Salon.com > Anwar al-Awlaki

Touré defends drone programs

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:58:00 +0000

MSNBC host Touré sternly argued against the growing chorus of voices decrying America's drone wars Monday. "I am not pro-drone. But I am pro killing those who are working to kill us," he said on Monday's edition of MSNBC's "The Cycle."

Specifically, Touré defended the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki, asserting, “If you join al-Qaida, you lose the right to be an American.” The host conceded, however, that if Al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son -- not an al-Qaida member -- was also targeted, it would constitute a "war crime."

Touré's remarks come amid furor surrounding a leaked Justice Department white paper, summarizing the legal reasoning that would allow for an American to be added to Obama's "kill lists" -- reasoning that has been roundly decried by human rights groups and legal experts.

Watch the video via MSNBC below:

How do you explain drone killings? With post-Orwellian “Newspeak”

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

John Brennan’s confirmation hearing on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee struck many observers as a small but significant step in the direction of openness, a chink in the armor of secrecy that the last two presidential administrations have erected around the “war on terror.” Maybe that will turn out to be correct, and the incoming CIA director – the principal architect of President Obama’s drone war, and until recently a defender of rendition and “enhanced interrogation” – will launch a new era of transparency in Langley. While we wait for that, would you like to see this bridge I’ve got for sale in Brooklyn?

Indeed, watching the Brennan hearing, and then struggling through the troubling Justice Department “white paper” spelling out the legal justification for the drone killings of American citizens (which was recently acquired and released by NBC News), left me with quite a different feeling. In large part, this was the feeling that our government’s imperial creep continues uninterrupted, that most people simply don’t care (irrespective of their supposed political views) and that almost everyone involved in this charade, especially those of us in the media who are supposed to serve as the watchdogs, has agreed to ignore the most obvious and glaring questions.

When liberals ignore injustice

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:27:00 +0000

Last year Brown University’s Michael Tesler released a fascinating study showing that Americans inclined to racially blinkered views wound up opposing policies they would otherwise support, once they learned those policies were endorsed by President Obama. Their prejudice extended to the breed of the president’s dog, Bo: They were much more likely to say they liked Portuguese water dogs when told Ted Kennedy owned one than when they learned Obama did.

But Tesler found that the Obama effect worked the opposite way, too: African-Americans and white liberals who supported Obama became more likely to support policies once they learned the president did.

More than once I’ve worried that might carry over to bad policies that Obama has flirted with embracing, that liberals have traditionally opposed: raising the age for Medicare and Social Security or cutting those programs’ benefits. Or hawkish national security policies that liberals shrieked about when carried out by President Bush, from rendition to warrantless spying. Or even worse, policies that Bush stopped short of, like targeted assassination of U.S. citizens loyal to al-Qaida (or “affiliates”) who were (broadly) deemed (likely) to threaten the U.S. with (possible) violence (some day).

DoJ memo: It’s legal to kill Americans with drones

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:31:00 +0000

Organizations including the ACLU and the New York Times have for some months been engaged in lawsuits to gain information from the government about the legal reasoning behind the targeted killing of U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son in a 2011 drone strike. A federal judge told the Times that the Obama administration does not, under law, have to provide legal justification for its targeted kills.

However, a confidential Justice Department memo obtained by NBC News sheds some light on the legal reasoning for including U.S. citizens on Obama's controversial kill lists. According to the ACLU's Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, "It's a pretty remarkable document."

Government can keep legal justification for drone strikes secret

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:20:00 +0000

The Obama administration does not, under law, have to provide legal justification for its targeting killings to the public, a federal judge ruled today. U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan said the government did not violate the law by refusing the New York Times' FOIA requests for such information.

As Reuters noted, however, "McMahon appeared reluctant to rule as she did, noting in her decision that disclosure could help the public understand the 'vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise in which we have been engaged for well over a decade, at great cost in lives, treasure, and (at least in the minds of some) personal liberty.'"

Richard Cohen suddenly worried about scope of presidential anti-terror powers

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:41:00 +0000

Richard Cohen, the universe's worst opinion columnist, has rather belatedly and unexpectedly grown alarmed at the size and scope of the expensive, unaccountable death machine that is our counter-terror state. Don't get alarmed -- he's still no bleeding-heart anti-American hippie crying about the "rights" of terrorists who hate us and want to destroy us for our freedom -- but the idea that an American citizen's death warrant can be secretly signed by a couple of Justice Department lawyers seems to have shaken Cohen out of his 40-year fog of elite Beltway complacency. Sort of.

This is a big leap for Richard Cohen, a writer who hates democracy and defended Dick Cheney's torture regime as recently as 2009. (2009!)

So he begins by pointing out that he cheered the death of Anwar al-Awlaki:

Execution by secret WH committee

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:07:00 +0000

(updated below)

Here is what the Democratic President has created and implemented, and what many party loyalists explicitly endorse (when there's a Democrat in the White House) -- from Reuters: