Some Questions You Won't Hear Tonight at the Presidential Debate

Trey Smith

Meanwhile, as ChicagoDaveM points out in comments, The New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch proposes a good question that he'd like to see asked at tonight's debate:

"President Obama, you run a very regular and deadly program of secretive targeted assassination by drone aircraft, and yet you have forbidden the use of coercive practices such as waterboarding in interrogation. So why is assassination O.K., but using force in an interrogation is out of bounds?"

Esquire's Tom Junod would like to hear this question:

"Your administration has not just employed targeted killing; it has made the case for targeted killing to the rest of the world. What would you tell the leader of another country who wants to make use not only of technology pioneered by America but also of legal arguments pioneered by America? Do those arguments only count for America, or do they count also for Russia, China, and well, North Korea and Hezbollah?"

If I could ask one question tonight of President Obama, it would probably be this one:

Prior to your election, Democrats - you included - spent years aggressively denouncing President Bush for claiming the power to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial review and imprison people without due process.

And yet you have claimed not only those powers, but also the authority to assassinate people, including Americans, without any due process.

How can you claim that it was wrong for President Bush merely to eavesdrop on or imprison people without judicial review, but it's permissible and lawful for you to do something much more extreme - target them for assassination - without any judicial review?

~ from Presidential Debate on Foreign Policy by Glenn Greenwald ~

The question I would ask both candidates is a simple one: Why are you so intent on killing Muslims?