Al over at MilPub finally brings to light the official answer to the question Ron Paul should have asked:
"The White House responded to Paul's concerns Thursday, when Press Secretary Jay Carney read a letter Attorney General Eric Holder sent to Paul at the top of his daily briefing. "It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?'" Carney read. "The answer to that question is no."This does not appear to have penetrated the foot-thick skull of the man Chas Pierce likes to call "Senator Aqua Buddha"; his filibuster ran well into today for no more apparent reason than...well, because he's who he is and the Five Minute Rule still applies.
So the good news is that the rule of law still applies to the Land of the Free.
The bad news is that whether this is consolation to the survivors of these sorts of attacks we've been running in the less-paved portions of the world has not been determined.
3 comments:
In simpler times "not engaged in combat" had a clear meaning. However, in a world where all men of military age killed by a drone strike are defined post-hoc as militants (i.e. combatants) the definition becomes circular.
Alas.
True, but I think that the confusion becomes less when you're dealing with a U.S. national on ground accessible to conventional law enforcement. In short, I'm willing to accept this as the Administration's declaration that the AUMF "stops" at the border of Yemen.
That doesn't make me agree that what it's doing IN YEMEN is 100% positive; as I said in the original post, the whole business of retroactively baptizing dead Muslims as "terrorists" strikes me as sketchy and counterproductive. But we seem to be taking the line that whatever works for Mormons...
And 'not engaged in combat' means whatever the President wants it to mean?
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