what do you care? These are not even U.S. citizens we’re talking about.

So, let me tell you about the four U.S. citizens.

One of them we didn’t actually know who we were shooting at, and he turned out to be a U.S. citizen.  Hell, for all I know a few other bodies could belong to U.S. citizens too — It’s not as if we know all the names and backgrounds.

A second one of the four we got because he was with the one and only U.S. citizen we targeted.  So, that was a two-fer.  We saved enough on missiles on that one to pay for a school or whatever it is people keep whining about wanting money for.

A third one was a 16-year-old American kid.  He was the son of the one and only U.S. citizen I targeted.  I hit him two weeks after killing his father.  Sheer coincidence.  I don’t have any good explanation for it, but you’ll just have to trust that I meant to take out a bunch of innocent non-American teenagers, and there happened tragically to be an American among them.

Fourth is the one U.S. citizen I meant to kill.  I’d like to ask you to ignore certain facts about this one for the moment.  Actually forever.  Let’s ignore the fact that we tried to kill him before any of the incidents that I now claim justified his killing.  Let’s ignore that my attorney general said back then that we were killing him for things he’d said, not for anything he’d done.  Let’s forget that we never charged him with any crime, never indicted him, never tried him, never sought his extradition, never appealed to U.S. or foreign or international courts.  Let’s forget that we’ve never made any evidence against him public, nor explained why we can’t.  Let’s forget that nobody else has produced any evidence against him.

Now, let me tell you this: I only killed him because he was responsible for planning and executing violent attacks on the United States, was an imminent threat to the United States, and could not possibly have been captured.  Got that?  Write that down.

Now, it’s true that courts and the legislature and the public are left out of this.  But you’re going to have to trust me.

There is not a single domestic or international law that permits the killing of human beings by someone who invents criteria for himself to meet and then claims on the basis of secret evidence to have met those criteria.

But, what do you care?  You’ve already forgotten that for all but one of the people I’ve killed I don’t claim to have met any criteria at all.

Now clap, you morons!
…

Some speech.

What would the response have been to this some decades back, as compared to last Thursday?

I think there might have been some outrage.

Instead of outrage, we’re going to have more wars.

This memorial day, see if you can remember what it was like to object to giving presidents the power to murder us. Read the rest of this entry →

President Obama is expected to announce that the eternal war on the world will have an end.

When?

He won’t say.

I too have an announcement.  I promise my drinking problem will end some day.

When?

I’m not saying.  But the celebrations of the armistice in 1918 began when plans for it were announced, and the partying continued until it actually happened.  Perhaps that is the best approach here.  As an aid to your festivities, let me present the…

Afternoon Obama Murder Rap Drinking Game
(which I promise to stop playing soon)

1. The President is going to admit that he has a murder problem and propose to correct it by murdering less in certain countries.  If examples occur to you of crimes you might commit that you could not continue committing by promising to limit your criminal activities in some countries but not in others, DRINK!

2. The President is going to claim to have targeted, or to have allowed an unnamed John Brennan to have targeted, only one U.S. citizen for murder but to have killed three by mistake, on top of three killed by President Bush by mistake.  If you can think of outrages you might commit that you could not go on committing by claiming that 86% of them were accidental side effects, DRINK!

3. The President is going to claim that the one U.S. citizen he or his subordinate chose to murder was an imminent (meaning eventual theoretical) threat to violently attack the United States, that capture was infeasible (meaning the target was hiding following lots of death threats, but his location was known anyway), and that said citizen was a senior operational leader of al Qaeda (or an associated group or was an adherent or a backstage groupie who had once met a guy whose cousin knew where an al Qaeda meeting was held one time).  If you understand what that means, DRINK!

4. The President is going to hope that nobody notices that laws against war and murder don’t include exceptions for people who invent lists of arcane criteria that they require themselves to meet before murdering.  If you think you could invent and meet at least three qualifications before engaging in some immoral behavior, DRINK!

5. The President is going to hope nobody notices that he did not actually meet his own criteria before murdering Awlaki.  Attorney General Eric Holder now says Awlaki was killed for actions, not words.  Prior to the deed, Holder said it was the “hatred spewed” on Awlaki’s blog that put him “on the same list with bin Laden.”  Asked if he wanted Awlaki captured or killed, Holder did not say “captured if feasible,” but evaded the question.  Awlaki, as far as we know, was never a member of al Qaeda.  Obama’s and Holder’s claims about Awlaki’s role in terrorist attacks are undocumented claims.  No evidence has been presented and no charges were ever brought in court.  If you think shouting “Whoever he is, and whatever he’s charged with, he did it!” would be a nifty way to get out of jury duty, DRINK!

6. The President is going to speed past the fact that over 99% of the people he’s murdered have not been U.S. citizens, and that the pretense of justification so lazily applied to U.S. citizens has not been bothered with at all in these cases.  He’s not going to discuss “signature strikes” targeting unknown people and whoever’s near them, or the targeting of the rescuers of victims.  He’s not going to discuss children, women, seniors.  He’s not going to discuss the posthumous identification of males as “enemy combatants” — a non-legal term that adds insult to murder.  He’s not going to discuss the many known cases in which the victims could quite feasibly have been captured, were clearly not involved with al Qaeda in any way, and lacked any capacity whatsoever to threaten the United States.  He’s going to propose applying the fraudulent, meaningless, and illegal standards he applies to murdering U.S. citizens to murdering non-U.S. citizens in the future … in some countries.  If you can think of some people who might not be satisfied with this reform, DRINK!

7. The President is going to claim to be moving some but not all drone kill operations from a secret agency technically lacking in Congressional oversight to a department Congress simply chooses not to oversee.  If this falls short of what you can imagine when you hear “most transparent administration ever,” DRINK!

8. The President will not be speaking about how some 75 other nations with drones should begin applying his standards to their own behavior.  If you think such matters are worth discussing, DRINK!

9. The President is going to brush over the question of where and how he will be ordering the murder of people by means other than missiles.  If you can think of ways this might become seen as a problem down the road, DRINK!

10. The President is going to speed past the existence of a massive ongoing U.S. war on Afghanistan, larger now than when Obama moved into the White House, and expected to continue for many years after it “ends” in another year and a half.  If his ability to get away with this strikes you as perhaps what he must love most about drones and how they change the conversation, DRINK!

11. If you have concerns that go unanswered about the global expansion of U.S. bases, threats to Syria, weapons provided to Israel, threats to Iran, or the gargantuan military budget, DRINK!

12. The President will leak a great deal of information about his kill list program in this speech, as he has done on some previous “I killed bin Laden!” occasions, and yet will fail to prosecute himself for espionage at the end of the speech.  If you believe laws should be applied equally to all, DRINK! Read the rest of this entry →

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robin Rand, 12th Air Force commander, observes two Airmen with the 6th Reconnaissance Squadron as they demonstrate the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Field Training Unit simulators at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.

Congressional hearings, with a couple of excellent exceptions, question outside academics about the legality of this purported strategy.  The Obama administration declines to send any witnesses.

But drone pilots have begun talking to the media.  And they describe policies that bear a lot closer resemblance to reporting from the areas where the missiles strike.  These pilots should be brought before Congress.

Here is a stunning new interview with one of them:

“So the pilot is not only flying the airplane, he or she is using all those sensors to watch a potential target, circling over it for hours or days at a time. What can you really see?

“Okay, so in a village in, say, country X, where the houses are built together, there are adults who live in this house, and these children belong to those adults because we see them out in the fields together or we see them eating dinner. So you can start figuring out who is associated with who. Who is a stranger, who is it that’s visiting this house? There’s a dog and it barks at strangers, so if we needed to go in and free a hostage or conduct a raid, you’d want to tell the land forces there’s a dog there and either it’s an attack dog or it alerts the village that somebody’s coming.

“You must develop an emotional tie with the people on the ground that makes it hard if there is going to be a strike or a raid, people are going to be killed.

“I would couch it not in terms of an emotional connection, but a … seriousness. I have watched this individual, and regardless of how many children he has, no matter how close his wife is, no matter what they do, that individual fired at Americans or coalition forces, or planted an IED — did something that met the rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict, and I am tasked to strike that individual.  The seriousness of it is that I am going to do this and it will affect his family. But that individual is the one that brought it on himself. He became a combatant the minute he took up arms.”

This pilot, in fact this director of the Air Force Remotely Piloted Aircraft Capabilities Division, has not said that a high level operation leader of terrorists who is imminently threatening the United States is targeted.  He has said that some ordinary guy who has chosen to violently resist the hostile foreign occupation of his country by shooting at the occupiers is targeted.

He has also not said anything to satisfy those who support the notion of just wars but want them conducted in compliance with the Geneva Conventions and other such legally binding limitations.  This director of a U.S. drone kill program openly says that our public employees target a family for death if needed in order to blow up a foreign soldier from thousands of miles away.  Every effort is made to avoid killing innocent family members, he says in the interview, but if it can’t be avoided, well, the target “brought it on himself.”

Here another pilot describes specific such incidents.  Here the New York Times reports on the resulting PTSD suffered by drone pilots.

War is murder, and this type of war ought to look to most people like the murder that it is.  But even if you accept war, this is not how ANYBODY claims it is to be legally done.  This is beyond what Congressional witnesses or even Congress members would say is acceptable or legal.  Yet this pilot blurts it out to the media with apparently no concern that his life will be inconvenienced by further questioning.

Enough is enough is enough. End this madness now. Read the rest of this entry →

Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee hearing on drones was not your usual droning and yammering.  Well, mostly it was, but not entirely.  Of course, the White House refused to send any witnesses.  Of course, most of the witnesses were your usual professorial fare.

What wasn't heard at the Drone War hearing is as interesting as what was.

But there was also a witness with something to say.  Farea Al-Muslimi came from Yemen.  His village had just been hit by a drone strike last week.  He described the effects — all bad for the people of the village, for the people of Yemen, and for the United States and its mission to eliminate all the bad people in the world without turning any of the good people against it.

The usual droning and yammering that preceded and followed this testimony seemed more offensive than usual.  One witness summarized the general position of pointless witnesses who accept all common wisdom and have no information or insights to contribute:

If the drone strikes are part of war, that’s fine, she said.  But if they’re not part of war, then they’re murder.  But since the memos that “legalize” the drone strikes are secret, we don’t know whether they’re perfectly fine or murder.

That’s the common view of things.  But to say it in front of someone who knows something about the killing from the perspective of the victims seems particularly tasteless.

The basic facts are barely in dispute.  A single individual, President Barack Obama, is choosing to send missiles from drones into particular houses and buildings.  Most of the people being killed are innocent and not targeted.  Some of those targeted are not even identified.  Most of the others are identified as run-of-the-mill resisters to hostile foreign occupations of their or neighboring countries.  A handful are alleged to be imminent (meaning eventual theoretical) threats to the United States.  Many could easily have been arrested and put on trial, but were instead killed along with whoever was too close to them.

If this is not part of a war, apparently, then it’s murder.

But if it’s part of a war, supposedly, it’s fine.

It’s funny that murder is the only crime war erases.  Believers in civilized warfare maintain that, even in war, you cannot kidnap or rape or torture or steal or lie under oath or cheat on your taxes.  But if you want to murder, that’ll be just fine.

Believers in uncivilized war find this hard to grasp.  If you can murder, which is the worst thing possible, then why in the world — they ask — can you not torture a little bit too?

What is the substantive difference between being at war and not being at war, such that in one case an action is honorable and in the other it’s murder?  By definition, there is nothing substantive about it.  If a secret memo can legalize drone kills by explaining that they are part of a war, then the difference is not substantive or observable.  We cannot see it here in the heart of the empire, and Al-Muslimi cannot see it in his drone-struck village in Yemen.  The difference is something that can be contained in a secret memo.

This is apparently the case no matter whom a drone strike kills and no matter where it kills them.  The world is the battlefield, and the enemies are Muslims.  Young men in predominantly Muslim countries are posthumously declared enemies once a drone has killed them.  They must be enemies.  After all, they’re dead.

I wonder how this sounds to a young Muslim man who’s taken to heart the lesson that violence is righteous and that war is everywhere at all times.

Do people who blow up bombs at public sporting events think all together differently from people who blow up peaceful villages in Yemen?

Don’t tell me we can’t know because their memos are secret too.  Those who engage in murder believe that murder is justified.  The reasons they have (secret or known) are unacceptable.  Murder is not made into something else by declaring it to be part of a war.

War is, rather, made criminal by our recognition of it as mass murder.

Read the rest of this entry →

This coming Wednesday the House Judiciary Committee plans to hold a hearing on “Drones and the War On Terror: When Can the U.S. Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas?”

This is odd for a number of reasons.

1. Congressional committees usually don’t do anything at all on such matters.

2. The vast majority of the men, women, and children being killed have not been targeted.

3. The vast majority of the men, women, and children being killed or targeted have not been Americans.

4. The president’s nominee to direct the CIA refuses to deny that the president claims the power to kill Americans when they are not overseas, not to mention non-Americans within the United States and anyone at all overseas.

5. The three Americans we know the president has targeted and killed by drone strike in no way match up with the justifications for theoretical strikes found in the “white paper.”

6. The president is targeting and killing people with a variety of technologies, not just drones.

7. The only remotely legal or moral answer to the question asked by the hearing is “never.”

All such concerns will, of course, be brushed aside.  Congress ought to question the administration on its program of drone killing, regardless of what title the hearing is given, right?  But this is where things get really odd.  The witness list doesn’t include the president or a single person who works for him, no one from the CIA, no one from the White House, no one from the Pentagon, nobody from the Office of Legal Counsel. As far as we know, and it seems extremely likely to be the case, the committee has not subpoenaed any documents.  If it invited any government witnesses, it has not subpoenaed them or made any plans to figuratively or literally hold them in contempt.  Instead, all the witnesses are outside “experts” who won’t know any more about what’s going on than the rest of us.

A defender of this approach explained it to me thus: Senators and Representatives are often remarkably ignorant.  Senator Dianne Feinstein doesn’t even know that all military aged males killed by drone strikes are being declared militants.  Congress Members don’t even read newspapers.  If some smart experts testify at a public hearing, then elected officials can’t deny as many facts.  Plus, inviting government witnesses would just produce stonewalling or lying.

In my view, stonewalling and lying are reasons for subpoenas and contempt, not a complete abdication of the power of oversight.  It’s not that I think glorified public newspaper reading is worse than nothing.  I just think more is called for.

On the other hand, the notion that Congress needs more information before it should act is ludicrous.  What sort of memo could legalize murder?  What sort of due process could be applied to murder to make it not be murder?  As long as Congress is bringing in experts to talk about what’s already public knowledge, I’d like to propose a different type of witness.  If witnesses from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen are not deemed relevant, newspaper interpreters are not going to make them so.  I’d like to propose, then, as one of many actually useful witnesses a gentleman by the name of Leo Tolstoy, who had this to say well over a century ago:

“People are astonished that every year there are sixty thousand cases of suicide in Europe, and those only the recognized and recorded cases—and excluding Russia and Turkey; but one ought rather to be surprised that there are so few. Every man of the present day, if we go deep enough into the contradiction between his conscience and his life, is in a state of despair.

“Not to speak of all the other contradictions between modern life and the conscience, the permanently armed condition of Europe together with its profession of Christianity is alone enough to drive any man to despair, to doubt of the sanity of mankind, and to terminate an existence in this senseless and brutal world. This contradiction, which is a quintessence of all the other contradictions, is so terrible that to live and to take part in it is only possible if one does not think of it—if one is able to forget it.

“What! all of us, Christians, not only profess to love one another, but do actually live one common life; we whose social existence beats with one common pulse—we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness, and find in this closeness the whole meaning of life!—and to-morrow some crazy ruler will say some stupidity, and another will answer in the same spirit, and then I must go expose myself to being murdered, and murder men—who have done me no harm—and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, which is not only probable, but an inevitable certainty.

“To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man out of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end.

“And this is the only explanation of the dreadful intensity with which men of modern times strive to stupefy themselves, with spirits, tobacco, opium, cards, reading newspapers, traveling, and all kinds of spectacles and amusements. These pursuits are followed up as an important, serious business. And indeed they are a serious business. If there were no external means of dulling their sensibilities, half of mankind would shoot themselves without delay, for to live in opposition to one’s reason is the most intolerable condition. And that is the condition of all men of the present day. All men of the modern world exist in a state of continual and flagrant antagonism between their conscience and their way of life. This antagonism is apparent in economic as well as political life. But most striking of all is the contradiction between the Christian law of the brotherhood of men existing in the conscience and the necessity under which all men are placed by compulsory military service of being prepared for hatred and murder—of being at the same time a Christian and a gladiator.”

It seems to me that the occasion of publicly discussing the U.S. government’s targeting and killing U.S. citizens presents an opportunity for opening up even the narrowest of bigots to the contradiction between killing and protecting (whether or not one puts the latter in the religious terms of Tolstoy’s day — as I do not but most Congress Members sometimes pretend to).  Tolstoy may not be the ideal witness, as he’s dead.  But he does have the advantage of having already posed to himself better questions than anyone would ask him if he were alive. (You know they’d be asking about the latest film adaptation of Anna Karenina.)

“‘How can you kill people, when it is written in God’s commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”?’ I have often inquired of different soldiers. And I always drove them to embarrassment and confusion by reminding them of what they did not want to think about. They knew they were bound by the law of God, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and knew too that they were bound by their duty as soldiers, but had never reflected on the contradiction between these duties. The drift of the timid answers I received to this question was always approximately this: that killing in war and executing criminals by command of the government are not included in the general prohibition of murder. But when I said this distinction was not made in the law of God, and reminded them of the Christian duty of fraternity, forgiveness of injuries, and love, which could not be reconciled with murder, the peasants usually agreed, but in their turn began to ask me questions. ‘How does it happen,’ they inquired, ‘that the government [which according to their ideas cannot do wrong] sends the army to war and orders criminals to be executed.’ When I answered that the government does wrong in giving such orders, the peasants fell into still greater confusion, and either broke off the conversation or else got angry with me.

“‘They must have found a law for it. The archbishops know as much about it as we do, I should hope,’ a Russian soldier once observed to me. And in saying this the soldier obviously set his mind at rest, in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a law which authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their descendants, and millions of men, to serve as he was doing himself, and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or conundrum on my part.

“Everyone in our Christian society knows, either by tradition or by revelation or by the voice of conscience, that murder is one of the most fearful crimes a man can commit, as the Gospel tells us, and that the sin of murder cannot be limited to certain persons, that is, murder cannot be a sin for some and not a sin for others. Everyone knows that if murder is a sin, it is always a sin, whoever are the victims murdered, just like the sin of adultery, theft, or any other. At the same time from their childhood up men see that murder is not only permitted, but even sanctioned by the blessing of those whom they are accustomed to regard as their divinely appointed spiritual guides, and see their secular leaders with calm assurance organizing murder, proud to wear murderous arms, and demanding of others in the name of the laws of the country, and even of God, that they should take part in murder. Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in this conviction.”

Congress would hear something worth hearing from this witness, I believe.  But so might twenty-first century U.S. peasants as well. Read the rest of this entry →

The national religion of the United States of America is nationalism.  Its god is the flag.  Its prayer is the pledge of allegiance.

The flag’s powers include those of life and death, powers formerly possessed by traditional religions.  Its myths are built around the sacrifice of lives to protect against the evils outside the nation.  Its heroes are soldiers who make such sacrifices based on unquestioning faith.  A “Dream Act” that would give citizenship to those immigrants who kill or die for the flag embodies the deepest dreams of flag worship.  Its high priest is the Commander in Chief.  Its slaughter of infidels is not protection of a nation otherwise engaged, but an act that in itself completely constitutes the nation as it is understood by its devotees.  If the nation stopped killing it would cease to be.

What happens to myths like these when we discover that flying killer robots make better soldiers than soldiers do?  Or when we learn that the president is using those flying robots to kill U.S. citizens?  Which beliefs do we jettison to reduce the dissonance in our troubled brains?

Some 85% of U.S.ians, and shrinking rapidly, are theists.  Flag worship may be on the decline as well, but its numbers are still high.  A majority supports a ban on flag burning.  A majority supports the power of the president to kill non-U.S.ians with drones, while a significantly smaller percentage supports the president’s power to kill U.S. citizens with drones abroad.  That is to say, if the high priest declares someone an enemy of god, many people believe he should have the power to kill that enemy . . . unless that enemy is a U.S. citizen.  In secular terms, which make this reality seem all the crazier, many of us support acts of murder based on the citizenship of the victim.

Of course, the Commander in Chief kills U.S. citizens all the time by sending them into wars.  Drones don’t change that.  Drone pilots have committed suicide.  Drone pilots have been targeted and killed by retaliatory suicide bombings.  Drones have killed U.S. citizens through accidental “friendly” fire.  The hostility that drones are generating abroad has motivated terrorist attacks and attempted attacks abroad and within the national borders of the United States.

But feeding corpses to our holy flag looks different when we’re feeding them directly to the president’s flying robots without a foreign intermediary.  And yet to approximately a quarter of the U.S. public it doesn’t look different after all.  The president, in their own view, should have the power to kill them, or at least the power to kill anyone (including U.S. citizens) so contaminated as to be standing outside the United States of America — a frightening and primitive realm that many U.S.ians have never visited and feel no need to ever visit.

Popular support for murder-by-president drops off significantly if “innocent civilians may also be killed.”  But a religious belief system perpetuates itself not through the positions it takes on existing facts so much as through its ability to select which facts one becomes aware of and which facts remain unknown.

Read the rest of this entry →

John Brennan - Caricature

When CIA nominee John Brennan faced the Senate Select Committee on So-Called Intelligence on Thursday, countless critical and cutting questions had been prepared by bloggers and journalists.  None of them were asked.

Brennan might have been asked why he’d lied about the killing of bin Laden or about the murder by drone program.  He had claimed that every target was known, even though he was fully aware that people were being targeted without identifying them (using so-called signature strikes).  He had claimed that there were zero collateral deaths, even though independent reports have produced hundreds of names, identities, and photographs, and even though the U.S. Ambassador in Pakistan told a delegation of peace activists that there was a U.S. government count of civilian deaths and he wouldn’t reveal what it was.

Brennan might have been asked how in the world it can be legal, according to a “white paper” leaked on Monday, for a “high official” to order the murder of a human being, American or non-American, without judicial or legislative or public or international oversight — or even with such oversight.  He might have been asked if he is one such high official. He might have been asked whether there was a memo to justify the murder of the three Americans thus far known to have been intentionally murdered, since none of them seem to fit the qualifications laid out in the “white paper.”  He might have been asked what the procedure would be if two “high officials” disagreed on the desirability of murdering a particular American.  He might have been asked what authority would certify that a targeted victim could not be captured rather than killed.  He might have been confronted with the rise in hostility toward the U.S. government being generated.  He might have been asked about the United Nations investigation of the murder by drone program as criminal.

We Virginians were represented in the hearing room by Senator Mark Warner.  He claimed what he called the “honor” of introducing the nominee, and expressed his pride that Brennan lives in Virginia along with much of the “intelligence community.”  Warner hyped his effort to create a U.S. Intelligence Professionals Day (which presumably we’ll celebrate silently in our minds), praised Brennan in the vaguest of terms by reading through his resume, declared him ready to be confirmed pre-questioning, and outrageously asserted that Brennan backed “greater transparency” and “adherence to the rule of law.”  A major news story in the preceding 24 hours had been the White House’s refusal to tell the public or even the legislature exactly what it was pretending that the law was.

The most informative and valuable portion of the hearing was produced by Toby Blome, Ann Wright, David Barrows, JoAnn Lingle, Alli McCracken, Eve Tetaz, Joan Nicholson, and Jonathan Tucker, who took turns interrupting the proceedings to ask what needed to be asked.  The message that some Americans do not favor murdering children abroad was thus communicated to the world.  Many others were prepared to add their voices in that room, but Chairwoman Feinstein kicked everyone out except for a handful of Good Americans, and the hearing proceeded with a mostly empty room.  The “Intelligence” Committee is of course used to holding hearings in an entirely empty room with the door locked.

Senator Warner’s chance to ask questions, despite having already declared his support, would come later in the hearing.  By that point, Warner had to work with not only Brennan’s pathetic written answers to a series of weak questions presented to him prior to the hearing, but all of his answers to other Senators during the hearing up to that point.  Remarkably, during the hearing, on more than one occasion, Brennan claimed to have believed (despite voluminous public evidence) that torture was an effective tool.  He did not claim to have believed that as a child, or to have believed it 10 years ago.  He claimed to have believed it up until last week when he took the time to read part of the Senate committee’s report, as he had been shamed and pressured into doing.  He said he was shocked to learn that torture was not an effective tool.  Also during the hearing, before Warner’s turn came, Brennan repeatedly refused to call waterboarding torture and claimed that only a lawyer could make that judgment.  Note that he was asking to direct an agency involved in torturing people, identifying himself as a non-lawyer, and declaring that only a lawyer could determine what torture was.  Brennan also, by the time Warner’s turn came around, had refused to list the nations in which the United States is murdering people.  He had also repeatedly confessed to having had “inside control” of the underwear bomber.
Read the rest of this entry →

Charlottesville City Hall. The city just became the first in the USA to pass a resolution restricting the use of drones.

Shortly after 11 p.m. on Monday, February 4th, the City Council of Charlottesville, Va., passed what is believed to be the first anti-drone resolution in the country.  According to my notes, and verifiable soon on the City Council’s website, the resolution reads:

[Editor's Note: For more on this topic, see David Swanson's Resolution for Drone Free Skies. -MyFDL Editor]

Assorted Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

No city is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.

I write from Charlottesville, Va., but am hopeful that this message applies to your city, town, or county as well.

In the absence of state or federal laws, localities around the United States are proceeding to put unmanned aerial vehicles in our skies as they see fit.  The federal government has authorized the flight of 30,000 drones, and the use of drones up to 400 feet by police departments, at least 300 of which already have surveillance drones in operation.

States and localities can ban or regulate such actions.  Or they can proceed to endanger our health and our civil rights.

In Montgomery County, Texas, the Sheriff showed off a drone to the media but crashed it into his armored vehicle (thereby, I guess, proving that he needed an armored vehicle).

When the Dept. of Homeland Security challenged the University of Texas-Austin to hack into a drone and take control of it, the response was “No problem,” and it was quickly done.

Drones are not safe.  Surveillance by drones cannot comply with the Fourth Amendment.  And the arming of drones with tear gas and rubber bullets, already underway in many U.S. localities, is an outrageous threat to our First Amendment right to assemble and petition our governments for a redress of grievances.

If Charlottesville were to remain silent while (how shall I put this delicately?) crack-pot cities continue setting de facto law, we would all be worse off.

Charlottesville City Council routinely informs the state general assembly of its wishes.  That state assembly has already been considering legislation on drones.  Charlottesville has a responsibility to speak up, as well as to act locally on its own behalf.

Moreover, Charlottesville’s influence spreads.  Its past resolutions on Iraq, military spending, uranium, and other matters have inspired other localities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to raise their voices as well.  Some of these resolutions have been directed to the federal government, to which the residents of Charlottesville pay taxes and whose laws the residents of Charlottesville are subject to.

This is how our republic is supposed to work.  City council members in Virginia take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Cities and towns routinely send petitions to Congress for all kinds of requests. This is allowed under Clause 3, Rule XII, Section 819, of the Rules of the House of Representatives. This clause is routinely used to accept petitions from cities, and memorials from states, all across America. The same is established in the Jefferson Manual, the rule book for the House originally written by Thomas Jefferson for the Senate.

In 1967 a court in California ruled (Farley v. Healey , 67 Cal.2d 325) that “one of the purposes of local government is to represent its citizens before the Congress, the Legislature, and administrative agencies in matters over which the local government has no power. Even in matters of foreign policy it is not uncommon for local legislative bodies to make their positions known.”

Abolitionists passed local resolutions against U.S. policies on slavery. The anti-apartheid movement did the same, as did the nuclear freeze movement, the movement against the PATRIOT Act, the movement in favor of the Kyoto Protocol, etc.

We are not an island.  If we become environmentally sustainable, others will ruin our climate.  If we ban assault weapons, they’ll arrive at our borders.  And if the skies of the United States are filled with drones, it will become ever more difficult for Charlottesville to keep them out.

Just over a year ago, the Charlottesville City Council passed a resolution calling for an end to “foreign ground and drone wars.”  U.S. drone wars are now under investigation by the United Nations as possible crimes.  We now know that individuals are targeted without so much as identifying their names.  We now know that hundreds of children have been killed.  We now know that at least three Americans have been targeted and killed.  The view of our city should be restated in the context of local and state actions on drones.  This is an action desired by local people, affecting local people, and costing the local budget exactly nothing.

Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind.  Therefore, send not to know  For whom the bell tolls,  It tolls for thee.
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David Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and War Is A Crime and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization RootsAction. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and Facebook.  Subscribe or unsubscribe from David’s email lists here. Read the rest of this entry →