On Drones

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I feel the overwhelming need to write about drones. This latest article in the Huffington Post, where Holder apparently says the US has the authority to kill an American citizen in the US with a drone, has put me over the top. To summarize, Obama’s policies on drones represent some of the same abuses and lack of values as the Bush administration. And in some ways, the policies and actions are actually worse.

First, let me explain how they are similar. The worst policies of the Bush administration used absurd logic in legal memos to approve things that obviously contradict the spirit and intent of the laws. The torture memo is the prime example. To define, in absurd legal logic, that all treatment short of organ failure is not torture defies common sense and legal reasoning. The way the law works, the legal argument was plausible enough for Bush’s lawyers to write it and endorse it. But everyone could see how absurd it was.

Barack Obama is doing the same thing with drones. To say that he has the authority to kill an American citizen, away from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, when the people are not part of Al Qaeda and are not planning immediate attacks, contradicts common sense and the Constitution.

The 5th Amendment says the government cannot deprive someone of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Obama says that what he is doing - without any involvement of the judicial or legislative branches - is due process. Someone on Twitter interpreted the statement thusly: Due process is the process that we do.

Further, President Obama says he has this authority when individuals are planning imminent attacks on the US, but imminent attack is re-defined to mean not at all imminent and in fact not necessarily planning an actual specific attack.

You can argue that individuals that are at war with the US can be killed by the US without due process. However, the president is using this authority to kill individuals that are not on a battlefield, and in fact they are claiming this power exists on American soil, where I don’t think a war is happening.

What Obama is doing is using the same absurd legal logic to give himself the authority to do something that violates laws and our own values. Due process is a fundemental value of our constitutional system and the drone policies trample that.

But what makes Obama’s policy worse is that it exists for him and no one else. President Bush and especially Vice President Cheney believed, wrongly in my opinion, that the executive branch was excessively weakened following the Nixon presidency; they believed in a strong “unitary” executive. So the powers they were fighting for were not for them only, but for their successors as well.

President Obama on the other hand enjoys having a free hand executing individuals without due process, including American civilians away from battlefields. But he wants it to exist for him only. In the run-up to the election, in the fear that Romney might win, the administration prepared to release rules governing this supposed power to kill individuals. Once the election was over, that rush has slowed down to a crawl. So in his mind, it is right that he has this power, because he will use it responsibly. But we cannot trust Romeny to use it this well.

But this mentality, even more so, violates American values. We are a nation of laws, not of individuals. The laws that enable or restrict government need to apply to everyone. If it is a good idea for Obama to have the power, then it must be a good idea for Romney to as well.

Conversely, if it is not a good idea for Romney, than it isn’t a good idea for Obama to have the power. By walking away from the idea of a country of laws, not people, we walk away from a system of objective policies and restraining everyone even though some might not abuse a power where others would.

There is also a political problem with Obama's policies. As a Democrat implementing these policies, Obama is preventing any ability to reign in or stop these powers in the future. If this were a Republican claiming the ability to kill Americans on American soil, the left would be in a frothing rage. There are many on the left that are opposing this (and are frothing mad) - Glen Greenwald as well as the ACLU come to mind - but not as many as would be were it a Republican president claiming the same powers. And now, when a Republican becomes president and tries to use these same powers, the left as a whole, even with those that have opposed it, will lack any moral authority to oppose and stop it.

I am deeply disappointed in Presdient Obama. He says we can maintain our values while maintaining our security. We can, but his administration is not a model for that, no matter how many times he repeats that phrase. He had the ability to be that leader, to show that we could protect our values. But he chose to do the opposite - without unfortunately giving up the talking point.