In my view it's entirely reasonable, and Rand Paul is full of shit. His filibuster is nothing other than pandering to a right-wing fringe that considers Obama to be the reincarnation of Josef Stalin.
False premise. That said, if I were engaged in some sort of military-style assault upon the US then of course I would expect to encounter armed opposition. Is it your view that when a country is attacked the executive is supposed to sit on its hands?
Call me cold-heart, but I think George W. Bush would have been better off ordering fighter jets into the air back in 2001 instead of listening to a story about a pet goat. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pet_Goat#George_W._Bush:_9.... for context).
It would be easier to buy the "we'll only use this new, extraordinary power to combat terrorists (or pedophiles, or drug dealers, or whatever the boogeyman of the day is)" excuse if it hadn't turned out to be a lie time, and time again.
Over and over, the government grabs more power for itself, then uses and abuses that power in whatever way it wishes.
What makes this particular case even more eggregious is that there's absolutely no oversight whatsoever. Obama (or whoever we're unlucky enough to be saddled with after him) can just designate anyone he wants a "terrorist", without anyone being able to question his judgement or even ask for justifications. It's assassination power on a whim.
How much more absolute power are you going to be willing to grant the government for the sake of security theater?
What is the oversight that was used when the administration decided to bomb Dresden, or to firebomb Tokyo? How does it differ from the oversight employed against "organizations involved in the attacks on 9/11"?
How many more innocent people were killed in those attacks than will ever be killed by drones? Have you ever watched "Fog Of War"? Tokyo was made of wood and paper.
I encourage you to watch the filibuster then, because Rand Paul is explicitly claiming that he is not concerned with a person " engaged in some sort of military-style assault upon the US" being killed by drones. His concern is explicitly that there has been no clarification that drones will not be used to kill non-combatant citizens on American soil. He has directly said his concern is with non-combatants. Multiple times. How can there be any reasonable opposition to this?
His concern is explicitly that there has been no clarification that drones will not be used to kill non-combatant citizens on American soil.
'[T]he US Government has not carried out drone strikes within the United States and has no intention of doing so.'
That sounds pretty damn clear to me. That's why I say Senator Paul is pandering; he has had the clarification he asked for. Holder can't very well cite laws that Congress has not seen fit to write.
No, not really. Also, I invite you consider the second half of my comment above. As far as I know, there is no law limiting the Administration's use of drones pursuant to its lawful exercise of military force.
And Holder has told him that that's not going to happen, short of an obvious military emergency. The President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and is responsible for the defense of the US in such situations.
If the Senator is so worried about pre-emptive drone attacks, why hasn't he crafted any legislation defining the scope of the executive's power to deploy military assets within the domestic boundaries of the United States? Or introduced a bill to rescind or amend the Authorization for Use of Military Force that is presently the law of the land? Why, in short, is he engaging in windy rhetoric but making no use of his legislative power?
Even if you trust the Obama administration implicitly, I do not believe you can trust every subsequent administration not to abuse the powers given them, or indeed in this case simply use them.
By the way, he's actually drafting such a bill, he said so an hour or so ago in his filibuster.
Then he should introduce the bill instead of filibustering an appointment. I don't trust every future administration not to abuse its powers, but likewise I recognize that the incumbent administration can't bind its successors. Only Congress or the Judicial Branch can do that, and so far neither have seen fit to restrain the Executive Branch on this issue.
Don't you think there should be legal limitations on the President's ability to order someone's death? Note that Holder's letter recognizes no such limitations.
There should and there are. These have been presented in detail before and no doubt will be again. If Holder were to submit a lengthy memo restating the administration's legal position in regards to military action within the borders of the US, people would complain that he was trying to bury the issue in obfuscatory language.
Let me offer you instead a rule of thumb by which to judge this situation. You are aware, no doubt, that there are many combat-ready planes and ships operated by our armed forces in the airspace and waters of the continental US; and you can surely conceive of situations where those planes and ships might be ordered to intercept or even fire upon targets in response to military or terroristic threats. The primary purpose of having armed forces, after all, is for a country to defend itself from attack. If tomorrow we were to find that hostile actors had control of a jet airliner and were flying it towards a city or similarly important target, nobody would be surprised or upset if the President were to order fighter jets scrambled in order to divert even destroy it if necessary. Indeed, the previous administration came in for quite a bit of criticism over its lack of preparedness to take such actions on September 11 2001.
If you are OK with this, and I would bet money that you are, because no government in its right mind would respond to military attack by filing suit in the Supreme Court or asking congress to legislate before doing anything, then you should be OK with drones being employed for the same purpose. On the off-chance that you are opposed to any military assets of any kind being deployed within or around the US during peacetime, and that the US should not maintain any sort of defensive capability, then we are doomed to disagree.
What you describe is not targeted assassination. Your scenario depicts incident response. For example, "neutralize the several people that have hijacked this plane." Targeted assassination is, as the name suggests, aimed at a specific person, not because they are currently engaged in firing guns, hijacking planes, taking hostages, and so on, but because "intelligence suggests" that this person has been or could be involved with threats at some point. While we most all of us can envision situations in which targeted assassination is an appropriate response to a threat, the problem is that there are currently no inter-branch checks on the process that determines who is a threat. While due process doesn't mandate a trial or situation-specific court review, it's hard to argue that it doesn't demand input from any other federal branch at all. The criteria are currently determined by executive fiat and are not subject to general review by the judiciary or to modification by legislature. It's not just a matter of "drones," though the use of drones makes these issues more salient. It's about the balance of power distributed throughout the federal government.
> Targeted assassination is, as the name suggests, aimed at a specific person, not because they are currently engaged in firing guns, hijacking planes, taking hostages, and so on, but because "intelligence suggests" that this person has been or could be involved with threats at some point.
Even that [targeted assassination] has previously been used in a purely military context though (lookup what happened to Admiral Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy, not to mention counter-sniper activities throughout the past hundred years).
I have to agree with anigbrown here, if Congress or the judiciary doesn't give direction to the contrary then the Article II powers of the Commander-in-Chief can give some extremely broad powers to him with only a little bit of imagination required.
If that's something that scares Congress then they need to clip the wings early instead of whining about interpretation of law (especially interpretation at the farthest reaches of plausibility).
While due process doesn't mandate a trial or situation-specific court review, it's hard to argue that it doesn't demand input from any other federal branch at all.
I would entirely agree that the AUMF (which underpins the administration's policy on the use of drones) is overbroad and that Congress should either drastically narrow its scope or consider rescinding it completely after US troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2014, after which we would arguably no longer be in a state of war.
Likewise, I think it's past time for Congress to develop legislation on the scope of military technology - not least because we are approaching or already at the point where we have technology capable of automatically identifying and firing on targets more quickly and accurately than any human. We don't have the technology for making ethical or legal determinations about the rightness of targeting someone; I'm talking purely about the physical capabilities of machines v. humans.
Only Congress can bind the Executive on such matters. The incumbent administration can eschew any intention of using drones domestically (as they have done) but can't bind future administrations.
And Crongress has the (enumerated) power of declaring war, issuing letters of reprisal and so forth (A1,s8.11), and has lawfully granted the President broad powers to wage war under the AUMF. The fact that the President is constitutionally named as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces means that when a state of war obtains he has the privilege of commanding which military activity is to take place.
Would you please try discussing this in its proper context instead of pretending that the Executive pulled its military powers out of thin air?
As long as they're used 'to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States' by al Qaeda or its affiliates, they're being employed lawfully.
I'm not saying that that law is good or desirable. I'm just pointing out that that's how the law stands at present.
This isn't necessarily proof against what you're saying, but many articles I've been reading are chock full of commenters saying they dislike Rand Paul and usually disagree with him, but agree with him on this matter.
So from what I can tell, many people agree with him on the matter of drone attacks on US soil.
http://paul.senate.gov/files/documents/BrennanPaul.pdf