Salon.com > Drone War

Are Hugo Chávez and Rand Paul anti-imperialist BFFs?

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 17:30:00 +0000

It might sound facetious to draw comparisons between Hugo Chávez and Rand Paul, beyond the fact that they both made headline news this week. They’d have made a great sitcom duo, somewhat in the Harold and Kumar vein: the Latin loudmouth and the unctuous Kentuckian! They bicker endlessly about privatization vs. nationalization and, boy, do things get wild when their respective pals Ahmadinejad and Netanyahu come over! But then comes the heartwarming season-ender when they get baked on decriminalized Mexican sinsemilla, march against United States militarism and chain themselves to the doors of the World Bank! (And don’t you get the feeling they’re both deadly when it comes to the ladies?)

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.

Obama’s drone war and the conservative media

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:31:00 +0000

Between the confirmation hearings of drone war architect John Brennan and the recent release of the Department of Justice white paper vaguely laying out the supposed legal basis for the targeted assassination of American citizens suspected of terrorism, the Obama administration has, this month, faced more sustained and vocal criticism of its anti-terror and civil liberties record than ever before. Arguments leftists and civil libertarians have been making for years are finally getting something of an airing in the mainstream press. You'd think the conservative press, united in its ferocious opposition to nearly everything Obama does, would be gleeful. They aren't, really.

Last week, Conor Friedersdorf answered the common conservative complaint that the media are "too easy" on Barack Obama, The claim does have merit. Most of the political press has a sycophantic relationship to power. The White House press corps do regularly beat up on the press secretary (it is his job to be berated theatrically by people he is lying to), but reporters usually treat the president and most of his Cabinet deferentially. The president prefers the one-on-one interview to the press conference. He usually chooses friendly interviewees, which is easy, because most successful American political journalists naturally default to a friendly posture when one-on-one with the president, out of "respect" for the office.