Ron's View

Change We Can Believe In: Killing US Citizens (But Don’t Ask Why)

September ended with the death of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by drone attack in Yemen. President Obama created a new legal precedent with the strike, claiming it was justified because al-Awlaki “had joined the enemy in wartime, shifting from propaganda to an operational role in plots devised in Yemen by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula against the United States.” (Quote from Scott Shane’s NYT article on the legal debate over the killing.) Whether becoming operational is sufficient legal basis for assassinating a US citizen is not in itself clear, though many have been happy to support this line of reasoning. It should be noted, however, that the administration was unwilling to provide evidence of al-Awlkai’s operational role.

Last week, US drones struck again, killing al-Awlaki’s son “Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin … in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.” Whatever did they do to deserve this fate? No one’s talking:

One week after a U.S. military airstrike killed a 16-year-old American citizen in Yemen, no one in the Obama administration, Pentagon or Congress has taken responsibility for his death, or even publicly acknowledged that it happened.

The absence of official accountability for the demise of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a Denver native and the son of an al-Qaeda member, deepens the legal and ethical murkiness of the Obama administration’s campaign to kill alleged enemies of the state outside of traditional war zones.

Had Abdulrahman gone operational too? Does Obama believe he should have the right to assassinate minors without due process? Is this what it’s come to?

As Amy Davidson asked in her New Yorker blog on Tuesday:

Anwar al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and wrote angry and ugly sermons for them. The Administration says that it had to kill him because he had become “operational,” but so far it has kept the evidence for that to itself.

Was the son targeted, too?

… Where does the Obama Administration see the limits of its right to kill an American citizen without a trial? … And what are the protections for an American child?

I’d sure like to hear some answers.

Change We Can Believe In: Institutionalize Bush civil liberty policies

Yes, I’ve touched on this theme before. But it’s time to circle back, thanks to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley’s op-ed piece in today’s LA Times. The article should be read in full. Here’s a sample:

Historically, this country has tended to correct periods of heightened police powers with a pendulum swing back toward greater individual rights. Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities. Candidate Obama capitalized on this swing and portrayed himself as the champion of civil liberties.

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the “just following orders” defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

I have nothing to add to Turley’s conclusion that “the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties.”

A few days ago, I wrote about the White House’s justification for continuing the war in Libya without the Congressional authorization that the War Powers Act would appear to require. As explained in the NYT article by Charlie Savage and Mark Landler, Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, and Robert BAuer, the White House counsel, argued that “American forces had not been in ‘hostilities’ … They argued that United States forces are at little risk because there are no troops on the ground and Libyan forces are unable to exchange fire with them meaningfully.” (See Ted Rall’s representation of this concept above.)

On the front page of yesterday’s NYT, Charlie Savage followed up with a piece on how Bauer and Koh won Obama’s ear, and the day, despite counter-arguments by

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, [who] had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Savage goes on to explain that “Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.”

Only in the penultimate paragraph does Savage reveal the the stunning news that “Other high-level Justice lawyers were also involved in the deliberations, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. supported Ms. Krass’s view.”

President Bush listened to his OLC, but then he made sure to appoint hacks who told him whatever he wanted, most notably by re-defining torture so that whatever he wanted to do wouldn’t count. I don’t know what’s worse, Bush’s approach or Obama’s: just keep asking around until you hear what you want, then ignore the OLC and your attorney general.

The rule of law continues to wither away.

Change We Can Believe In: It’s My Party, and I’ll Bomb Who I Want To

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll get the reference. If not, well, there was this nice Jewish girl named Leslie Sue Goldstein who recorded It’s My Party under the name Lesley Gore. As she turned 17 in the spring of 1963, it became the #1 song in the country, a hit for both her and producer Quincy Jones. The words of its immortal refrain were on all our tongues that summer: “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to. You would cry too if it happened to you.”

This morning I was dumbfounded as I read online the NYT article by Charlie Savage and Mark Landler, to appear in tomorrow’s paper, in which White House explains why the fighting in Libya is not a war. This was the basis for concluding that the War Powers Act doesn’t apply, so that President Obama need not ask Congress for authorization for continued fighting in Libya.

In contending that the limited American role did not oblige the administration to ask for authorization under the War Powers Resolution, the report asserted that “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.”

[snip]

“We are acting lawfully,” said Harold H. Koh, the State Department legal adviser, who expanded on the administration’s reasoning in a joint interview with the White House counsel, Robert Bauer.

The two senior administration lawyers contended that American forces had not been in “hostilities” at least since early April, when NATO took over the responsibility for the no-fly zone and the United States shifted to primarily a supporting role — providing refueling and surveillance to allied warplanes, although remotely piloted drones operated by the United States periodically fire missiles, too.

They argued that United States forces are at little risk because there are no troops on the ground and Libyan forces are unable to exchange fire with them meaningfully. And they said the military mission was constrained by a United Nations Security Council resolution, which authorized air power for the purpose of defending civilians.

“We are not saying the president can take the country into war on his own,” said Mr. Koh, a former Yale Law School dean and outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s expansive theories of executive power. “We are not saying the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional or should be scrapped or that we can refuse to consult Congress. We are saying the limited nature of this particular mission is not the kind of ‘hostilities’ envisioned by the War Powers Resolution.”

If I understand this correctly, we’re not at war because even though we get to fire missiles, Libyan forces can’t fire back.

Is this a great country or what? I love the rule of law. Okay, so the president is constrained by law to get Congressional approval to fight wars. But if we want to bomb the crap out of a country, as long as we keep them at arm’s length so they can’t return fire, we’re not at war.

Sorry, Congress. You don’t matter. It’s my party, and I’ll bomb who I want to.

This is a post I started three weeks ago, in the wake of Jane Mayer’s widely discussed New Yorker article on the US Justice Department’s prosecution of Thomas Drake, the former National Security Agency employee accused of disclosing top-secret defense documents. Events have overtaken me, most notably the government’s abandonment of its overblown case and agreement to a plea bargain with Drake.

Mayer’s article is still very much to the point in its depiction of the Obama administration’s over-reach in its zeal to bring whistleblowers to their knees. It’s essential reading. For now, let me settle on making just one point, by quoting from Mayer’s article her own quote of Yale law professor Jack Balkin:

Jack Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, agrees that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation. “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” he says. In his view, zealous leak prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin says, has “systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration.”

There is little more troubling about the Obama administration than its continuation of Bush’s national security state. At least in the Bush years we could see what he was doing as an aberration and anticipate that his successor would return us to the rule of law. Had McCain been elected and continued these policies, we might still view them as an aberration. But for Obama, who spoke out against these measures as a senator and campaigned against them, to not just continue them but vigorously argue for their necessity indeed enshrines them as bipartisan national policy. (See the cartoon at the top of this post for Tom Tomorrow’s take on this issue.)

Which brings us to Charlie Savage’s front-page article in today’s NYT, whose title speaks for itself: “F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

[snip]

Some of the most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an “assessment.” The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look into people and organizations “proactively” and without firm evidence for suspecting criminal or terrorist activity.

Under current rules, agents must open such an inquiry before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database. Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without making a record about their decision.

In other words, the FBI can spy on us for just about any reason, or no reason at all.

I feel safer already.

Obama signing order to close Guantánamo, January 21, 2009

[Doug Mills/The New York Times]

An Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo died yesterday, apparently by suicide. In the NYT At War blog site, Andrew Lehren writes unquestioningly today that the detainee

had worked as a courier for senior officials for Al Qaeda in Pakistan, a job similar to those who ultimately were instrumental in leading the United States military to tracking down Osama bin Laden, according to government documents.

…

The United States government, in 2009 federal court filings, portrayed him as a courier who worked with senior Qaeda officials in Pakistan and Iran, delivering correspondence and supplies. He also helped guide soldiers into Afghanistan.

Lehrer provides no substantiation of these accusations. Do we really believe whatever the government says about Guantánamo detainees? If the guy is so obviously guilty, why was he never charged with a crime? Fortunately, the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg provided a little more sanity.

Inayatullah, 37, was one of the last captives brought to the controversial camps in southeast Cuba by the Bush administration. He arrived in September 2007, and was described as an Al Qaeda emir in Iran who planned and directed the group’s terror operations.

His lawyer, Miami public defender Paul Raskind, countered that the man who died was never known as Inayatullah anywhere but in Guantánamo, never had a role in Al Qaeda and was in fact named Hajji Nassim and ran a cellphone shop in Iran near the Afghan border.

Rashkind also acknowledged that his client had a history of psychological problems that the military recognized at Guantánamo. “I have no doubt it was a suicide,” he said by telephone while traveling in St. Louis.

The Afghan’s mental health problems became so profound last year that Rashkind arranged to bring a civilian psychiatrist to the base to work with the man.

“This is really a sad mental health case … starting from childhood,” he said. At Guantánamo, “they treated him pretty humanely, I’d have to say.”

Legal sources familiar with the case added that the Afghan had spent long stretches in the psychiatric ward at Guantánamo and had previous episodes where he had tried to harm himself.

[snip]

Less is known about Inayatullah than most Guantanamo captives at this stage. Publicly released Information on him, aside from the report of his death, comes from a single Sept. 12, 2007 Pentagon press release that announced his arrival at Guantanamo as the alleged confessed al Qaeda “emir,” or chief, in Zahedan, in southeastern Iran, near the Pakistan-Afghan border.

The press release alleged he “collaborated with numerous senior al Qaeda leaders” and had a personal hand in “global terrorist efforts” — notably smuggling foreign fighters between Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.

He was never charged with a crime and was never known to undergo a combatant status review tribunal at Guantanamo, a procedure designed by the Pentagon to evaluate whether he met the criteria for indefinite detention as an “enemy combatant,” a standard established early in the administration of President George W. Bush. …

His attorney, Rashkind, called his case “an outlier” in the prison camp processes, partly because he was brought there so late in the camps’ history and partly because of his mental health issues. He was never designated for trial nor for indefinite detention nor release, Rashkind said.

“To me this is a human tragedy,” said Rashkind, who has defended four Guantánamo captives. “I don’t think he belonged there at all.”

Was I dreaming or did Obama issue an order when he took office to close Guantánamo in order to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism.”? Let’s see. According to this NYT article on January 22, 2009, it really happened.

What a disgrace!

Change We Can Believe In: We’re A Nation of Laws He’s Guilty If I Say So

It was good to learn last Tuesday that “Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking classified government documents to the Web site WikiLeaks, will be moved from near-solitary confinement at the Marine brig in Quantico, Va., to another prison [Fort Leavenworth] under conditions that may be less restrictive.

What a puzzle, then, that on Friday, President Obama told Manning supporter Logan Price that

if you’re in the military… And I have to abide by certain rules of classified information. If I were to release material I weren’t allowed to, I’d be breaking the law.

We’re a nation of laws! We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.

He broke the law? No need for a trial, then? Last I knew, he was merely being detained while awaiting trial. Now I’m really puzzled.

What makes Obama’s comments especialluy unfortunate is that if Manning ever is tried, it will be in a military court with judges who are under Obama’s command. As Greenwald observed two days ago,

It may be that Obama spoke extemporaneously and without sufficient forethought, but it is — at best — reckless in the extreme for him to go around decreeing people guilty who have not been tried: especially members of the military who are under his command and who will be adjudged by other members of the military under his command. Moreover, as a self-proclaimed Constitutional Law professor, he ought to have an instinctive aversion when speaking as a public official to assuming someone’s guilt who has been convicted of nothing. It’s little wonder that he’s so comfortable with Manning’s punitive detention since he already perceives Manning as a convicted criminal. “Sentence first – verdict afterward,” said the Queen of Hearts to Alice in Wonderland.

Meanwhile, we can thank WikiLeaks (whatever role Manning played in providing documents) for our best look yet into the travesty of justice that was, and continues to be, Guantánamo. Instead of going after whistleblowers, Obama might better spend his time cleaning up the mess, as he once promised.

Change We Can Believe In: Fear Trumps the Rule of Law

I’m a little late getting to this, because of our trip to New York, and by now what needs to be said has been said widely elsewhere.

On Monday, Attorney General Holder announced

that the Obama administration “will prosecute Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other people accused of plotting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks before a military commission and not a civilian court, as it once planned. …

[This shift] marked a significant moment of capitulation in the Obama administration’s largely frustrated effort to dismantle counterterrorism architecture left behind by former President George W. Bush. President Obama, in one of his first initiatives, had announced his intention to close the Guantánamo prison in a year, a goal that he failed to fulfill.

Mr. Holder said Monday that he stood by his judgment that it made more sense, based on the facts and evidence of the case, to try Mr. Mohammed, described as the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and the four others in a federal court.

The NYT editorial page didn’t pull its punches the next day, in an editorial titled Cowardice Blocks the 9/11 Trial:

On Monday, Mr. Holder’s dream for demonstrating the power of the American court system crumbled when he announced that the trial would take place not in New York City or anywhere in the United States but before a military commission at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp.

That retreat was a victory for Congressional pandering and an embarrassment for the Obama administration, which failed to stand up to it.

The wound inflicted on New York City from Mr. Mohammed’s plot nearly a decade ago will not heal for many lifetimes, yet the city, while still grieving, has thrived. How fitting it would have been to put the plot’s architect on trial a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, to force him to submit to the justice of a dozen chosen New Yorkers, to demonstrate to the world that we will not allow fear of terrorism to alter our rule of law.

But, apparently, there are many who continue to cower, who view terrorists as much more fearsome than homegrown American mass murderers and the American civilian jury system as too “soft” to impose needed justice. The administration of George W. Bush encouraged this view for more than seven years, spreading a notion that terror suspects only could be safely held and tried far from our shores at Guantánamo and brought nowhere near an American courthouse. The federal courts have, in fact, convicted hundreds of terrorists since 9/11. And federal prisons safely hold more than 350 of them.

. . . Monday’s announcement represents a huge missed opportunity to prove the fairness of the federal court system and restore the nation’s reputation for providing justice for all.

Shortly after Holder’s announcement, Jane Mayer wrote:

Today’s news that K.S.M. is slated now for a military commission in the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, rather than facing a criminal trial in the civilian justice system that Holder believed was more fitting, may indeed be the defining moment for the Obama Justice Department, defining it, unfortunately, as incapable of standing up to to the political passions still stirred by the threat of terrorism.

Holder and some of the smartest prosecutors in the country had prepared what they believed was the strongest case possible against K.S.M. Lawyers involved in the effort told me they had spent years on it, and had files filled with killer evidence, just waiting for trial. Careers had been devoted to compiling an impeccable case. By using the civilian justice system, Holder had wanted to send several important messages, among them that terrorists are criminals, not some new breed of super warrior, and that the U.S. legal system is the strongest, fairest, and most credible system in the world. A guilty verdict arrived at in front of the world, in a public trial, with ordinary citizens sitting in judgment of K.S.M., would be internationally accepted as legitimate, in a way that no military tribunal ever will be. Or so the thinking went.

…

Despite Holder’s defiant reiteration today of his preference for trying K.S.M. in the federal courts, human-rights advocates were critical. “The administration has gone to great lengths to defend its authority to make these decisions, but has done little to exercise it,” Human Rights First president Elisa Massimino said. “Holder’s defense of executive prerogative today is stirring, but it comes too late without White House backing. The administration had months to act before Congress tied its hands on this. It failed to do so. There’s no substitute for leadership on this issue—and it has to come from the top. Without it, you get what we have today: capitulation to the agenda of fear.”

Obama left Holder high and dry, choosing the politics of fear over the rule of law.

Change We Can Believe In: Reaffirming the commitment to close Guantanamo but keeping it open

You gotta love it. Eight days ago, the White House released a fact sheet on Guantanamo and detainee policy announcing that it “remains committed to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and to maintain a lawful, sustainable and principled regime for the handling of detainees there, consistent with the full range of U.S. national security interests.” There’s the rub. Committed consistent with national security interests. And if the administration’s determination of national security interests results in keeping Guantanamo open, oh well.

I’ve been meaning for a week to write about this, but now I can simply refer to an eloquent editorial in last Saturday’s Des Moines Register that says what needs to be said. Excerpts below.

President Barack Obama’s announcement this week that some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay could be held indefinitely by the United States without benefit of trials is a major disappointment. He may have inherited Guantanamo from former President George W. Bush, but by failing to make good on his pledge to shut it down, Obama now shares credit for this stain on America’s once proud tradition as a champion of justice for all.

That stain must eventually be removed. The president alone clearly cannot resolve the Guantanamo dilemma, however. It will take leadership from both parties in Congress, and the support of the American people, who should see that this nation has a strong interest in living up to its commitment to protecting human rights.

The president made a bold – if risky – promise in his first month of office in 2009 to close down Guantanamo and prosecute or resettle the remaining prisoners outside the United States. . . .

On Monday, Obama appeared to throw in the towel. He cleared the way for trying some Guantanamo detainees before military tribunals. He issued an executive order regarding the fate of the remainder who cannot be tried for various reasons, and who are too dangerous to release: Their status will be periodically reviewed, but unless some miracle happens, they likely will remain in U.S. custody for the remainder of their lives even though they have never been tried or convicted of any crimes against the United States.

[snip]

The United States must eventually come to terms with the fact that it has imprisoned foreign nationals for years with no immediate prospect of a fair trial. Some of these men may present a potential threat to the United States, but the world is full of terrorists who would dearly love to wreak havoc on America. We cannot lock them all up, and locking up a few of them forever without trial will create whole new generations of terrorists with good reason to hate this country.

The stain must be removed.

Change We Can Believe In: Mainstreaming brutality

In the last two posts of my Change We Can Believe In series (here and here), I wrote about the recent escalation in the mistreatment of PFC Bradley Manning at the Quantico brig, where he is held in solitary confinement and now forced to spend nights naked. Thursday, while speaking to a small audience at MIT, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley described Manning’s treatment as “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”

News of Crowley’s comments first appeared in a blog of Philippa Thomas, who was at the event, and who concluded her account with the note that:

A few minutes later, I had a chance to ask a question. “Are you on the record?” I would not be writing this if he’d said no. There was an uncomfortable pause. “Sure.” So there we are.

Crowley’s comments were widely covered yesterday, with Crowley confirming to Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin that they were indeed on the record, adding that “What I said was my personal opinion. It does not reflect an official USG policy position. I defer to the Department of Defense regarding the treatment of Bradley Manning.”

ABC’s Jake Tapper asked President Obama yesterday if he agreed with Crowley’s comments.

President Obama said Friday that he’d “asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.”

Pentagon officials, he said, “assure me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.”

Asked if he therefore disagreed with P.J. Crowley, President Obama sidestepped the question, saying he’d responded “to the substantive issue.”

Manning’s safety! Yes, the Defense Department has said Manning may commit suicide, and if there’s even a kernel of truth to this, it’s because they have been systematically driving him crazy by using the same techniques used on prisoners in Guantánamo. But is he really going to kill himself with his underwear? As Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, explained last week,

his client’s clothing was taken away at night after Manning commented that if he wanted to harm himself, he could do it with “the elastic waistband of his underwear or with his flip-flops.”

He now has to strip every night before bed and also stand outside his cell naked during an inspection every morning, after which his clothes will be returned. He will be allowed to have two blankets at night.

Military officials said the move was a “precautionary measure” to prevent Manning from injuring himself.

Obama’s response yesterday lends credence to Alex Knapp’s observation in a blog post at Outside the Beltway last Monday that Obama is mainstreaming brutality. Well, Knapp doesn’t lay the blame entirely on Obama. Rather, he lays out a familiar, decade-long process. Obama is just the endpoint.

What I find most troubling is that until Obama acquiesced in this process, one could imagine it was a short-term Bush-Cheney aberration. Indeed, many voted for Obama in the belief that he would ensure the short-term, aberrational character of the Bush-Cheney brutality. Instead, by sanctioning such brutality, Obama is ensuring instead that it will move into the mainstream. Knapp explains:

I’ve been trying for the past couple weeks to write about Bradley Manning, but I can’t. It makes me sick to my stomach. The whole trend of brutality and betrayal of American ideals over the past decade makes me sick to my stomach.

We have gone from being the first country that established the principle that prisoners of war should be treated respectfully to a country that operates black sites and sends prisoners to other countries to be tortured–when we don’t torture them ourselves.

In the American Revolution, the number one cause of death for American soldiers was maltreatment and disease in British POW camps. In the Civil War, Andersonville was a cause of national outrage. In the early 20th century, the United States emphatically supported the adoption of the Geneva Conventions. In World War II, German soldiers happily surrendered to Americans in the West, knowing they’d be well treated. But in the East, they fought the Russians to the last man because they knew they wouldn’t be.

Now, in the 21st century, we send robot planes to bomb civilians in a country that’s ostensibly an ally. We have prisons where people are routinely denied basic essentials, denied due process, are maltreated and tortured. We reverse decades of tradition and not only have legalized assassination, but have legalized assassination of United States citizens.

[snip]

Then in 2008, one major reason why I voted for Barack Obama was because he forcefully claimed to be opposed to such policies. And I was mad that that was actually a voting issue for me, because you’d think that not torturing people is a moral no-brainer.

But, as it turned out, Obama lied.

Now, as I look to vote in 2012, I realize that just like in 2000, no part of my consideration for any of the candidates will involve their positions on torture, war crimes, secret prisons, renditions, etc.
Because both candidates will be in favor. Without apology.