Glenn Greenwald defend Rand Paul against "Democratic myths"

[stupidicus]

28. that reads like so much _____ to me

1. Just because Rand Paul might be a grandstanding hypocrite and worse, doesn't detract from the fact that he provoked debate on an issue that is long overdue.

"We are pleased that we now have the access that we have long sought and need to conduct the vigilant oversight with which the committee has been charged. We believe that this sets an important precedent for applying our American system of checks and balances to the challenges of 21st century warfare. We look forward to reviewing and discussing these documents in the days ahead," Democrats Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said in a statement.

They credited Paul with raising the use of drones domestically as a question of "fundamental importance." http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/05/politics/obama-drones-cia/index.html

I'm sure it leaves a bad taste in the mouths of some, kinda like all the negative talk about S, etc cuts does and has to those who've long suffered from a knowledge deficit on such matters. I suspect they'll inevitably find themselves on the wrong side of this issue as well.

2. Just because GG supports the Citizen decision on grounds you likely can't undermine, allegedly supported the war in Iraq before he was against it, and again for reasons you've not articulated (and could be innocent, like an expectation of UN support for example) and likely can't undermine as well, has nothing to do with the merit of what he's arguing for here. Generally speaking most of the garbage I see of the alleged undermining kind is of the "impeach the witnesses credibility" kind, which largely serves only as a transparent dodge of what they are offering of the substantive kind.

3. The Kos piece is nonsense, given the way it refers to an obscure case of an injustice (and the injustices to be found in our two-tiered criminal justice system generally) that those who are objecting to drones, etc, would likely be equally offended by, whether the likes of RP would be or not. I'm sure GG would be. The one has nothing to do with the other other than something to be used as a broad brush that ultimately paints a falsehood -- that those objecting to drone use against US citizens are being hypocrites on grounds that have only been declared, not validated -- and are as guilty as Paul by extension/association. This whole effort is similar to but not to be confused with my charging you with being a McCain supporter, for agreeing with him over Paul's effort.

4. As I see, what this can all be distilled down to is a search for precisely what the definition of "imminent" is as applied to drone use generally, since so many that have died haven't satisfied the denotative definition of the word, whether a citizen or not, which the "combat role" garbage is merely a substitute for.

Defenders of the Obama administration now insist that this entire controversy has been resolved by a letter written to Paul by Attorney General Eric Holder, in which Holder wrote: "It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no." Despite Paul's declaration of victory, this carefully crafted statement tells us almost nothing about the actual controversy.

As Law Professor Ryan Goodman wrote yesterday in the New York Times, "the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has acted with an overly broad definition of what it means to be engaged in combat." That phrase - "engaged in combat" - does not only include people who are engaged in violence at the time you detain or kill them. It includes a huge array of people who we would not normally think of, using common language, as being "engaged in combat".

Indeed, the whole point of the Paul filibuster was to ask whether the Obama administration believes that it has the power to target a US citizen for assassination on US soil the way it did to Anwar Awlaki in Yemen. The Awlaki assassination was justified on the ground that Awlaki was a "combatant", that he was "engaged in combat", even though he was killed not while making bombs or shooting at anyone but after he had left a cafe where he had breakfast. If the Obama administration believes that Awlaki was "engaged in combat" at the time he was killed - and it clearly does - then Holder's letter is meaningless at best, and menacing at worst, because that standard is so broad as to vest the president with exactly the power his supporters now insist he disclaimed.

The phrase "engaged in combat" has come to mean little more than: anyone the President accuses, in secrecy and with no due process, of supporting a Terrorist group. Indeed, radically broad definitions of "enemy combatant" have been at the heart of every War on Terror policy, from Guantanamo to CIA black sites to torture. As Professor Goodman wrote:

All I see here is an effort to dodge the many things like that above in the GG piece, you have no answers for. Maybe you should go to that piece and post this effort on your part, so that we might enjoy the sight of GG carving you up, assuming you could even get him interested in the effort.