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- Congress has been so quiescent on the growth of the national security state that I am inclined to think the it was a net positive, albeit one that is unlikely to be very effectual.
- I would be a lot more excited about it if there was any evidence that Paul’s position on targeted assassinations was different than the Obama administration’s. (To the extent that I’m more skeptical than most civil libertarians, the problem isn’t so much that he’s a bad messenger as that his message on drones isn’t very good, and attempts to cast him as a civil libertarian tend to involve a lot of projection.)
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For one thing, Paul opposes the legal reasoning the Obama administration uses to justify its killing of American citizens overseas. (Or what we know of it from the White Paper.) Did a pretty good job of decimating it, actually.
You don’t know exactly what the Obama administration’s position is on targeted killing, because it refuses to tell us. Paul pressed the Obama administration to define whom it believe it has the authority to kill — a key, perhaps the key, legal question.
It would have been nice if a liberal Senator joined the filibuster or initiated his/her own to highlight, say, signature strikes. Alas, it was not to be.
It would have been nice if a liberal Senator joined the filibuster
Like Ron Wyden? At this point I just have to believe that you’re a deliberate liar.
Unfortunately, he didn’t really focus on its impact overseas. Indeed, almost all the pushback from pols — from Wyden, from Angus King, from Udall, from Paul — has focused on the killing of Americans, whether in the country or abroad. (Leahy, encouragingly, has threatened to subpoena all the OLC memos, to the extent that threat can be encouraging.)
For one thing, Paul opposes the legal reasoning the Obama administration uses to justify its killing of American citizens overseas.
If Paul believes that the authority for the assassinations that Paul supports (i.e. any that don’t involve Americans on American soil) derives from Article II rather than from Congress, this would be worse, rather than better.
No, like every person in Congress, he believes it derives from the 2001 AUMF, but he thinks the Obama administration is exceeding the authority it grants. Incidentally, it seems that so do lawyers in the Obama admin, who are urging a new AUMF.
Targeted killing against an admitted al-Qaeda member engaged in operations with other al-Qaeda members in Yemen definitely is covered by AUMF.
For one thing, Paul opposes the legal reasoning the Obama administration uses to justify its killing of American citizens overseas.
Then maybe he should have filibustered about *that*. He didn’t. From Rand Paul’s actual, real filibuster and not from the one he gave in fairyland:
This was about drone strikes on American citizens in the United States, the biggest are-you-fucking-kidding-me-with-this-shit non-issue in American politics since the last time Rand Paul opened his mouth.
I’ll note that this has already been explained several times in the relevant threads. You don’t seem to be taking it on board, though, so I thought what the hell, let’s roll it up the hill again.
I’m starting to think no of his critics watched his filibuster. He spoke for hours and covered a range of topics. For example, he advocated civilian trial for terrorism suspects and, as I said, tore apart the White Paper, and that was only in the hour or so that I watched.
he advocated civilian trial for terrorism suspects
Shame he voted the opposite way.
Come on now, you know we are never supposed to judge folks by their actual actions, just the pretty words they say.
Oh, you’ve seen John McCain too?
That’s not what that vote was. There was no guarantee that moving Gitmo detainees would have resulted in civilian trials.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/creating-gitmo-north-alarming-step-says-aclu
That’s from a press release in which the ACLU says creating Gitmo North would be alarming. There was — is — a debate in the human rights community whether it would be a net plus, or would further entrench the system of injustice.
I’m not saying that Paul voted the way he did because of civil liberties concerns — I really don’t know — just that your link doesn’t prove your claim.
Sweet Fucking Jesus.
It’s actually even worse than that:
http://prospect.org/article/rand-paul-good-civil-liberties
At least that’s where he was a few years ago, when he was running for office.
So you are agreeing that last week’s speech was about suckering the rubes?
To the extent that sincerity matters, I suspect he’s entirely sincere in opposing drone strikes on Americans, just as he’s sincere (or at least consistent) in opposing the Patriot Act, and to the extent that he’s questioning the President’s legal authority to kill and calling for transparency, it’s a good thing.
More generally, Rand, because he wants to be presidency, balances libertarian views (like those of his father) with the need to make clear he still happy to kill poor brown people. Up until recently, he was still defending the war in Afghanistan.
He’s never going, for example, going to associate himself with an ad like this. An ad that actually includes the word peace (complete with a peace sign) and love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjK0YNBBTaQ
Looks like you get it, Josh is addressing this also:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/03/rand_paul_and_the_black_helicopters.php?ref=fpblg
http://editors.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/03/rand_paul_and_the_black_drones.php?ref=fpblg
Again, this is the same scam his dad has pulled for decades:
1. Fabricate a conspiracy theory about black people in the federal government coming for you and your family.
2. Raise money and build support network on the suckers who fall for it.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a newsletter or a 13-hour filibuster, it’s the same scam. Sorry if I’m repeating what I said on the other thread but I think it bears repeating.
The funny thing, Random, is watching people who’ve always laughed the right wing’s conspiracy theories – the DHS memo, the FEMA camps, the black helicopters, all the 90s shit – fall all over themselves to be the first in the sucker line this time.
Drones do funny things to people’s heads.
Peace, Gold and Love, baby!
You forgot guns
And weed.
And, uh, weed.
There was a guarantee that keeping them in Guantanamo would result in no civilian trials, and Paul voted for that.
Glenn Greenwald also supported keeping them in Guantanamo, lying to his audience that moving them into the US somehow made their chance of getting a trial less likely, not more.
There was no guarantee that moving Gitmo detainees would have resulted in civilian trials.
No, there were no guarantees but one: there aren’t going to be any civilian trials if the defendants stay at Guantanamo, given that there are no civilian judges or juries there.
Christ, Mizner, how you desperately grasp at straws to support your illusions about Obama!
David manages opposes the Obama administration’s legal doctrine, while also insisting that we don’t know what it is.
The shreds of info we’ve seen — whether in the Brennan and Holder speeches or in the White Paper — have serious legal problems. Which is surely part of the reason why the White House doesn’t want us to see the OLC memos.
“shreds of info”
You have no shame. You don’t have the slightest regard for the people you’re talking to, do you? You don’t feel any compunction to be honest or fair at all. Whatever might make you feel good to say, or that you think would be politically useful for other people to believe, you say, even when you know it’s bullshit.
And you want us to pay attention to you.
There are eleven — eleven — memos. The public has seen none of them.
Why do they even need a memo to justify deploying military force against groups and individuals that are unarguably covered by even a narrow reading of AUMF?
Al-Awlaki’s relationship to the people who attacked us on 9/11 is well-established, at the time of his death he was putting out multiple public statements announcing his intention to launch future acts of international terrorism against the US and conducting operations pursuant to same.
Obama used his lawful authority to determine that al-Awlaki was a terrorist and then authorized military force against him.
This is not in some murky gray zone of the law, it’s well-established at this point that he can do this. If you have a problem with the broad legal authority the President has then get Congress to repeal it.
David needs the long-form memos, because these white papers, testimony, and letters could all be fabricated by them.
If you’re going to go bagger, I guess you go full bagger.
Has no one told him that you NEVER go Full Bag-Tard?
What are these legal problems? The Executive has the authority to use military force against people who are members of an organizations led by bin Laden’s secretary and 9/11 conspirator Ibrahim al-Zawahiri.
You don’t understand how these things work, David. I’ve done legal research memos for decision-makers, like judges. I don’t get to make the decisions. What I tell the judge (or told–most of this was actually a couple of decades back) is confidential. The judge’s decision, however, is public, and the decision belongs to the judge–the judge is responsible to the electorate for the decision, and the judge’s reasoning is whatever reasoning the judge employed, not what some law clerk or advisor told her.
So, right or wrong, these decisions are Obama’s, and the reasoning behind the decision is–whatever Obama was thinking, not what some advisor told him.
Contrast this to the Bush/Yoo method, which was to generate memos to leak, after the fact, so that the president could claim, “I sought and obtained legal advice, and followed it–I’m not responsible, and my actions (because of my reliance on advice of counsel) were not criminal!”
Wow you’re a lawyer? Scary. But it makes sense.
Wow you’re a lawyer? Scary.
Don’t be scared–I’ve no plans to sue you.
Certain banks and insurance companies, however, tremble at my name . . .
Uh oh, now other black helicopter racist libertarians are calling for the President to release the OLC memos: Barbara Lee, Conyers, Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison, Honda…
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/there-are-democrats-whod-like-answers.html
If only they had a lawyer like you on staff to tell they how foolish they are.
I don’t see the part where they express concern over the President blowing people up inside the US.
Several of the questions they do ask are valid, but not the question that Rand was upset over, and are addressed pretty definitively by the white paper. Including the bizarre notion that the White House changed the definition of ‘imminent’, since they certainly didn’t.
I guess there’s something sort of admirable in the way you condescend to people who actually know shit about the things you ramble on mindlessly about. Makes for a consistent character, anyway.
I’ve only recently realized that David Mizner isn’t David Mixner
I wondered about that.
If your assertion is true that we didn’t already know the answer to that question before the filibuster, how come I and everybody else I’ve talked to about it already knew the answer to that question before the filibuster?
Rand Paul only opposes targeted killing because he doesn’t want to be taxed to pay for the bullets.
Is this more accurate? If the States did it, well…
Although, I think that would be very close to a true and accurate summary of Ron Paul’s opinion on the matter, I’m not so sure about Rand.
I with the above paragraph were a joke.
I wonder if Rand Paul would also support issuing letters of marque and reprisal to allow
BlackwaterXeAcademi to assassinate whoever they see fit.Is the Paul, Lee, Udall, Wyden group talking about repealing the AUMF? If not, why not?
FlipYrWhig, because repealing (or amending) the AUMF would require Congressmen to actually take a stand on what to do about the threat of terrorism. That’s hard work!
Barbara Lee is the only Congress person I’m aware of who has proposed a bill that would repeal the AUMF. Of course she cast one of the great dissenting votes in history when she voted against it.
I’d feel better about the possibility of Paul spearheadig at least some pushback by Congress against executive war and police powers if it wasn’t couched in language that played heavily to the paranoid gun nut militia wing of the GOP, i.e. Democrat president/Agenda 21/Sharia Law/etc. He basically delivered the Wayne LaPierre brief against drone strikes.
I don’t think Paul has a problem per se with drone strikes against U.S. citizens on our soil. I think he, like all Republicans, has a problem with Barack Obama or any future Democratic president holding and justifying such power. Remember, it’s not the Unitary Executive Theory, it’s the Unitary Republican Executive Theory.
(My problem isn’t with drone strikes themselves, although I do find them troubling enough. It’s with the secrecy surrounding them and the concomitant lack of democratic transparency and accountability. Congress and the executive are co-conspirators on this, though I think more fault lies with Congress.)
Someone–probably here–linked to an appearance Paul made on the Limbaugh show recently, where Paul was _clearly_ making reference to the DHS “domestic extremism” report: he mentioned missing fingers and stained clothing as signs of potential involvement in domestic terrorism, and the DHS report is where those come from. Paul’s whole objective, then, was to seek assurances that the president couldn’t deem right-wing domestic extremists terrorists who could then be assassinated by drone strike. That way he could pose as the person who stuck it Obama and Holder by making them have to make it clear that that couldn’t be done. Anything else that could be done with a drone, or by assassination order, I am confident he had not the least interest in.
I do. I think Ron Paul, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Ted Cruz, Pat Toomey, and ever Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice are all absolutely against drone strikes against US citizens on our soil, and know perfectly well that the Constitution wouldn’t allow them.
This is a completely made-up controversy. Its advocates are straining implausibly hard to find even the slightest excuse to spout their bullshit, and that’s why you have bloggers pretending that Eric Holder is some sort of crafty evil genius for saying “No” to a question that used the phrase “engaged in combat,” which has now suddenly become an ambiguous concept, open to all sorts of sneaky interpretations.
I’m assuming that by “drone strike” you specifically mean “military drone strike”.
Because SWAT drones are coming. And there won’t be anything unconstitutional about the police using a drone to take out a sniper if it isn’t unconstitutional to use a cop with a gun to take out the sniper.
(Swear to god I do not understand why people make such a goddamn deal about the technology being used to kill people rather than the killing of people. It’s like we’re all Pope Innocent II worried about the fact that crossbows can kill people more efficiently than swords rather than worrying about the killing itself.)
There’s something to be said for the restraint on aggression offered by having to put one’s own people in harm’s way to kill other people, but as a civilian I’m in no position to ask someone else to risk their life unnecessarily for some arbitrary political point.
That doesn’t seem to have stopped governments from going to war before. See, e.g., the history of American foreign wars of the 20th Century.
the president couldn’t deem right-wing domestic extremists terrorists who could then be assassinated by drone strike.
Only if they move to Yemen.
To the degree that there was any substance at all, it was the thin reed of “how does someone get on the target list? Can it be just anybody?” And the answer was, no.
Alwaki was, after all, a “right-wing domestic extremist terrorist” who moved to Yemen.
Muslims are all leftists like Hitler was and therefore O.K. to drone.
Here’s the actual intended audience for Paul’s filibuster:
Ah, now this makes sense. Obama needs the drones to round up the people for the FEMA death camps.
Christ, has a bigger bunch of paranoid self-soilers ever held so much power over the political process? At least during the Cold War, the communists weren’t goddamn figments of their imaginations.
many of them were.
Has anyone else been getting ads about “FEMA coffins’ featuring a picture of a dude sitting in what appears to be a large plastic storage trunk? Is this because of some terrible website I visited?
I’ve seen those on Gawker and possibly Wonkette, so, probably a pretty standard
ad buy.
Why not? I hear they can extract mineral resources, build military bases, overthrow governments, and establish military and political hegemony over entire nations. Why shouldn’t they be able to round up people for camps?
” unleashed black helicopters in our major cities to intimate the people”
Sounds like sexytime. Maybe Obama will be playing Barry White
over intercoms.
well, that and the Purity Democrats.
Obama was all set to use his drone force to round up people for FEMA death camps, but Rand Paul’s filibuster foiled that plan by forcing Eric Holder to write a letter.
Yea. Obama is going to go tyrant on us, but because now the drone strikes are illegal he won’t be able to tear up the constitution and make us all his slaves…
“Congress has been so quiescent on the growth of the national security state..”.
Frank Church knew the score. And, thirty years after his death, is still pilloried for it.
One positive outcome of this whole episode:
There’s one more unelectable in the GOP 2016 circus. He won’t get the nomination, but enough people think that he can, and those people are insane and zealous enough that it could be a problem come primary season.