In the exclusive conversation below, Al-Muslimi tells Salon about the drone strikes’ devastating toll on Yemeni civilians and how the current U.S. counterterrorism policy in Yemen is like “reading from a manual '10 Steps on How to Lose a War.'”

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In 2008, the hysterical backlash to the above comment by Barack Obama's minister became a high-profile example of one of the most insidious rules in American politics: You are not allowed to honestly discuss the Central Intelligence Agency's concept of "blowback" without putting yourself at risk of being deemed a traitor to country.

Now, five years later, with America having killed thousands of Muslim civilians in its drone strikes and wars, that rule is thankfully being challenged, and not by someone who is so easily smeared. Instead, the apostate is one of this epoch's most revered journalists, and because of that, we will see whether this country is mature enough to face one of its biggest national security quandaries.

This is the news from Tom Brokaw's appearance on “Meet the Press” last Sunday. Discussing revelations that the bombing suspects may be connected to Muslim fundamentalism, he said:

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“I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important,” Paul declared. “That your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

Even though I disagree with Paul on virtually every other issue and generally consider him to be kind of a joke, I’d have been happy to be proven wrong. Maybe he had a conscience. Maybe he would become a much needed civil liberties leader on the right.

Alas, I haven’t been proven wrong. Mr. Filibuster, the tribune of civil liberties, now says that drones should have been used against the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston – not only that, he told Fox’s Neal Cavuto they should even be used against someone robbing a liquor store.

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Whether the Senate hearing will yield answers to crucial questions about Obama's drone wars is unclear. Witnesses scheduled to testify include retired Gen. James Cartwright of United States Marine Corp; activist and journalist Farea Al-Muslimi of Sana’a, Yemen; Peter Bergen, director of the National Security Studies Program at the New America Foundation; and a number of legal experts. Although the Senate committee tried to have a witness appear from the Justice Department, this request was denied.

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"If there is a killer on the loose in a neighborhood, I’m not against drones being used to search them," he said on the Fox Business Channel.

Paul said that the difference in this case was that there was an "imminent threat."

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The top-secret intelligence reports reveal, as one expert with the Council on Foreign Relations told McClatchy, that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.” It is not clear who leaked the documents to McClatchy for review.

Via McClatchy:

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Following his recent visit to Pakistan, Ben Emmerson, U.N. special rapporteur monitoring human rights in counterterrorism programs, reported that the Pakistani government had given no tacit consent for U.S. drones to enter Pakistani air space. However, Mazzetti reports that such a secret deal was made, at least with the Pakistani military, signed in blood with Muhammed's death. Via the Times:

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Another, perhaps less frequently asked question: What happens when innocent civilians are killed in drone strikes?

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Rasool and other Afghan villagers have their own name for Predator drones. They call them benghai, which in the Pashto language means the "buzzing of flies." When they explain the noise, they scrunch their faces and try to make a sound that resembles an army of flies.

"They are evil things that fly so high you don't see them but all the time you hear them," said Rasool, whose body is stooped and shrunken with age and his voice barely louder than a whisper. "Night and day we hear this sound and then the bombardment starts."

The U.S. military is increasingly relying on drone strikes inside Afghanistan, where the number of weapons fired from unmanned aerial aircraft soared from 294 in 2011 to 506 last year. With international combat forces set to withdraw by the end of next year, such attacks are now used more for targeted killings and less for supporting ground troops.

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Fantasies about the certain success of air power in transforming, even ending, war as we know it arose with the plane itself.  But when it comes to killing people from the skies, again and again air power has proven neither cheap nor surgical nor decisive nor in itself triumphant.  Seductive and tenacious as the dreams of air supremacy continue to be, much as they automatically attach themselves to the latest machine to take to the skies, air power has not fundamentally softened the brutal face of war, nor has it made war less dirty or chaotic.

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A budding commercial drone industry is poised to put mostly small, unmanned aircraft to countless uses, from monitoring crops to acting as lookouts for police SWAT teams, but federal and state privacy laws have been outpaced by advances in drone technology, experts said at a Senate hearing.

Current privacy protections from aerial surveillance are based on court decisions from the 1980s, the Judiciary Committee was told, before the widespread drone use was anticipated. In general, manned helicopters and planes already have the potential to do the same kinds of surveillance and intrusive information gathering as drones, but drones can be flown more cheaply, for longer periods of time and at less risk to human life. That makes it likely that surveillance and information-gathering will become much more widespread, legal experts said.

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As part of a pattern traced for some months (particularly by the Washington Post's Greg Miller), in shifting the drone program from the CIA to the Pentagon, the Obama administration would codify shadow wars as fully integrated into modern U.S. warfare -- the stuff of Defense Department oversight. Klaidman reported:

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Cruz made drones and civil liberties the cornerstone of the speech, using the issue both to take a stand for something he believes in and to hammer President Obama. It played such a prominent role in his speech that one has to wonder if Paul, who won the straw poll just moments earlier, would resent Cruz's attempt to steal a bit of his thunder.

Cruz also relished the opportunity to take a shot at Sen. John McCain, who sharply criticized Paul and Cruz's filibuster, calling them "wacko birds." “If standing for liberty and standing for the Constitution means you’re a wacko bird, then count me a proud wacko bird. I think there are more than a few other wacko birds gathered here today," he said to cheers.

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Ben Emmerson Q.C., the U.N. special rapporteur monitoring human rights in counterterrorism programs, returned this week from a trip to Pakistan, where he learned that there has been no "tacit consent by Pakistan to the use of drones on its territory." As such the U.S.'s targeted killing program there constitutes a violation of the country's sovereignty.  The Guardian noted that Emmerson's comments are "a direct response to widespread suspicions that some parts of Pakistan's military or intelligence organizations have been providing clandestine authorization to Washington for attacks by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on Taliban or al-Qaida suspects in provinces on the Afghan border."

Emmerson stated:

As a matter of international law the US drone campaign in Pakistan is therefore being conducted without the consent of the elected representatives of the people, or the legitimate government of the state. It involves the use of force on the territory of another state without its consent and is therefore a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty.

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The ACLU filed a FOIA request in January 2010 seeking to learn "when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how and whether the U.S. ensures compliance with international law restricting extrajudicial killings," according to a release from the group. Initially, a district court permitted the government to refuse to respond to the FOIA, accepting the CIA's argument that it could not release documents because even acknowledging the existence of the program would harm national security. Such a move is called a "Glomar" response -- a "neither confirm nor deny" response to FOIA requests deemed legal in certain circumstances. The decision on the Glomar response in this instance has now been reversed, largely on the grounds that the existence of CIA drone wars are the stuff of mainstream political discourse (and Senate hearings, filibusters and more).

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The truth is that in our post 9/11 world, Muslim women are not beneficiaries of violence in Muslim countries, but a gimmick used to justify it. Indeed, women are themselves major, underappreciated victims of the war in terror, including the recent incidence of drone strikes.

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The first event was President Obama's dinner with Senate Republicans to try to sell them on his conservative budget plan - a plan that specifically proposes to cut Social Security and means-test Medicare benefits, and generally proposes "$2.50 in spending cuts for every dollar in new revenue," according to Businessweek. The president reiterated this effort to cut Social Security yesterday when he deployed his top economic adviser, Gene Sperling, to formally announce that Obama "prefers" reductions in benefits.

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Two Democratic senators who spoke to Politico on the condition of anonymity said that, when challenged by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., over the administration's resistance to releasing Justice Department memos justifying the targeted killing program, the president responded, "This is not Dick Cheney we’re talking about here.”

Again, President Obama, in defense of his targeted killing program, reportedly said, "This is not Dick Cheney we're talking about here."

It's the sort of defense Dick Cheney would probably use, were he not already Dick Cheney.

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So it's notable that Podesta has taken to the Washington Post Op-Ed page to break with Obama and call on the administration to release more information about its drone program:

[T]he White House is still bobbing and weaving on whether to share with Congress the legal opinions and memorandums governing targeted killing, which include the legal justification for killing U.S. citizens without trial.

The Obama administration is wrong to withhold these documents from Congress and the American people. I say this as a former White House chief of staff who understands the instinct to keep sensitive information secret and out of public view. It is beyond dispute that some information must be closely held to protect national security and to engage in effective diplomacy, and that unauthorized disclosure can be extraordinarily harmful. But protecting technical means, human sources, operational details and intelligence methods cannot be an excuse for creating secret law to guide our institutions.

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