Glenn Greenwald points out that we've apparently learned nothing at all:
Here we have almost half of the U.S. Senate — liberals, moderates and conservatives — jointly demanding an escalation with Iran and all but endorsing a war before the U.S. Government even proposes one. Has the American political and media class learned a single lesson from the Iraq debacle?
Glenn Greenwald pushes back against those who think we are safer in light of the past decade of American aggression, including military aggression provoked by the Obama administration:
"Far from believing that another 9/11 can’t happen, I’m amazed that it hasn’t already, and am quite confident that at some point it will. How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?"
A recent article in the New York Times confirms Barack Obama's personal involvement in the use of drones to assassinate persons in Pakistan and elsewhere:
"Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be."
I realize that Barack Obama's unrelenting series of drone assassinations is an intensely inconvenient topic for many of the people who voted for him. I understand this reluctance to consider this topic because I too voted for Barack Obama. Back in 2008, I heard Obama repeatedly promise that he would quickly end American involvement in Afghanistan.Ralph Nader asks why we aren't hearing an outcry by lawyers, whose duty it is to be the first responders when a politician shreds the Constitution.
The drones have killed civilians, families with small children, and even allied soldiers in this undeclared war based on secret “facts” and local grudges (getting even). These attacks are justified by secret legal memos claiming that the president, without any Congressional authorization, can without any limitations other than his say-so, target far and wide assassinations of any “suspected terrorist,” including American citizens. The bombings by Mr. Obama, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, trample proper constitutional authority, separation of powers, and checks and balances and constitute repeated impeachable offenses. That is, if a pathetic Congress ever decided to uphold its constitutional responsibility, including and beyond Article I, section 8’s war-declaring powers. ... Sadly, the bulk of our profession, as individuals and through their bar associations, has remained quietly on the sidelines. They have turned away from their role as “first-responders” to protect the Constitution from its official violators. [The New York Times recently] reported that a weekly role of the president is to personally select and order a “kill list” of suspected terrorists or militants via drone strikes or other means. The reporters wrote that this personal role of Obama’s is “without precedent in presidential history.” Adversaries are pulling him into more and more countries – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other territories.
Glenn Greenwald discusses the definition of "militant" with Amy Goodman:
Well we, of course don’t imply that the President of the United States believes that he has the power to order people to killed — assassinated — in total secrecy, without any due process, without transparency or oversight of any kind. I really do believe it’s literally the most radical power that a government and a President can seize, and yet the Obama administration has seized this power and exercised it aggressively with very little controversy. What the New York Times article does is it adds some important, though very disturbing details. Probably the most disturbing of which is that one of the reasons why the Obama administration runs around claiming that the casualties of civilians are so low from their drone attacks, which everyone knows is false, is because they have redefined what a militant is. A militant in the eyes of the Obama administration formally means any male of fighting age, presumably 18 to 40, who is in a strike zone of a missile. So, if the U.S. shoots a missile or detonates a bomb by drone or aircraft and kills eight or a dozen or two dozen people without even knowing whom they have killed or anything about them, they will immediately label any male of a certain age a militant by virtue of their proximity to that scene. What the New York Times article said, was that the rationale for this is that they believe that anybody who is even near a terrorist or any terrorist activity is "Probably up to no good." Ironically, that is, as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News pointed out, the exact phrase that George Zimmerman used when describing Trayvon Martin to the 9-1-1 call, that he must be up to no good. The sort of suspicion, that even though we don’t know anything about somebody, the mere happenstance of where they are or what they’re doing entitles us not just to harbor a suspicion about them, but to kill them. And it is amazing that American media outlets continue to use the word "militant" to describe people are killed by American drones without knowing their identity, even though we now know that the Obama administration uses that word in a incredibly deceitful and propagandistic way. And the fact that Obama, himself, is sitting at the top of this pyramid, making decisions about life and death — issuing death sentences without a shred of oversight or transparency, really ought to be provoking widespread outrage, and yet with the exception of a few circles and factions it really isn’t. . . . he’s has been embracing these radical theories of executive power that even George Bush’s former former CIA and NSA chief General Michael Haden has lavishly praised and other Bush officials are over the moon about in terms of President Obama endorsing them. So, we know his policies have been extremist and radical, but here you have one of the most controversial things that a president can do — ordering an American citizen assassinated by the CIA in total secrecy with no due process, never been charged with a crime, even though they could have charged him if they really had evidence as they claim, that he was guilty of plotting terrorist attacks. Instead of charging him, they simply secretly ordered his assassination, and it turns out there was no struggling in terms of the difficult constitutional and ethical and legal issues this a obviously presents. According to the President’s own aides, they’re boasting to the New York Times that he has declared that this was an "Easy" decision, not anything that he struggled with, something that he made quite easily. So, we find out that not only is exercising this radical power, he is not even having any struggles with conscience or constitutional questions or legal or intellectual quandaries about it. It’s something that his national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, also bragged to the New York Times about. It shows how "Comfortable" he is using force, even against American citizens. That I think reflects really on the type of person that occupies the Oval Office.