The War on Terror: an old psychohistorical fable

There never was a serious global terrorist threat to the United States after 9/11. The 9/11 attacks were a freakish anomaly. This is confirmed by the absence of any significant follow-on attacks in the presence of demonstrably porous anti-terror measures. The TSA repeatedly succeeded in smuggling simulated bombs aboard aircraft in the last decade, but no US aircraft were bombed. QED.

The entire war on terror was fabricated and sustained by the US Military Industrial Complex as a desperately-needed successor to the Cold War. Their ability to sustain this bogus war indefinitely is a testament to the remarkable power of modern propaganda tools.

I would prefer not to follow any horses. Partly on account of the amount of horse-shit, and the way a horse’s butt dominates the view, and partly on account of not trusting their leadership.

Is this an available option?

It occurs to me that the only time since 1941 that the US hasn’t been on a war footing was during the Clinton Administration. This goes a long way to explaining why the GOP hated him so much and sought to change this all through his tenure (PNAC was born then and kept trying to get him to invade Iraq or anyplace since roughly 1994). WWII was when the GOP found their true calling (war profiteering) and Clinton’s refusal to wage war filled the GOP with fear and loathing. Only when we are at war do they feel they have the existential reason to be hard ass gun nuts, war mongers and law enforcers. If we get too soft and squishy and don’t have someone to hate and fight (and an excuse to keep feeding the MIC) then we’ll slide into irrelevance and start contemplating other ways to spend our fortune, like universal health care, space exploration, infrastructure repair or some other sissy project. Thus, the War on Terror. It can last forever because we’ll always be afraid of something (or be able to be talked into pretending to be afraid of something).

I’ve heard it claimed that one Arabic translation of _foundation_, in the senses of organisation and base, is _Al Qaeda_.

The follow on theory that bin Laden, who after all was a mid-20th century engineering student, was an Asimov fan, is sadly lacking in supporting evidence.

It’s not quite clear that this story shows what people seem to be using it to show. After all, if the horse really was in severe danger of losing its life, then didn’t it actually gain something out of the deal, even if it ends up paying a cost in perpetuity?

I think to make this more like 9/11 we need a backstory between the man and the wolf. Maybe the man had used the wolf or its friends to kill other animals, or maybe the man had killed some of the wolf’s friends and the wolf thought it could get revenge by attacking a horse the man obviously wanted to domesticate.

Then we could have a Truther movement among surviving horses who imagine that the man actually trained the wolf to kill the horse, but there would be no evidence for this, though it was firmly believed by some of the more left-leaning horses. Later the man tortures some wolf pups…

The story would be a better fit if, instead of killing the wolf, the man killed a rabbit and claimed it was the wolf.

The correct story should note that the man also keeps the wolf, in somewhat defanged form, as a well-fed pet. And then lets the wolf rule the house, shitting wherever it likes, since it is afraid of the dog’s bark. But then the story sounds like its about the finance industry.

Unfortunately Salvor Hardin also reportedly said – “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right”. Dick Cheney must have taken note.

It occurs to me that the only time since 1941 that the US hasn’t been on a war footing was during the Clinton Administration.

The sanctions on Iraq during the 90s were enforced by the American military and sent hundreds of thousands of people to untimely deaths. Clinton attacked Serbia, a nation that did the US no harm, on “humanitarian” grounds, sending thousands of people to their deaths.

Idiot.

@Andrew F: The ACLU’s hysterical rhetoric, equating the use of targeted killing, indefinite detention, and trial by military commission, with the betrayal of core American values, is frankly absurd.

The report says “Ten years ago, we could not have imagined our country would engage in systematic policies of torture and targeted killing, extraordinary rendition and warrantless wiretaps, military commissions and indefinite detention, political surveillance and religious discrimination.” Are you saying that torture, extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretaps, political surveillance, and religious discrimination are essential parts of America’s core values, right up there with assasination, imprisonment without trial, and kangaroo courts? Or are the former just side issues, not really worth mentioning as you rush to defend the latter?

I just don’t understand this whole discussion. I’m a houyhnhnm.

Joshua Holmes @19:

There’s a big difference between war footing for prolonged occupation and engagement in international operations and the occasional short term military operation.

Jackass.

Re Andrew F@18, is ‘almost unquestionably legal’ the new ‘with notably rare exceptions’?

Yarrow, the US – as the report notes – has ended the s0-called “enhanced interrogation program.” I don’t address it because it’s not part of US policy. Nor, for that matter, is religious discrimination or political surveillance.

I do agree that certain types of renditions are morally problematic; the administration says that they’ve altered that program in certain respects, but I simply don’t know enough about it to even make tentative judgments. And so I don’t refer to that part of the report as horse manure.

Bexley: Nope, there’s no blanket authority to declare anyone an enemy combatant and order them killed. No one has claimed that there is.

geo @22: targeted killing is simply a possible component of the use of military force. So long as that use is authorized, there is nothing in the law that prohibits its use against legitimate targets in foreign areas, provided that the standard of proportionality and other rules governing the application of lethal force in war are met.

The ACLU provides a valuable function as a strong advocate of civil liberties. And I’ve worked with them when I’ve agreed with them. At times however, such as here, they do seem to walk the line between zealous advocacy and melodramatic nonsense.

The 10th anniversary of 9/11 this Sunday gives occasion to remember, mourn, celebrate, and reflect upon many things. The ACLU’s concern that we’ve betrayed fundamental values and must reclaim lost liberties isn’t one of them.

Andrew F:

The law is an ass. Really just because something is legal hardly makes it right. The laws of man and God are considerably different. I would note that the Bible does say “Thou Shalt not Kill.” So regardless of what US or Israeli or any other state law says, I am going to stick with my position that assasination or the deliberate targeting and killing of individuals is morally wrong.

@ 29
You have no problem with just declaring someone an enemy combatant and detaining them indefinitely with no day in court? Despite the fine rhetoric from Obama, there remain people who have been jailed for years with no chance to answer their accusers in court. But don’t worry such behaviour is totally legal and not at all a betrayal of American values!

He’s a major player in Al-Queda, and the military believes it can consider him a combatant. That’s a bit more then just your usual run of the mill robbery and murder. We all recognize that the military has the power to target individuals in a time of war who are military targets, and that US citizens can be military targets of the US government if they satisfy the conditions of being military targets. So what exactly is the objection? Is it that the military should not be able to fight nonstate actors? Of course, the whole neither civilian nor military bit is quite worrying, but that’s an objection that isn’t ripe until Awlaki is captured.

@37

Declaring assassination to be a “military” matter is a neat trick for bypassing the rule of law. If domestic protests were considered a threat to the state, these could easily be made into “military” matters too. That is how the dirty wars in Latin America were conducted. You seem to be happy to slide down the slippery slope of trading justice for military expediency.

Kaveh:

There was ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Serbia backed the most aggressive side. But, being as that our Croatian allies also committed ethnic cleansing, “Operation Storm”, it is hard to say that opposition to human rights violations was the real motive. After all we did not intervene militarily in Rwanda regarding a far more lethal genocide.

@geo: Look up Operation Anthropod. That was simply an execution by grenade. Nothing wrong with that, even though the target was unable to surrender before being blown up.

@John: Your argument is that the president could order the execution of someone who was not a military target. No, he couldn’t. That would be a war crime. The nature of the decision doesn’t change the fact that it is a substantive and clear distinction. If you are in the chain of command, watch out! A civilian: no worries. If this was a matter of US citizens fighting in an army of foreign countries against the United States we wouldn’t be having this dispute. The issue that I think is underlying this is the broader question of which targets are acceptable for the military. Drug gangs clearly aren’t, armies clearly are, as are militias etc., but treating al-Queda as a military target seems to weaken the distinction.

@geo: “Whoa. Of course on a battlefield, or from the air, you target one person or emplacement rather than another. But you can’t kill even combatants indiscriminately—you have to offer them the opportunity to surrender.”

Whoa, indeed. In what way are combatants killed discriminately in aerial bombardments or artillery barrages or long-range rifle fire? Other than “we are at war, you should surrender,” what form of offer (much less opportunity) have they been given?

On the other hand, executions on the battlefield are an entirely different matter from indiscriminate in-battle killing. They speak far more to the hypothetical case posted earlier where Osama bin Laden walks up to the US Embassy and turns himself in.

Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, and Iraq

I’m not sure about Afghanistan. What do others think?

@Andrew

With regard to Aulaqi (that’s how his dad spelled it filing suit), the argument that he’s just as much subject to use of force as a ‘private’ in the enemy army depends, it seems to me, on the quality of intelligence that hasn’t been made available to ordinary folks. Is he a fighter? Is he a chaplain? Is he a planner? We have anonymous leaks, but I’m not sure we have much (in the public domain, anyway) by way of facts. I personally have a lot less faith in the products of military intelligence since I started seeing some, and much less faith in anonymous leaks from the intel community. Anon leakers do seem to present his role in AQAP quite differently from that understood by people like Gregory Johnsen, who seem to be trying more to be careful about facts than score political points within our government.

On the legality of commission trials, I’ll note that no appeal from a commission verdict has yet reached an article III court. They will eventually. And it may well be that the crime most often charged turns out to be improper for a commission. It may turn out that the evidentiary rules don’t meet due process. I personally think the commissions have done better than a lot of people expect — eg Jawad — but I don’t think you can claim vindication of the legality of the system as it exists just yet.

WRT indef detention, what the Hamdi plurality said was that in the immediate wake of captivity, war still raging, someone who was actually engaged in hostilities against the US could be detained. But also hinted that if detention went too long, the understandings underpinning that conclusion could unravel. The DC Circuit has been very hostile to GTMO (and Bagram) prisoners — and has been reversed every time the SC has taken a case. The SC didn’t take Kiyemba or Adahi or any of the others this term. But you know what? We’re not supposed to infer anything from that. There may well be a dozen petitions in the next term, and the legality of detaining people who never fired a shot, or carried a gun, or were at a battlefield — facts quite different from Hamdi — may end up getting a hard look. Eventually, the SC might even get a chance to look at section 5 of the military commissions act. And as the war described in the AUMF winds down, as it will, maybe those periodic reviews (seen the regs on that??) are going to have to look again at the legality of ‘indefinite’ detention.

The singular quality of the “war” on Terror is that it has no boundaries in space or time. It is an Orwellian eternal war. As long as a single Islamic militant anywhere wishes to raise his hand against America, the good times will continue to roll for the Military Industrial Complex. When a nation becomes culturally militarized, all considerations of legality, economics, and sanity are swept away by the craving for military action. We are now tasting the bitter fruit of our great military adventure to conquer Terror.

The 9/11 attacks were criminal acts by a small stateless band of political radicals. Declaring “war” on this motley crew was the crowning stupidity of the Bush administration. Bin Laden’s most damaging blow to America was not the pin-prick of the airplane attacks; it was the bleeding out of our treasury and the corruption of our laws. Our economy has been crippled by war profiteers and financial looters, and our liberties have been supplanted by a permanent climate of fear. Ten years later, it is Bin Laden’s mission that was accomplished: the destruction of America’s wealth and prestige.

John @35: There certainly is a claimed authority to declare people as enemy combatants and kill them. This authority is clearly claimed as entirely unlimited, and regularly exercised without any limits or legal rights of redress, as regards non-citizens located outside the US (the great majority of the world’s population).

The assertion I denied is that it is an unlimited authority to kill anyone. With respect to non-citizens, outside the US, the US is limited by the law of warfare and by its own criminal statutes – as are other governments limited by theirs. There is no government, of which I’m aware, that allows those it views as belligerents, outside the reach of its law and having not surrendered to any authority, to challenge their status as military targets.

The claim is that the President may, in the course of conducting an authorized military effort, attack military targets in areas outside the jurisdiction of the US in a manner consistent with the law of warfare and US law. Those restrictions do not include successful judicial review prior to an attack. And this is neither a new principle, nor is it a principle unique to the United States.

In this instance, the target in question is an individual well-known – indeed self-proclaimed – to be part of a hostile enemy organization with which the US is actively engaged, and who is located on a battlefield, well beyond the reach of US law, and who has not surrendered to any authority.

CharleyCarp @51: Is he a chaplain? Is he a planner? We have anonymous leaks, but I’m not sure we have much (in the public domain, anyway) by way of facts. I personally have a lot less faith in the products of military intelligence since I started seeing some, and much less faith in anonymous leaks from the intel community.

I think there’s actually enough in the public domain for us to say that he’s, at a bare minimum, engaged in recruitment and propaganda operations – but in any case the courts don’t get a seat at the table on this. You’re raising the possibility of a mistake, and implying that a judicial hearing would minimize that possibility. And while I agree that additional reviews would reduce the possibility of error, that kind of review is consistent with neither the authority granted to Congress and the President to authorize and engage in war nor with the effective conduct of a military effort.

I personally think the commissions have done better than a lot of people expect—eg Jawad—but I don’t think you can claim vindication of the legality of the system as it exists just yet.

I agree that it’s possible (though unlikely) that the particular structure of the commissions or individual charges could be found lacking, and therefore require further changes. But it’s well settled that, in principle, the use of military commissions is legal – and I took a refutation of that principle to be part of the ACLU’s contention.

But also hinted that if detention went too long, the understandings underpinning that conclusion could unravel.

Well, they said that if the “practical circumstances” of this conflict varied in a certain way, then their understanding of the law of warfare as applied here might unravel. That’s not the same as saying that if the detention is too lengthy, then it might become improper.

Nor am I saying that detention without review is authorized. But, with respect to detainees who would remain a threat to the US and return to hostilities against the US should they be released, it is very hard to argue that their continued detention is not a necessary incident of the military effort authorized by Congress.

Gordon’s link @8 is good – as is much on the Post’s ‘Top Secret America’ site, e.g.:

CIA shifts focus to killing targets
and
A look at the military’s Joint Special Operations Command

Which describe the CIA/special forces merger under the rubric of JSOC, one practical effect being to facilitate the CIA’s initiating covert paramilitary action free from the (notional) need for Title 50 Presidential approval and congressional ‘oversight’ (i.e. notification).

I think the ACLU is going to have less influence on policy than, say, the CFR:

A revised AUMF [Authorisation for military force, to replace the 2001 one still being used to cover the airborne killer robots infesting the skies over Pakistan, etc etc] can certainly reference the 9/11 attacks. But my view is that it’s not intended to be an open-ended legal authority to carry out military operations against terrorists or others all around the world, as some critics suggest. It is important to bring the statutory authority in line with the reality of our military operations. Administration lawyers at the Defense Department and the Justice Department have to strain very hard when reviewing the legal authority for our military or intelligence agencies to go after certain individuals or groups to find that affiliation with the original 9/11 planners.

The point is not to have a huge unrestricted authority that opens up new wars, but simply to make plain that our military and intelligence services have clear statutory authority to do what it is they are already doing today. It would be possible to rely on constitutional authority; I have absolutely no question about that. But it is useful and important for Congress to be authorizing what government agencies are doing. If they are not already over the line today, as far as eking out every last bit of authority from the ten-year-old AUMF, then it is likely to happen very soon.

(Note the bootstrapping involved: we’re doing it, so it must be OK, so we should have authorisation for it.)

Also, a promising new propaganda front in the GWOT is opening up in Libya now that phase 1 (start and participate in regime-change war) is – entirely predictably – giving way to phase 2 (tackle resultant chaotic conflict, including groups plausibly described as Islamist, by getting tame authority to invite regular ground troops in; build bases, eat Big Macs, play golf).

Plenty of straw there, along with implications not justified, at all, by the text.

That a thing might be unreviewable by the judiciary does not mean it is ‘clearly legal.’ It just means that appeal for redress of alleged illegality has to be made in a different forum.

Membership in the enemy force is, in fact, not enough: e.g., chaplains are protected.

You are free to trust in the judgment of the kind of people who beat false confessions out of Fouad al Rabia and then believed them, or who think some granny from the Midwest just might bring down a jetliner with a tube of toothpaste. Plenty of us think our Constitution should and in fact does require a little more before you start going around depriving people of life and/or liberty.

Btw, I see that the first substantive decision from the Court of Military Commission Review came out yesterday.

http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2011/09/09/23/59/ZIYoo.So.56.pdf

We’ll see how this fares on Article III review.

(Oops, that’s the second decision. Hamdan slipped by me in June).

Damn the preview pane. The second paragraph is also a quote from Andrew and should be in italics. Sorry.

“Ten years ago, we could not have imagined our country would engage in systematic policies of torture and targeted killing, extraordinary rendition and warrantless wiretaps, military commissions and indefinite detention, political surveillance and religious discrimination.”

No offense, but plenty of people imagined things like that, or worse, prior to 9-11. Plenty of people noticed the government doing little things like, oh, burning people alive, or keeping hitmen on it’s payroll, way back in the 90’s. It’s just that they were conservatives, and gun owners, so they didn’t much count.

I also disagree that military hostilities can only exist between state actors.

Of course you do, because you place the military above the law. You judge Aulaqi guilty and deserving of summary execution because the military told you he is. Despite the documented shoddiness of the military evidence against Guantanamo detainees, many of whom have been freed after being described as “the worst of the worst,” you would prefer that, when in doubt, the military should kill a suspected terrorist. If the US Military removed the President and declared martial law in the US, you would cook up some sophistry explaining how it was perfectly legal as a matter of national security.

Sorry again. The second paragraph (“I also disagree … “) was a quote from Andrew and should have been in italics.

Geo, just a few things… first, Congress isn’t bound by the Charter. Like the government of any other nation, it may alter or reject its agreement to abide by the Charter. Second the Charter doesn’t require actual or imminent attack. It merely provides for a right of self-defense. Finally, since there certainly were actual attacks here, it’s crystal clear that the US is acting in self-defense. It did not require UNSC authorization to begin the destruction of AQ following 9/11. It does not require that authorization today.

My view, both from the vantage of US law and int’l law (such as it is), is that there is a properly authorized and ongoing military conflict with AQ and its affiliates; and that Aulaqi, in the context of that conflict, and given his circumstances, has rendered himself a legitimate military target in that conflict.

Straightwood, I don’t know if Aulaqi would be deserving of capital punishment; that’s not the issue here. This isn’t a question of punishment. Your various personal accusations are ludicrous in the extreme. Let’s stick to the issue at hand.

Like the government of any other nation, it may alter or reject its agreement to abide by the Charter.

No, it literally cannot. This is a false statement. We have been through this before, with you, on CT. I’m less inclined this time around to be charitable and call you ‘misinformed.’ But let’s walk through the steps

* The U.S. Constitution is the highest law of the land

* Article II, Section 2: The President … shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur

* Any legislative act that attempts to compromise the validity of a treaty is unconstitutional, because it would be overruling executive authority to make treaties

* For that matter, any action that attempts to compromise the validity of the U.N. Charter is illegal under international law (just as the U.S. Constitution does not provide any means for a state to legally secede, the U.N. Charter does not provide any means for a nation to withdraw its signatory status — a signatory could flout its responsibilities, but it is literally impossible for a signatory to actually become a non-signatory)

* the U.N. Charter is a constituent treaty, and all members are bound by its articles; each nation that has become a signatory is bound by its articles in perpetuity

Given those bullet points, the only way the U.S. can alter or reject its agreement to abide by the charter is by rejecting its own Constitution and forming a new government not bound by the Constitution. Now ok, some of us feel that that has sort of already happened, at least in spirit. But that’s a different issue; people who express that opinion don’t believe it literally happened.

I wasn’t aware of everything Salient contends @75. If true, it’s extremely important. I wish some commenters more knowledgeable than me about US and international law would chime in.

I would have answered Andrew more simply: whether or not Congress may or may not repudiate some of its obligations under the UN Charter, it has not formally done so and is therefore still bound by it. As for “self-defense”: I think Andrew is simply mistaken; it means “in response to actual or imminent attack.” Every other perceived threat must be referred to the Security Council for resolution.

LFC: yes, I didn’t mean to imply that the North Vietnamese were completely aloof, merely that they hadn’t intervened with their own forces (as the US had as early as 1962) until the US started bombing North Vietnam after the Tonkin Gulf circus.

Salient, I appreciate your patience with me. Notwithstanding that virtue, your above comment seems to be almost completely wrong. In US law, the governing principle is “last in time” when a conflict between an act of Congress and a treaty arises. In int’l law, the US is has not agreed that any treaty is perpetually in force, and it has not behaved as though that were the case.

Different Chris, this conflict seems to have all the important features of a military conflict to me; I’m not sure you believe that a military conflict must involve vying for territory.

MarkUp, yes, but if a chaplain goes beyond providing spiritual comfort and actively recruits fighters in enemy territory, then he’s no longer simply acting as a chaplain. The intended protection no longer applies. I agree that it’s a closer case than if Aulaki were clearly engaged in additional operational roles, though.

Geo, self-defense isn’t a defined term in the Charter. From a common sense vantage, especially given the nature of contemporary weapons, I don’t think it should be read to require an imminent attack. As to whether the US is bound, from a US legal perspective the government can qualify or adjust its level of agreement whenever it chooses, as can any other government. And this, frankly, is why I don’t think int’l law is very useful when it comes to the regulation of force. But, this is academic: 9/11 qualifies as an actual attack.

no one likes us … I don’t know why

Let’s stick to the issue at hand.

The issue at hand is your primitive belief that a bogus state of “war” makes the pronouncements of the US military the highest authority in the land. If some targeting idiot in a cubicle concluded that you were a “military threat,” I suppose you would consent to your own execution to support our national security state. But have no fear, blog trolls have not yet been designated “enemy combatants.”

bin laden was pretty clear why he attacked us: our support of apostate dictators in the mideast iis a obstacle to bin ladens plan to restore the caliphate. so far as i can tell, bin laden doesn’t really care that much about our liberty and lifestyle

Bush said that bin laden attacked us cause bin laden hated out liberty and way of life.

what is amusing, in a black humor sort of way, is that both bush and osama are loosing: osama is loosing because we are more entrenched (in terms of military bases and footprint) in the mideast, and bush is loosing cause our civil libertys are reduced.

yarrow @21
if you had any knowledge of US history (say chomsky) you would know that support of torture is commonplace
I mean, how many people on this blog know who Mohammed Mossadegh is, and why his name is relevant to a discussion of US sanctioned and supported torture ?
School of Americas ?
Kissinger and Allende ?
Paraguay and Stroessner ?
Indonesia after the coup that took out suharto ?
Today, Kazakastan and other countries in mid asia we need for airbases ?
D Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam (bad, bad saddam …you really shouldn’t use poison gas on your own people, bad saddam,,,oh, and by the way, heres some satellite info to help you with your war against Iraq

@geo: Okay, that works as an interpretation. Knowing what human nature is we should not be surprised that violence exists. But Islamic terrorism has a content, and we shouldn’t shy away from considering how to respond to that. Al-Queda won’t vanish if we don’t confront them. They will quite simply make life a living hell for millions.

Andrew F.
As to whether the US is bound [by the UN Charter], from a US legal perspective the government can qualify or adjust its level of agreement whenever it chooses

I’m not sure exactly what you intend by “qualify or adjust its level of agreement whenever it chooses,” but US obligations under int’l law are not like thermostats that can be moved up or down whenever someone in the State Dept’s Legal Adviser’s Office decides that he or she is feeling too chilly or too warm on a particular day. I’m sure the present chief legal adviser in the State Dept would reject this view, or anything resembling it, out of hand. Presidents have attached reservations to treaties before submitting them for Senate approval, and the Senate has at times attached reservations itself, but that’s different and in any case the legal status of such reservations is debatable.

On the other hand, on the question whether treaties are “perpetually in force,” I think that states/govt’s can decide to withdraw from treaties if they follow certain formal procedures (presumably an act of Congress etc. in the US case), though I don’t know what the situation is specifically w/r/t the UN Charter.

@79, 91

Unless a treaty includes a clause allowing a party to withdraw (as, e.g., the nuclear anti-proliferation treaty does and the ABM treaty did), then one country cannot legally pull out unilaterally. They’re like any other contract in this regard.

There are a great many treaties with no provision for withdrawal. This explains why some some countries have ‘de-criminalised’ certain drugs but none have actually legalised them; the treaties governing them make no provision for individual signatories to pull out. To do so would require all signatories to conclude a new treaty.

Thank you to Adrian Kelleher for the backup.

In US law, the governing principle is “last in time” when a conflict between an act of Congress and a treaty arises.

First of all, when it comes to international obligations I don’t give a hoot about what the United States’ internal law is. It’s about time for a Godwin, so take for example: the Holocaust was legal under German law. International law that takes precedence for exactly that reason.

I assume you’re referring to the Supreme Court decision Whitney v. Robertson from the 19th century, which contradicts and is superseded by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties [pdf], Article 27, to which the United States is a signatory. The assertion that treaty obligations take higher precedence than federal and state legislation was specifically verified by International Court of Justice in the LaGrand case.

I suppose the United States could say “go stuff it, world, our military’s larger than the rest of yours combined, so we can do whatever we want, m*****f*****s,” the same way a criminal might get away with saying “f the law, I’m above the law” if they’re not subject to law enforcement (maybe because they’re the sheriff’s nephew or whatever).

If nobody’s militarily strong enough to enforce the treaty by force, and if everyone’s too scared to attempt economic sanctions against the US, then there’s effectively no enforcable penalty the United States suffers for breaking/violating any treaty. We could just go invade Haiti, and be like, whazzup, this is now our 51st state! And really probably no entity in the world could effectively enforce the international law that makes such an act illegal. But that’s very very different from saying that the United States has no legal obligation to follow the treaty, or that the United States is acting legally!

If you’re arguing “the United States should flout its international treaty obligations when those obligations conflict with its homeland security goals” then you should say so explicitly, instead of maintaining some veneer of international-law legitimacy.

In int’l law, the US is has not agreed that any treaty is perpetually in force

Neither has it disagreed with that principle, except in cases where a treaty explicitly provides a means through which a signatory can withdraw from the treaty. The case law is silent, so far as I know. (Again, the United States could just ignore the treaty and make a public statement about its intention to not be bound by that treaty anymore, the same way a criminal could publish a newspaper manifesto outlining their intention to rob everyone else. If there’s no capacity for enforcing the law, then there’s effectively no penalty for breaking it. And there’s really no force on Earth that can enforce anything on the United States at this time.)

geo @80: 9/11 was not an attack by a state, nor was the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan a response to an ongoing or imminent attack—completed attacks are no longer ongoing or imminent and must be referred to the Security Council for redress.

Geo, the idea that self-defense ceases to be operable once a given attack has ceased is actually absurd. One no longer must act in self-defense once the probability of further attacks has fallen below a certain level – and even then, self-defense sometimes requires retaliation even when it appears that an entity cannot immediately launch further attacks.

Your interpretation of int’l law in the case of 9/11 – that it was a single attack, not ongoing, and therefore the US was obligated to turn to the UNSC – has not, as far as I’m aware, been upheld anywhere. By contrast, numerous international organizations have held to, and followed through with, a much more reasonable interpretation.

As to what the inherent right of self-defense involves, it is certainly not settled that one may act in self-defense only upon actual or imminent attack. There are those who argue this – but their arguments fly in the face of any reasonable understanding of self-defense, particularly given the nature of modern war. But in fact there is not a settled interpretation.

Markup @82: Perhaps there is some document I’m as of yet unaware of that prohibits distance ministering but it would appear that in absence of and w/o verifiable proof that it does not occur

Chaplains are given protection to allow them to provide spiritual comfort to those in battle. Once they exceed that role, and assume some unprotected operational function, they become legitimate targets. Aulaki is quite clearly not simply providing spiritual comfort. He’s not simply “distance ministering.”

LFC @91: I’m not sure exactly what you intend by “qualify or adjust its level of agreement whenever it chooses,” but US obligations under int’l law are not like thermostats that can be moved up or down whenever someone in the State Dept’s Legal Adviser’s Office decides that he or she is feeling too chilly or too warm on a particular day.

My point was that under US law, the government may adjust its level of agreement whenever it chooses. The State Department cannot do this, but Congress certainly can.

Henri @84: It’s only natural that there is a resistance, and that one of its manifestations is terrorism. Of course the natural impulse is to suppress all the resistance, but of course in the long run this can only produce more resistance, more terrorism.

We differ on the causes of the particular organizations at issue, and the best way of dealing with them. My view is that they were created as a result of a leadership both privileged but held in diminished roles in their native society. That leadership took advantage of a variety of alienations and real problems to recruit. The predictable goal of the leadership is to assume a more powerful role in the society that marginalized them.

Salient, you made an argument based on the US Constitution. To claim now that your argument has nothing to do with US law is a bit disingenuous, imho. As to the “last in time” rule, that rule is followed by the courts today. Treaties have the same force as ordinary law from a US constitutional vantage. The seminal decision was in the 19th century, but that precedent has been upheld consistently to this day.

The US never ratified the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

As to international law, I’m not sure why you would give it any moral precedence over domestic law. International law is the product of agreements between sovereigns and sovereign behavior. It is, to be sure, far less the product of any democratic processes than the domestic law of democratic states, and has correspondingly less moral force.

As to international law, I’m not sure why you would give it any moral precedence over domestic law.

Then you would repudiate the Nuremberg principles and allow Hitler-era atrocities, provided they were, as in the case of Germany, legal under domestic law. Your elastic concept of law conveniently permits any level of violence that your authoritarian personality desires, as long as it has some “legal” cover. This silly-putty concept of “law” was employed by John Yoo when he legalized torture for the Bush administration, presumably with your approval.

A. Kelleher @93:
Thanks for the clarification. I remembered that the GW Bush admin withdrew from the ABM treaty but had forgotten the mechanism, i.e., a clause in the treaty allowing withdrawal with a certain amount of advance notice.

J Otto Pohl @41 “it is hard to say that opposition to human rights violations was the real motive”

Well, I never said anything about “the real motive”, just about whether there actually was a genocide being committed. I don’t even see why “the real motive” is all that important.

geo @44, okay, you’re talking about the genocide in Kosovo, which happened later, I was talking about the earlier events in Serbia/Croatia/Bosnia.

Andrew @97: I guess we’re both too lazy to chase down citations, which is (I hope) entirely forgiveable. But I think you’re quite wrong about the legal meaning of “self-defense” and”imminent” and about the obligations imposed by the UN Charter.

I don’t know what exactly Aulaqi is doing; I know of rumors that are sourced to anonymous people who have proven pretty unreliable. I do know that our military/intelligence operation doesn’t usually call out members of the enemy force by name. Having done so, having made a particular finding, I think that finding ought to be reviewable on petition of someone with appropriate standing.

I also think detention in Bagram ought to be reviewable. The idea that habeas jurisdiction depends on the location of the prison and not the identity of the jailer is a mistake and, I expect, will be seen as such at some distant point in the future. The point of the suspension clause, and of the 1679 act, were that you can’t hide your detentions from the law either by going offshore or by declaring yourself exempt because there’s an emergency (unless there really is one).

Should Canada take preemptive action against US?

Yes. Canada should demand to come in as 10 states (plus a Puerto Rico like free commonwealth) to finally dilute away the effects in the US of plantation slavery. Do the Canadians want to save humanity or not?

The Taliban is a political movement. They want to reshape society in a way the Mafia doesn’t even try to. They want to do all sorts of nasty things to a lot of people, not out of any sense of resisting the US, but that’s what they are going to set out to do. I’m not going to bore you with a lengthy description of their crimes, but the fact that thousands flee their advances in Pakistan should convince you of their reality and serious nature. Doesn’t that make military action against the Taliban justified in the same way slavery justified the Civil War and monarchy Napoleon’s conquest of Europe?

@113

The US power elite have made justification of military adventures into a propaganda art form. FOX News alone could have 40% of Americans rabidly committed to invading any country in the world with 72 hours of atrocity stories. For some putrid monarchies, like Saudi Arabia, it would take even less time, since they flaunt their barbaric customs.

Regrettably, for many American, the rationale for the WAR ON TERROR is anything they have been told often enough on television (e.g., “We are fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here”). America’s blood-stained pursuit of self-interest has empowered some of the most vicious regimes in modern history, so our objection to the “crimes” of the Taliban stinks of hypocrisy.

I understand when ignorant people claim that the USA is a champion of liberty and defender of the poor, but when educated and informed people on this blog spout this nonsense it is insufferable. As long as the tyrants we support keep our business and military interests happy, America, Inc. doesn’t give a flying flip for the innocents rotting in their prisons. That is the realpolitik face of America that the “good war” lovers refuse to see.

“Far better inconsistent virtue then consistent vice.”

Much like death by freezing is better than death by old age, I suppose.

No, it doesn’t. In fact, it goes against the core principles of international relations.

Well yes, the core principle of international relations is that the successful perpetration of atrocities gets you a palace, a choice of arms deals and a coterie of apologists who go around repeating that any description of what you did is meaningless propaganda.

Well yes, the core principle of international relations is that the successful perpetration of atrocities gets you a palace, a choice of arms deals and a coterie of apologists who go around repeating that any description of what you did is meaningless propaganda.

I’m sure Bush and Cheney have very nice spreads these days, but I think “palace” may be a bit much.

Salient @102 and @112

Under US law, the Constitution is always the highest Law of the land regardless of what treaties are ratified by the US Sentate. These days, US generally spells out this limitation in the treaties it signs. As the US Constitution grants that the Declaration of War is a power held by Congress, it would take a Constitutional Amendment to give that power to another entity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_v._Covert

The depth of cold-blooded predatory exploitation of the events of 9/11 is unfathomable to people with conventional morals. Rove, Bush, Cheney, and their whole sick crew were jacked up on some sort of domestic Nietschean philosophical brew that relegated morality to the “little people.” In their power-crazed minds, they were history’s heroic actors, and what a performance of knavery, brutality, and greed they put on. Historians will record the 9/11 decade as one of the most shameful chapters in America’s recent history.

Salient, the people of Afghanistan were not unaffected by Taliban rule.

Quite a lot of folks in the U.S. military and their families were unaffected.

If you want to make utilitarian arguments you should get your facts straight.

Admittedly, I’m not a utilitarian. Mostly I was trying to point out how silly your boisterous comment was. There’s a big big difference between “well, nobody’s perfect” and “wow are we ever botching the hell out of that” and the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan clearly belongs in the latter category.

As the US Constitution grants that the Declaration of War is a power held by Congress, it would take a Constitutional Amendment to give that power to another entity.

I sort of think that interpretation of Reid v Covert is backwards (though I am apparently not on very sturdy ground here). The decision specifically states that international treaty can’t give more power to the Congress than the Bill of Rights allows. It doesn’t say that treaties cannot bindingly restrict exercise of that power.

At the beginning we reject the idea that when the United States acts against citizens abroad it can do so free of the Bill of Rights. The United States is entirely [354 U.S. 1, 6] a creature of the Constitution. 3 Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution. … The language of Art. III, 2 manifests that constitutional protections for the individual were designed to restrict the United States Government when it acts outside of this country, as well as here at home. — R v C, pages 5-6

[blah blah] …no agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution. — page 16

And actually, saying “treaties cannot in any way restrict actions of Congress” is exactly equal to saying “treaties do not matter for squat whatsoever” since the whole point of a treaty is to agree to restrict states’ behavior in various ways (presumably in mutually beneficial ways). And if I’m wrong about how expansive Reid v Covert is, and the Supreme Court’s opinion is that treaties can’t restrict Congress, I have to admit I don’t understand why we would have treaties in the first place, because they’d be utterly meaningless.

tl;dr the Supreme Court has ruled that the United States can’t evade its constitutional responsibilities via treaty, but I haven’t seen a ruling that asserts the United States can’t limit its legislative rights via treaty. (In fact, I think the fact that treaties can do this is exactly why the Constitution requires the Senate to supermajority-approve treaties before they are ratified. But that’s a side issue.)

It is entirely possible I am about to get schooled on this, but consider for example this passage from Geofroy v Riggs:

The treaty power, as expressed in the Constitution, is in terms unlimited except by those restraints which are found in that instrument against the action of the government or of its departments, and those arising from the nature of the government itself and of that of the States. It would not be contended that it extends so far as to authorize what the Constitution forbids, or a change in the character of the [354 U.S. 1, 18] government or in that of one of the States, or a cession of any portion of the territory of the latter, without its consent.

Now it is true that the ruling explicitly states:

This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty.

However, in context, it seems to be saying that the Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of Constitutional citizen protections over any treaty which seems to curtail the applicability of those protections.

This summary seems to support me (weakly), not that that means much.

straightwood, why should that history matter for whether or not continuing the fight against the Taliban is a good idea today?

History matters because it tells us that simple-minded rationales for very costly and destructive wars are seldom correct. We are continuing the endless WAR ON TERROR because is is a cracking good business for some of the most powerful corporations in America, not because we are advancing the cause of social justice in Afghanistan.

If you fight an endless war, sooner or later you will kill a bad person. That does not justify a deeply dishonest and largely destructive foreign policy that has drained our treasury and destroyed our credibility in the Islamic world.

@ Watson – “Far better inconsistent virtue then consistent vice.”

You’re still assuming there was an argument with that. There wasn’t. There was an obtuse [perhaps] rede, but certainly no argument or counter. It’s was not something that is particularly arguable; well it wasn’t then but I do have a beer now so it could change…
… so in stripping some gloss, is the faltering virtue purposely preventing death[s], and the consistent vice public booger picking?

I’m not going to say someone is bad for wanting to do good for bad reasons.

When someone disguises evil as a noble action, it is doubly evil. This kind of sophistry is corrosive to society, because it affords malefactors a defense based on any incidental good arising from bad actions. The moral compass spins aimlessly as superficial appearances become the criteria for judgments of character and policy. It suggest the absurd conclusion that only evil people can accomplish good things.

Your statement is such a fundamental declaration of moral bankruptcy, that no further discourse is possible. A person who believes this would say anything to win an argument, irrespective of truth or logic, and justify the action by claiming to produce some “good.”

After an enlightening in-person conversation, I’ll save others the trouble of responding to my not-terribly-bright post earlier saying “[if] treaties can’t restrict Congress, I have to admit I don’t understand why we would have treaties in the first place, because they’d be utterly meaningless.” Under that logic, laws are utterly meaningless, since laws passed by previous Congresses can’t restrict Congress’s ability to pass legislation that would revise existing statutes. My apologies for whiffing on something so obvious.

As for the rest of my argument, I’m allegedly almost surely wrong, because Congress’s ability to pass legislation is sacrosanct according to the Constitution. I’ve been trying to argue that, unlike legislation which can always be annihilated later on by passing a bill that says the opposite thing, there is no mechanism in the Constitution for undoing ratification of a treaty, ergo all treaties are ratified in perpetuity. Which would be cool, if it were true. My argument is basically sunk because [1] nobody else in the world interprets the wording in the precise and peculiar way that I need to in order to make my argument make sense and [2] five copies of me are not sitting on the Supreme Court.

Boo. Somewhere my old high school civics teacher is weeping and crying out, “why didn’t you listen to Andrew?!”

Salient, how does the Migratory Bird Treaty fit into that argument? It was used to get around limitations on the Commerce Clause.

The trouble with SWANCC is the Supreme Court evaded the interesting questions and stuck to the sadly completely sensible ‘the existence or nonexistence of a pond in the middle of nowhere has negligible effect on interstate commerce, even if some pretty birds bathe in it’ assertion (though I suppose I should be deeply grateful for that, given frustrating/execrable decisions like US v Morrison).

I really feel like what we’re missing is a case where [1] the U.S. signed onto a treaty that constrained the circumstances in which it can exercise its Constitution-granted capacity to declare war (or to fulfill other duties unambiguously delegated by the Constitution), and then [2] the U.S. attempted to get around or ignore those constraints, and it went to the Supreme Court. But at this point that’s just an academic exercise, given the two paragraphs I led this comment with.

@138: the core principle of international relations is respect for national sovereignty, and prevention of wars between nations

Why do you think restating the same facts in flowery rhetoric is a counterargument? How is ‘respect for national sovereignty’ functionally different from ‘selling the dictator a palace and some fragmentation bombs’? Why do you prefer the vaguer phrase?

There are very good reasons for that.

Yes, there are certainly good reasons for it, within a certain context and scope of validity. But I am unconvinced those arguments are well served by becoming disconnected from the reality of what is being advocated.

Well, the military actually isn’t that shy about naming individuals it is targeting. In fact they’ve had a tendency to deal out the names like playing cards. But, more seriously, do you mean that ANYONE the military names should result in a review of the military’s finding? What would be the finding that the reviewing party would review? And who would this reviewing party be?

Andrew’s willing suspension of disbelief regarding assassination is enabled by the magic word, MILITARY. Once this word is whispered, all reason flies out the window, because now we are in fear of our national security. A funny thing happened on our way to becoming nationally secure. America’s leaders found that almost anyone they didn’t like could be considered a threat to national security.

Andrew is fully aware of the incarceration and abuse of innocent people at Guantanamo, many of whom were handed over for bounties, but he doesn’t care if mistakes were made, because the MILITARY made the mistakes. It is all good as long as it is a MILITARY decision that is keeping him safe. He is delighted that the MILITARY is spreading so much rage in the Islamic world that an ever increasing number of targeted killings is needed to keep him safe.

But wait! The CIA, which used to be an intelligence agency, is now in the robotic killing business, having executed over 2,000 “terrorists” via remote controlled strikes. Are they quasi-military, or para-military, or just desk murderers? No problem for Andrew. It’s all MILITARY, and it’s all good.

Does this make international law of dubious efficacy in regulating military conflicts? Absolutely. But this is not new news!

Neither is it welcome news, or news unsomber enough to warrant an exclamation point. There really was a point and purpose to the Vienna conventions, and flouting that purpose

True power rests with the sovereign.

Horrifying. I’d rather that true power rests with the populace, you know? And the power to annihilate cities’ worth of people in war, that power I’d rather have limited by a supermajority population support across multiple nations.

In your view of international relations, I don’t understand how you can condemn the World Trade Center attacks. The military force Al Qaeda identified strategic targets in the WTC and Pentagon, and conducted a targeted strike, using its authority to unilaterally dispose of targets it considers a threat. If our military gets to use that kind of justification, theirs does to, right? It’s just business, at that point.

But, more seriously, do you mean that ANYONE the military names should result in a review of the military’s finding?

This belief that the military is allowed to unilaterally declare open season on assassination for any target is alarming. I suppose anyone who Al Qaeda names should not be subject to review either, and no international force should be applied in any attempt to protect the right of the named person to face a jury and hearing before being subjected to assassination.

Let’s try it this way. If you identify Al Qaeda as a military force in conflict with ours, then anything you allow our military to do, you must also allow their military to do. And that means legally (in the sense of international law) in addition to morally. There’s no coherent principle of fairness/justice that allows ‘us’ to commit atrocities that are prohibited to ‘them.’ (And if you attempt to assert that pre-emptively striking us disqualified them from any such reciprocal protection, I’d like to point out that our striking Iraq pre-emptively means we have no recourse vs Iraq aggression — in that case, you’re giving Iraq the unrestricted and assymmetrical right to conduct assassination operations on U.S. soil when and where their security force sees fit.)

@144

American militarists don’t argue in good faith, as is clear from Andrew and Watson Ladd’s posts. Their constantly shifting arguments reflect the psyops of the US Military. It’s all about securing dominance for the good old USA. Winning is their mission, and for all we know “Andrew” is part of a domestic psyops unit. That is why these threads never seldom result in fruitful discourse. The militarists will sacrifice anything to prevail, including the truth.

Straightwood I’m arguing in good faith. If you could demonstrate that surrender to the Taliban is better for the people of Afghanistan then continuing the war, I would support that surrender.

Do you have any basis for assuming that the condition of people in Afghanistan today, under effective local warlord rule and the massive corruption of the Karzai regime, is better than it was under the Taliban? Your use of the term “surrender” shows that you have a cartoonish view of the situation, in which we are the gallant defenders of an innocent populace against sinister oppressors.

This is the same story that the public was sold in Vietnam. America was dropping napalm and cratering 15% of the surface of the country to defend “freedom” of the Vietnamese peasants. How did that work out?

Your childish search for feel-good rationales makes you easy prey for the PR professionals who tell you how many schools have been painted and how many Taliban atrocities were committed. Meanwhile, the war profits keep rolling in. How many more decades of this nonsense are you willing to pay for? How long must Afghanistan bleed because it make you feel we are doing good?

I know what really makes you feel good: it is that militaristic buzz you get while you help the old Afghan lady across the street.

Chris Hedges on the real disaster of 9/11:

We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.

Link

Coalitions of the willing never have identical, singular motives for action.

John Brown wasn’t trying to control the Southern States, he was trying to free the slaves.

Absolutely. And that’s exactly why I suggested that you should follow his example, stop blowing hot air, and start marching on Kandahar immediately. Time’s a-wastin’, the suffering masses of Afghans need your support. Now.

What happens on April 15th, you send a check to Hamid Karzai?

Washington has endorsed plans for the Islamist network to open political headquarters in the gulf state of Qatar by the end of the year. The move has been devised so the West can begin formal peace talks with the Taliban. ….

The initiative follows more than a year of informal stop-start talks between Western diplomats and a senior representative of the Taliban, Tayyab Agha, at the home of a former Taliban diplomat in Qatar.

Abdul Hakim Mujahid, the former Taliban ambassador to Islamabad and one-time envoy to the UN in New York, said Mr Agha was negotiating with the personal authority of the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. Western diplomats said there was little hope of brokering a end to the conflict without his blessing. Previous attempts at negotiations have foundered over the credentials of intermediaries.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/taliban-office-in-qatar-approved-by-us/story-e6frg6so-1226135168019

we are adhering to internationally accepted rules on who is a noncombatant.

Not that I feel much obligation to follow up on this (Salish? Not that I’m stung, it’s cheeky and cute and all, but what’s the reciprocal retort supposed to be? Waddy? Whatsup? Laddie? Watslow Wilson?) but for the sake of planting a flag in the dirt: No. No, we are not adhering to internationally accepted rules on aggression, including rules on who can be targeted by assassination squads. (Did you use the word ‘rule’ rather than ‘treaty’ to try to squeam around the specific treaties which we were discussing back when we were discussing something worth discussing?)

The fact that we have found ways and acted on ways to brazenly flout very nearly every convention which could potentially apply to these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan is pretty important to the general discussion of “we are not acting in accordance with international laws and treaties to which we are signatory” — to which the (sadly unanswerable) retort was not “no actually we’re following all that” in any way shape or form, but something more like “there’s nothing in our own Constitution binding us to all that claptrap crap about actually having to be restrained about how we pursue our wars or how we select who to kill and under what circumstances, international law’s a flimsy sham we can abandon whenever we feel like, so stuff it, World, we didn’t even ratify hardly any of it in the first place and even the stuff we did ratify, we’ll ignore at will ’cause you can’t bind us to nothin’ and our own laws won’t hold us to account for it.”

Which is unsatisfactory, but I don’t exactly have recourse.

They get it every April 15th.

That’s a couple orders of magnitude too brass-necked for my tolerance level. I’m out.

have we had documented proof that the US is assassinating persons who do not qualify as combatants?

The process is opaque, and requires that we trust the CIA. The CIA has been involved in a long history of unsavory clandestine operations, including coups, arms smuggling, and assassinations. The CIA deliberately, and illegally, destroyed recordings of the torture of captives. Having a secret agency decide who should live or die is as far from due process as you can get. How long before domestic “terrorists” are summarily executed?

straightwood, why should due process apply to the armed forces? Again, I think the key contention you are making is that terrorism should be a civilian problem handled by the police, not the military. Its not clear how that would work in say Yemen or Pakistan .

Salish, we are adhering to internationally accepted rules on who is a noncombatant. Its active participation in hostilities.

This is plain wrong.

straightwood, why should due process apply to the armed forces?

In which branch of the armed forces would you place the CIA? Are they subject to any laws? They waterboarded one prisoner 183 times in one month. They destroyed torture evidence in defiance of a court order. Obama has a CIA robotic death squad roaming the world killing people with drones – by decree, and you see nothing wrong with that? Where are the checks and balances? Where is the recognition of the corrupting effect of absolute power? Where is your common sense?

John Quiggin @ #12

@Kenny presumably a sensible horse would have refused the bridle and saddle, and had the man ride bareback.

The US government, with the consent of the governed, went into anti-terrorist over-kill after 911, but mainly because it was once bitten, twice shy by the liberal bug. It dropped its guard swept up by a wave of “globaloney” after the end of the Cold War. The day before 911 Clinton was blathering about the wisdom of a borderless world in Australia.

The “sensible horse” (general public) was happy to trot along without “bridle and saddle” during the decade-long “era of good feelings”, with the government pleased to ride”bareback”. So much so that even George W. Bush, in the second of the 2000 presidential election debates, called for a liberalisation of terrorist profiling laws:

there is other forms of racial profiling that goes on in America. Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what is called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we have to do something about that. My friend, Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, is pushing a law to make sure that Arab-Americans are treated with respect. So racial profiling isn’t just an issue at local police forces. It’s an issue throughout our society. And as we become a diverse society, we’re going to have to deal with it more and more.

And how did that work out on 9/11/? Pretty shabby, although the catastrophic consequences of relaxed border security have been carefully air-brushed out of the received version of history. By both conservative REPs for political reasons, and liberal DEMs for ideological reasons.

Fortunately eye-witnesses do testify. MNBC reports that Michael Tuhoey, an airport clerk, gave Atta a free pass at the airport check-in despite his unsettling appearance and suspicious demeanour, mainly due to his fear of politically correct sanctions:

“I said to myself, ‘If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.’ Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it’s not nice to say things like this,” he said. “You’ve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you’ve never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed.”

More liberal border regulations and political correctness are not the whole story when it comes to figuring out why 911 happened. But its a bit rich for liberals to complain about the authoritarian reaction to 911 when part of the buck should have stopped with them, including GW Bush, on this issue a liberal mugged by reality if ever there was one.

PS in the spirit of civil liberties which I know all CT’ers hold dear I trust moderators will let this comment stand.

There is the discussion about whether the President, having decided that an American citizen, in place far outside US jurisdiction or the reach of the legal system, and clearly an active member of a hostile organization engaged in an ongoing military conflict with the US, should be able to target that American citizen without some form of prior judicial review.

Ah, so now it is the President who is targeting people for summary execution. And I thought it was a MILITARY matter (assuming that the CIA is a military organization). Obviously all that matters to you is that someone in authority is having people killed summarily. I don’t see much point in continuing this discussion, since you simply ignore points that conflict with your position and continually muddle legal and might-makes-right arguments. Your argument boils down to “We are America, and we can kill at will.”

what procedure do you think should exist, either in the case of Aulaki or in the case of military strikes generally, that does not exist?

The entire military campaign should be halted. Terrorists are criminals, who should be hunted down by coordinated international police and intelligence agency action. Arrest and trial should be the goal, not summary execution. In the case of heavily defended terrorist enclaves, military assistance may be necessary, but only in support of law enforcement personnel.

This struggle was militarized deliberately to secure geo-strategic advantages and to fund the Military Industrial Complex. The grief of our nation was ruthlessly exploited by jingoists and profiteers in a cold blooded, sustained campaign to achieve power projection and enrichment of weapons makers.

TEN YEARS of (very expensive) fighting in Afghanistan have brought us to the point where infiltrators can rain bullets and RPGs on the US embassy in Kabul (yesterday). When both Ralph Nader and Ron Paul call for an end to this farce, I think you should reconsider your position.

Count me as one of those black-hearted reactionaries content to concede the US government’s “claimed authority to declare people as enemy combatants and kill them”

A black heart and an empty head are often found in the same person. You think the more people we kill, the safer we are. Unfortunately, when you kill people in a vengance-oriented culture, there is a multiplier effect that does not favor the killers. We are creating enemies faster than we are killing them, but this is exactly what the US Military Industrial Complex wants. If there is no AQ bogeyman, they have to find a substitute, and these have become scarce creatures.

Look at Hollywood’s products and you will see that Americans like to see killing, especially when served up through high technology. The violence we are spreading in the world will not go unanswered. We have killed vastly more people in the Mideast since 9/11 than perished in the WTC and Pentagon attacks, and we don’t intend to stop. Enjoy the show, but don’t think it is making you safe.

Straightwood, I don’t think a law enforcement response would have been sufficient to handle the threat. I also believe, purely from a prudential vantage, that a strong military response to the attacks of 9/11 was important as a demonstration of the consequences for any state that harbors or aids those who carry out such attacks. Finally, quite frankly, from the perspective of an American and a New Yorker, any foreign group of fanatics that plots for years to kill as many Americans as possible, and then ends 3,000 innocent lives on a day of fanatic lunacy, is highly deserving precisely of what Bin Laden received.

As far as the targeted killing program, in my view it has been a success. It allows the US to focus on killing particular terrorist networks by attacking important nodes and lines of support. And, in conjunction with other lines of effort (intelligence gathering, broader military support, and economic/political reform), it seems to have worked quite well.

I wish it, and those who are undoubtedly on a mission right now, continued success.

my sympathy for this nation is in short supply

I’d like to nominate this as the takeaway phrase from this thread, if not the decade.

Also, let’s remember that the targeted killing program produces the least amount of civilian casualties of alternatives.

Excluding, of course, an alternative that relies on something other than military activity. Like, say, not blowing people up. But you, of course, knew that.

That assumes we can let al-Queda leaders get away scott-free. That’s an outcome that we should all view as unacceptable. Punishment is deserved for what they have done.

Because the only way to punish a criminal is to blow stuff up.

Andrew:
There were and are all manner of alternatives that didn’t involve blowing stuff and people up. These alternative weren’t pursued but they did, in fact, exist. Or there ought to have been if, as you argue, there were questions of strategy. Because, after all, strategy means how to attack a or the problem. You could, for example, decide on a strategy that didn’t involve blowing stuff and people up and, instead, pursue a strategy of arresting and trying those specific individuals responsible. That kind of a strategy might or would be hard but it wouldn’t involve blowing stuff and people up.

As to the modifier “reasonable,” I ask how reasonable is blowing up people and invading nation-states who had nothing what so ever to do with the initial outrage?

I don’t see a good analogy with ww1.

Going in and simply arresting every AQ fighter wasn’t an option. Nor was the intransigence of the Taliban remotely acceptable for any country in the US’s position.

I meant, of course, more effective.

Arresting Osama in the middle of Afghanistan?
And yet he is dead in the middle of some other state, no?

Charley, perhaps that’s one key distinction between a law enforcement action and a military action.

Law enforcement actions are focused on arresting criminals for prosecution. A presumption of innocence applies to those who are arrested, and they must be treated accordingly. While one goal of law enforcement actions might be the dismantling of a criminal organization, that goal must be achieved by arrests, convictions, and the seizure of assets.

Military action by contrast is focused on the achievement of a certain end-state by the application of military force. Here, the end-state is a destroyed AQ organization, the detention or death of those directly responsible for 9/11, all states deterred from giving aid or harbor to organizations like AQ, and a shrinking number of areas from which AQ can operate in relative safety.

The major benefit of the law enforcement action is, of course, the preservation of civil liberties and the restraint of the state. Within the United States, and in most circumstances in other developed and friendly countries, this the way to go.

But of course in undeveloped, non-friendly countries or in failed states, the law enforcement action is unlikely to be effective in achieving the end-state that military action can be designed to achieve.

Straightwood, obviously as to where it should go would be case by case. But for failed or unriendly states where other options are limited and the target is of high value, there’s likely a good case at least – even if it will not necessarily be a persuasive case in each such instance.

It’s effective and it minimizes civilian casualties. Can we at least agree that, where law enforcement is not a viable option, these targeted strikes are preferable to other military options?

Can we at least agree that, where law enforcement is not a viable option, these targeted strikes are preferable to other military options?

You seem not to have been exposed to any literary, historical, or philisophical writings on the nature of evil. Evil commonly arises when men are given unlimited power. The unchecked power of life and death: to condemn men to summary execution without appeal WILL BE ABUSED. Your child-like faith that men in AUTHORITY directing expensive machinery are immune to destructive behavior patterns that have been demonstrated and documented throughout the history of civilization is absurd.

Only a mindless American exceptionalist would consider Obama’s robotic global execution scheme to be a good idea. It is evil to the core, and like any unchecked evil it will spread until the horrible moment when even you will ask “What have we done?”

@196

Tit for tat is an infantile approach to setting national policy. The United States used to regard itself as a morally superior nation. George Washington refused the requests of his officers to inflict reprisals on British prisoners in revenge for the maltreatment of American captives. We did not torture or summarily execute Nazi or Japanese captives in WWII, even if lives might have been saved by abusing them.

Now we have descended to the level of brutality and viciousness of our adversaries, on whom we inflict indefinite imprisonment, torture, and summary execution (by robotic drone). Instead of being ashamed of this conduct, armchair belligerents like Watson Ladd cheer it on. We have already lost the war on terror, because we now resemble our enemy: we have become cruel, vindictive, and unjust.

I don’t think it is being abused. There’s no evidence that it is

Yes, and when the abuse is revealed, you will piously say that “Who could have known that the unchecked power to kill would be abused?” Your demand for “evidence” is ridiculous, because the assassination teams deny that any innocents are being killed and refuse to disclose any targeting errors. (And, of course, you believe that persons in AUTHORITY never make mistakes.) Obama’s power to kill “terrorists” is effectively unlimited, because of the decade-long PR job equating them with the essence of evil. The current President has demonstrated that the CIA can act with complete impunity in matters of murder, torture, and destruction of evidence. What further proof of unaccountable power do you require?