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The Nobel Peace Laureate with a Kill List

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On February 5, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney offered a rare defense of America’s drone policy. He stated, “These strikes are legal, they are ethical, and they are wise.” The rarity of his statement arises from the fact that the White House has stonewalled reporters on the drone program since its inception. The proximate cause of Carney’s statement was a confidential Justice Department 16-page memo that was leaked to NBC News (PDF). It opens, “This white paper sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the U.S. government could use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force of al-Qa’ida.” (A more accurate wording would have been “a U.S. citizen who is believed to be.…”) Elsewhere, the paper allows for targeting Americans even if there is no intelligence about their involvement in an imminent ...

Empire vs. Peace, Freedom, Morality, and Prosperity

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The justification that U.S. officials use for their assassination of people overseas, including American citizens, is that the people they’re killing are bent on killing U.S. forces. Thus, the justification is sort of a modified self-defense concept—they’re trying to kill us and so we’re assassinating them before they have a chance to kill us. Most mainstream commentators have come to passively accept this justification for the U.S. assassination program. You can especially see this when they comment on people killed who are considered “collateral damage.” They refer to those people as innocent civilians and to the targeted people as terrorists or insurgents. The notion is that the assassins were simply targeting the “bad guys” and, unfortunately, struck some innocent people in the process. But the fact is that people over there are trying to kill U.S. forces because U.S. forces are over there. They’re over there occupying Afghanistan. They’re rearming Iraq, after destroying the country and killing countless people. They have ...

Peace, Prosperity, Harmony, and Fun

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I went to a baseball game last night in Baltimore. The Orioles were playing the Washington Nationals. I couldn’t help but notice what a good time everyone was having, and in spite of the fact that the home team was losing the entire game. I thought to myself: This is what life is all about. Notwithstanding the heartaches in life that everyone experiences at one time or another, life is about pursuing happiness and enjoying life, each in his own way. That is what the United States was once all about. The game of baseball, which was invented in the 1800s, reflects that. Now, let’s place a reality overlay on that baseball game last night: The war on terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, bombs, drones, assassinations, torture, death, injuries, destruction, detention, kidnapping, incarceration, NSA, surveillance, TSA, searches, seizures, spying, monitoring, and denial of due process. Not very pleasant, is it? In fact, it’s all become a dark side to American life, one that is as ...