On 30th September last year, A CIA drone fired a Hellfire missile to kill Anwar al Awlaki. We all know about that. Less well known is the day another drone killed his 16 year old son, Abdulrahman.
On Oct. 14, U.S. drones pounded targets again, this time hundreds of kilometres away in the southeastern region of Azzan.
Abdulrahman, also born in the U.S., and his 17-year-old cousin were among the seven killed. They were apparently having a barbecue.
At first, media outlets reported that Abdulrahman was five years older than his actual age, had been militant like his father and, that a high-value Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) target was also among the dead.
But his grandfather, Nasser al Awlaki, a Fulbright scholar, former agricultural minister and prominent figure in Yemen, said Abdulrahman had nothing to do with his father since he had gone into hiding in 2009.
Nasser al Awlaki has never apologized for his son’s radical views, but said he had also worked hard to insulate his grandchildren from the controversy. He attempted, he said, to give them a ”œnormal life.”
Furious at the inaccurate reporting, he released his grandson’s birth certificate. It reads: ”œAbdulrahman Anwar al-Aulaqi (another English spelling of the last name). Born: Denver, Colorado. Sept. 13, 1995.”
It later emerged, but was not widely reported, that the strike did not kill its purported target, AQAP’s media chief, Egyptian Ibrahim al Bana.
The U.S. administration has refused comment.
We’ve been told that Obama personally reviews every drone strike in his assassination program, the one in which “due process and judicial process are not one and the same“, after a secret panel puts someone on the hit list. Killing an American minor without trial, when even the national law doesn’t allow the execution of minors, is surely a crime of the highest order. I’ll personally be holding Obama to the same bipartisan standard I held Bush – he should face a full civil trial of the kind he has failed to afford to too many. That’s the bottom line for me, and despite expecting many calls to support Obama in the coming election “because a Republican would be worse”, in good conscience I cannot do so.
Anyone capable of becoming President today would do the same. Several have done so before Obama and there will be more.
To tweak a ’60s manta: What if they gave an election and nobody came?
I may be showing my age, but I’m going to vote for Pogo.
It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.
if they make the ballot here in Virginia. I don’t agree with all their positions, but they’re light years better than the Dems or Reps. I’m still willing to bet they wouldn’t do anything like this. Not 100% on that though…
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them,and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows,or with both~FDouglas
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them,and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows,or with both~FDouglas
Always keep an open mind and a compassionate heart. ~ Phil Jackson
Two officially recognized candidates as of April 8.
The Convention will be held in Baltimore on July 14.
Being Green: Presidential hopeful Jill Stein aims to rebuild a broken system
Grist, By Greg Hanscom, April 6
Lost amid the carnival of embarrassments that is the Republican presidential primary is the fact that there is another primary race underway: the Green Party’s. “What?†you say. “Those guys are still around?†Well yes, but they’re not guys.
The front-runner in the race is Jill Stein, a Boston physician and veteran activist and candidate with the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party. (Note to the good people of the Bay State: We get that you’re trying to be inclusive, but a name like that is NO WAY to win respect in the world.) She is currently trouncing the second-place runner, former sitcom star Roseanne Barr. (Note to the good people of the Green Party: Oh, never mind …)
Lest you think this is all rainbows and ponies, however, Stein is not messing around. She says she became involved in politics after witnessing firsthand the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, learning disorders, autism — problems that she traces to toxic chemicals, an industrial food system, and a society built around the automobile.
Stein’s presidential platform includes universal health care, tuition-free higher education, and forgiveness of student debt. And at the center of it all is a Green New Deal that she says will put millions of people to work, tackle the climate crisis, and address our failing health as well.
The Green Party will choose its candidate for president at a national convention in Baltimore in July. If things continue as they have been, Stein will win the spot handily. (She has won 10 of 10 state primaries, plus the District of Columbia.) I talked with her earlier this week.
Continued at the link.
Green Party Watch Blog.
…then it is “worth” killing the American citizen son standing beside him. I have a real tough time with where this whole mode of thinking leads – seems to me that if it’s “worth” killing any foreign national in this way, it’s “worth” killing the American – particularly involved, active ones – standing beside him. If you’d accept a given level of collateral if it was foreign nationals, then you’d better be willing to accept the same level of collateral if it happens to include Americans.
Getting wrapped up in the Americanness of who’s on the receiving end of the ordnance is just another way of chanting “USA, USA” – it’s just more politically palatable.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
although they are against nuclear power and are kind of iffy on science and technology–well, mostly I’m worried that they share some mental space with the pseudo-scientific parts of the health and wellness and environmental communities.
To clarify, there are definitely legitimate concerns in these areas, but I cringe every time someone talks about how everything will give you cancer, how you need to cleanse the toxins in your body, how diet X is definitely causing condition Y, etc. I get the feeling that people with these concerns will tend to vote Green a bit more.
But frankly I’ll take that any day over the other political parties that want the President to have the power to unilaterally assassinate people, want to bust down doors to arrest marijuana users, and that think government can at best just barely function and at worst needs to be chopped up into bits and fed to private sector cronies. Plus, the Greens seem like they actually are looking to the future, not staring at their feet in the present (Dems) or looking to the past for inspiration (Reps).
Unfortunately your argument flows the wrong way. The “Americanness of who’s on the receiving end” just represents the extreme end of policy that is inherently wrong. As Americans we are supposed to be protected by a constitutional due process imperative. The argument should then be that all human beings should be similarly protected except in the case of a real war. The fact that even our constitutional due process protections have been all but abrogated for the sake of our phony “wars” against terrorism or drugs or black people generally etc., should be, if we were in the least bit interested, the galvanizing step towards the assertion of rights that we claim distinguish us from the “bad” guys.
..you have the choice of engaging in what you call phoney war – so that you can disengage from Afghanistan (this has been the strategy and it has about run its course) – or prosecute an actual real war in Afghanistan indefinitely. Your citizenry has spoken quite loudly on the matter, if not eloquently or morally. Their lack of willingness to bear the costs associated with the “should” you mention, well, in my book that’s pretty shitty (I won’t even get into how none of us should ever again trust American high command in combined ops). If the last fig leaf that all of y’all can grasp onto is not slotting your countrymen, well, that’s a pretty low standard but one that’s of a piece with the exceptionalism the rest of us have become accustomed to.
If one of my countrymen decides that transnational terrorism is what he wants to devote himself to and he’s viably striving to put anyone’s blood on his hands, in my view it’s our responsibility to bring him in if we can and to put him down if we can’t. Odds are real good that it wouldn’t be us paying the butcher’s bill if we let him run, but that’s frankly unacceptable.
“If they’re shooting at you, it’s a high intensity conflict.” ~ Murphy
Let me pose this question to you. If a suspected murderer lived next door to you would you find it tolerable if, without making an effort to capture him and put him on trial, your local constabulary simply bombed his building? If your answer is yes then obviously you don’t understand the concept of due process, if no then:
Neither you nor anyone else has made a reasonable argument telling me why or how the “war on terrorism” is properly a war and not something better handled through effective police work. In fact, I would say that the outcomes of boots on the ground or bombs from the air warfare in this regard have been an unconscionable, unmitigated failure.
Despite your having repeated this more than several times I don’t see how my arguments favoring extending due process protections to anyone, any where that is the proper target of police work by my nation which supposedly believes in the quaint notion of due process constitutes some sort of exceptionalism.
Even in law enforcement it is entirely permissible under some circumstances to shoot someone quite dead without attempting to arrest them. It doesn’t happen very often and no one likes it or wants to talk about it much, but it does happen.
If you wish to make an argument that the war on terrorism should primarily – even overwhelmingly – be a law enforcement type operation, then we’re in pretty much complete agreement. If you want to make the argument that too militaristic an approach is counter-productive, again we’re in agreement. However, when you take directed lethal action off the table completely, I think you’re backing yourself into a corner you don’t want to be in and the unintended consequences make moral purity pretty expensive.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
Not necessarily dsagreeing, JPD, but if “moral purity” was cheap and easy to have, it’d be more widespread.
That said – you’re sorta missing the point. I agree with what you say on a practical level up until you don’t mention the bit where, after a law enforcement dude shoots someone without arresting him, there’s meant to be a transparent enquiry process and serious legal consequences if it’s found he acted beyond the law’s remit. That’s part of “due process” too, following the basic premise of “universal law”.
There’s none of that in Obama’s hit list program. Instead there’s a carte-blanche to decide someone is killeable and then simply kill them, without accountability at any point in the process.
Thanks Steve.
Lethal force is not off the table if someone, duly charged, resists arrest. Inasmuch as we are in agreement on the basic idea that these “terrorists” are better seen as criminals, I repose my hypothetical to you, JPD, what about the suspected murderer next door? And why should we behave differently here.
As to the unintended consequences argument, which I understand, when do we ever get off the treadmill that our initial rounds of extra-legal behavior set us on?
…but let’s extend it to be a bit more real comparison. Guy’s an accused murderer, he’s barricaded absolutely beyond reach – any police team that you put in to try and arrest him, he can kill, absolute given that there is no hope of a successful resolution to the situation – he further asserts that he has the means to support mass casualty attacks (say, undetectable, pre-positioned remote detonated devices) and that he intends to do so – you know all this to be true. What do you do?
Me, I say pass me the SOFLAM – I’ll designate the target myself.
As to the unintended consequences, actually I don’t think folks particularly grasp that one. As an external observer, I’d have to say that you’re not choosing between law enforcement and military approaches – you’re choosing between extra-legal approaches and full out war between states.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
…pretend that things like capital trials in absentia can ever really be fair (as has been the Israeli approach) or to acknowledge that sometimes reality does require extra-judicial approaches. Me, I’d rather firewall the judicial system than let someone slip the thin end of the wedge in there.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
Well so far I haven’t seen anyone who meets that description – not Osama not the kid or father that are the subjects of this thread. So it is not particularly real. No need to go extra-legal. Even the sovereignty issues were dealt with in both cases and I see no reason to believe that the accused could not have been brought back here for a criminal trial.
You mean those same sovereignty issues that had Pakistan quietly co-operating with drone strikes but damned near severing relations entirely over the ObL strike, those sovereignty issues? The simple reality is that “host” governments are a hell of a lot more tolerant of deniable drone strikes than they are of boots on the ground approaches.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
The sovereignty issues that we resolved over the Pakistani’s later protest that got us boots on the ground enough to take Osama’s body if not his soul into U.S. custody.
…are so far from resolved that it takes hours for light to travel from where they’re at to the spot marked “resolution”.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
Irony.