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xocetaceans
xocetaceans's Journal
xocetaceans's Journal
October 19, 2015
The actual point is made at the beginning of the "Drone Papers":
The lawfare blog creates a strawman (the process), and you use an ad hominem (against the authors).
There certainly is a process which may even be "deliberate", but it is not the process itself that is the problem.
Instead, the problem is that there is an assassination program in the first place in spite of assassination programs being banned. (Of course, one could speak here of the process of targeting and of determining the target's guilt and thereby become distracted from the issue.)
Lastly, your closing statements do not address the contents of the "Drone Papers" - you are merely engaging in an ad hominem attack on the authors of these articles, authors with whom you do not agree: i.e., your argument is fallacious.
Note that the evidence of the strawman's construction is left as the article's conclusion:
A Response to the Drone Papers: AUMF Targeting is a Deliberate Process with Robust Political Accountability
By Adam Klein | Thursday, October 15, 2015, 5:40 PM
...
But if the concern is the process for approving these strikeshow the U.S. Government decides to assassinate peoplethen the Drone Papers should reassure rather than alarm.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/response-drone-papers-aumf-targeting-deliberate-process-robust-political-accountability
By Adam Klein | Thursday, October 15, 2015, 5:40 PM
...
But if the concern is the process for approving these strikeshow the U.S. Government decides to assassinate peoplethen the Drone Papers should reassure rather than alarm.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/response-drone-papers-aumf-targeting-deliberate-process-robust-political-accountability
The actual point is made at the beginning of the "Drone Papers":
The Assassination Complex
Jeremy Scahill | Oct. 15 2015
From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obamas weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed through secretive processes, without indictment or trial worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the states power over life and death.
Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word assassination. This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, targeted killings.
...
The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. This outrageous explosion of watchlisting of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them baseball cards, assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield it was, from the very first instance, wrong, the source said.
...
https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/
Jeremy Scahill | Oct. 15 2015
From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obamas weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed through secretive processes, without indictment or trial worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the states power over life and death.
Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word assassination. This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, targeted killings.
...
The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. This outrageous explosion of watchlisting of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them baseball cards, assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield it was, from the very first instance, wrong, the source said.
...
https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/
October 8, 2015
Faith versus Science: Ben Carson’s Scientific Ignorance
September 28, 2015
Ben Carsons Scientific Ignorance
By Lawrence M. Krauss
For a man with an impressive educational C.V., Ben Carson makes a lot of intellectual missteps. In his September 16th debate performance, he displayed a profound lack of foreign-policy knowledge; last Sunday, when he said, on Meet the Press, that he would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation, he may have seriously crippled his campaign. Still, theres one area in which Carsons credentials have seemed unimpeachable. Many people assume that, as a successful surgeon, he has a solid knowledge of technical, medical, and scientific issues.
With the wide release of video from a speech that Carson made to his fellow Seventh-Day Adventists in 2012, however, its becoming clear that there are significant gaps. In the speech, he made statements on subjects ranging from evolution to the Big Bang that suggest he never learned or chooses to ignore basic, well-tested scientific concepts. In attempting to refute the Big Bang, for examplewhich he characterized as a ridiculous ideaCarson said:
He continued, Its even more ridiculous than that, because our solar system, not to mention the universe outside of that, is extraordinarily well organized, to the point where we can predict seventy years away when a comet is coming. Now, [for] that type of organization to just come out of an explosion? I mean, you want to talk about fairy tales, that is amazing. Finally, he argued that the observed motion of the planets in our solar system would be impossible if there had been a Big Bang.
...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ben-carsons-scientific-ignorance
Ben Carsons Scientific Ignorance
By Lawrence M. Krauss
For a man with an impressive educational C.V., Ben Carson makes a lot of intellectual missteps. In his September 16th debate performance, he displayed a profound lack of foreign-policy knowledge; last Sunday, when he said, on Meet the Press, that he would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation, he may have seriously crippled his campaign. Still, theres one area in which Carsons credentials have seemed unimpeachable. Many people assume that, as a successful surgeon, he has a solid knowledge of technical, medical, and scientific issues.
With the wide release of video from a speech that Carson made to his fellow Seventh-Day Adventists in 2012, however, its becoming clear that there are significant gaps. In the speech, he made statements on subjects ranging from evolution to the Big Bang that suggest he never learned or chooses to ignore basic, well-tested scientific concepts. In attempting to refute the Big Bang, for examplewhich he characterized as a ridiculous ideaCarson said:
You have all these highfalutin scientists, and theyre saying that there was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now, these are the same scientists who go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization. So, now youre going to have this big explosion, and everything becomes perfectly organized. When you ask them about it, they say, Well we can explain this based on probability theory, because if theres enough big explosions, over a long enough period of time, billions and billions of years, one of them will be the perfect explosion . What youre telling me is, if I blow a hurricane through a junkyard enough times, over billions and billions of years, eventually, after one of those hurricanes, there will be a 747 fully loaded and ready to fly.
He continued, Its even more ridiculous than that, because our solar system, not to mention the universe outside of that, is extraordinarily well organized, to the point where we can predict seventy years away when a comet is coming. Now, [for] that type of organization to just come out of an explosion? I mean, you want to talk about fairy tales, that is amazing. Finally, he argued that the observed motion of the planets in our solar system would be impossible if there had been a Big Bang.
...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ben-carsons-scientific-ignorance
October 5, 2015
College kid who put noose on Ole Miss civil rights statue gets prison for sick stunt
College kid who put noose on Ole Miss civil rights statue gets prison for sick stunt
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / Thursday, September 17, 2015, 3:12 PM
JACKSON, Miss. A former University of Mississippi student who admitted helping place a noose on a statue of a civil rights activist is going to prison.
A federal judge sentenced Graeme Phillip Harris on Thursday to six months in prison beginning Jan. 4, and 12 months supervised release. Harris lawyer argued he didnt deserve jail time.
Harris pleaded guilty in June to a misdemeanor charge of using a threat of force to intimidate African-American students and employees. Prosecutors say he and two other former students placed a noose on the statue of James Meredith, a black man who integrated Ole Miss amid rioting in 1962.
...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/college-kid-put-noose-ole-statue-prison-article-1.2364583
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / Thursday, September 17, 2015, 3:12 PM
JACKSON, Miss. A former University of Mississippi student who admitted helping place a noose on a statue of a civil rights activist is going to prison.
A federal judge sentenced Graeme Phillip Harris on Thursday to six months in prison beginning Jan. 4, and 12 months supervised release. Harris lawyer argued he didnt deserve jail time.
Harris pleaded guilty in June to a misdemeanor charge of using a threat of force to intimidate African-American students and employees. Prosecutors say he and two other former students placed a noose on the statue of James Meredith, a black man who integrated Ole Miss amid rioting in 1962.
...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/college-kid-put-noose-ole-statue-prison-article-1.2364583
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