Word Games

Trey Smith

After the assassination of US citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki in September, the Obama administration has dropped vague hints that it might share its supposed legal reasoning with the American people. In a speech on Monday, US Attorney General Eric Holder sort of got around to doing that. Here are reactions from Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive and Glen Greenwald from Salon.com plus a few of my own comments.

Like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Holder hyped the danger the United States is in right now, erroneously comparing it to the existential threat we faced in JFK’s time.

Holder also embarrassingly bragged that Osama bin Laden was “brought to justice.” For the leading law enforcement officer of the United States to say that executing an unarmed, surrounded person is the same as bringing that person to “justice” is, in itself, appalling.

But more appalling were the word games Holder played in making the case for the President to order the killing of U.S. citizens. “Some have called such operations ‘assassinations.’ They are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced,” argued Holder. “Assassinations are unlawful killings.” But the ones the Obama Administration have carried out and might carry out in the future are lawful, he said. Therefore, they can’t be called assassinations. This isn’t logic; this is tautology.
~ from Eric Holder’s Pathetic Rationale for Assassinating U.S. Citizens by Matthew Rothschild ~

Folks, this is a classic example of circular reasoning. Not only that, but it is dangerous reasoning. It basically asserts that any President of the United States has become a unilateral king or queen. They now are "justified" in ascertaining whether or not any of their subjects are entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

As subjects, we can't lodge any objections. We can't dispute the findings of his or her highness. We can't do this because we are mere powerless serfs AND we may never know about it in the first place. The first time we are provided a tiny clue might be moments before the assassin's bullet rips through our head or the authorities come to drag us away.

The willingness of Democrats to embrace and defend this power is especially reprehensible because of how completely, glaringly and obviously at odds it is with everything they loudly claimed to believe during the Bush years. Recall two of the most significant “scandals” of the Bush War on Terror: his asserted power merely to eavesdrop on and detain accused Terrorists without judicial review of any kind. Remember all that? Progressives endlessly accused Bush of Assaulting Our Values and “shredding the Constitution” simply because Bush officials wanted to listen in on and detain suspected Terrorists — not kill them, just eavesdrop on and detain them — without first going to a court and proving they did anything wrong. Yet here is a Democratic administration asserting not merely the right to surveil or detain citizens without charges or judicial review, but to kill them without any of that: a far more extreme, permanent and irreversible act. Yet, with some righteous exceptions, the silence is deafening, or worse.

How can anyone who vocally decried Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detention powers without judicial review possibly justify Obama’s executions without judicial review? How can the former (far more mild powers) have been such an assault on Everything We Stand For while the latter is a tolerable and acceptable assertion of war powers? If Barack Obama has the right to order accused Terrorists executed by the CIA because We’re At War, then surely George Bush had the right to order accused Terrorists eavesdropped on and detained on the same ground.

That the same Party and political faction that endlessly shrieked about Bush’s eavesdropping and detention programs now tolerate Obama’s execution program is one of the most extreme and craven acts of dishonesty we’ve seen in quite some time.
~ from Attorney General Holder Defends Execution Without Charges by Glenn Greenwald ~

One of the reasons I opted out of mainstream [corporate] politics 20 years ago is because both sides play endless word games. Republicans, for example, are incessantly worried about the national deficit...until a Republican becomes president and then they defend him tooth-and-nail for running up the biggest deficits in our nation's history!

As Greenwald aptly points out, most Democrats were all over George W. Bush for eviscerating constitutional protections...until a Democrat became president and now they cheer him on for doing the same damn thing and worse.

Few, if any, politicians these days stand on principle. It's all about which party holds sway. Each side will oppose or support draconian measures based solely on who happens to occupy the Oval Office. The calculation of right and wrong no longer factors into the equation.