What Do You Think About the Leaked White Paper Justifying President Obama's Killing of American Citizens?

When i was 12 I dreamed of being Golgo 13 all up in that spycraft
Now the kids today play at being reapers and drones
All like Ender's Game killing from afar
Like they are on their Playstation 3s and 4s
Or tweaking with their Ipads
Damn
How did i get so old?
How did the killing become so damn impersonal?

The leak of the Obama administration's white paper "justifying" the killing of American citizens by the United States government has generated, quite justifiably, a great deal of concern by journalists, as well as some in the general public.

We have reason to be concerned as citizens. The Executive Office is not a Leviathan with the power to uniformally decide matters of life and death regarding American citizens--at least in theory. In practice, the President, and the various apparatuses of  the United States government, have been killing people without the approval of the courts for a very, very long time.

I am not particularly concerned about the use of drones to kill people, per se. If one is brought down by a slingshot, rock, bullet, knife, bomb, or missile, they are dead either way. There is no sliding scale: death is an absolute value.

My primary concern is precedence. We are creating standards for foreign policy and world governance that the United States will also be subject to when other countries equal and surpass us in global power and reach.

Moreover, the extrajudicial killing of American citizens, and the casual wantonness of the "targeted assassination" program in the Middle East and elsewhere--one which is rather indiscriminate--will inevitably lead to blowback. The American people, as they have been left ignorant by the power elite, will be surprised and default to silly questions such as "why do they hate us so?" The media and the President will tell them, as Bush did, that retaliation was caused by a hatred of "American values."

The sheeple will eat it up as they always do. Empty political calories do fill the belly of the body politic.

Wars should hurt. They should cost a nation some blood and gold. The use of robotic killing devices offers an asymmetric advantage in the short-term. The UAV arms race will limit the power of these weapons among peers in the mid to late term. At present, the robotic killing machines that the United States is deploying abroad threaten to retard the country's foreign policy by making its leaders less risk averse and further insulating the public from the personal consequences of war.

I have long-argued that foreign adventures should come at a cost to all of us. Liberals and conservatives alike are guilty of surrendering to the gross temptations of bloodless war--at least for the United States. In this way, the myth of American exceptionalism is an intoxicant to which both sides of the political aisle are addicted.

I suspect that most people who are offering up an opinion online, with their friends at the bar, in classrooms, or over the dinner table have not actually read the white paper which attempts to justify the extra-judicial murder of American citizens. This is expected: most folks take their cues from the mass media and rely upon the 4th estate to distill complex information down into digestible bits of information; others are put-off by intentionally opaque and vague legal language (if anything, are lawyers not in fact magicians practicing some type of arcane art?); and I suspect a great many people are just numb and tired, Power has worked well, creating a distracted and passive public.

I am not a constitutional scholar or attorney. I have read the white paper, as well as those analyses by folks imminently more qualified to render judgement on the case law and constitutionality of Obama's killing program. Like them, I too was struck by the Orwellian new speak of the Obama administration's legalese. Others have made similar observations as well.

Slate ties the threads together nicely:

The paper itself doesn't discuss any specific target and steers clear of the specifics needed to evaluate what, exactly, is the threshold of evidence required to make a final decision on when it is legal to kill an American. The portions of the document that are currently raising the most questions and concerns are the vague sounding classification of "an associated force," and the rather elastic definition of an "imminent" threat. 

The former would appear to give the government broad leeway to target anyone they deem even remotely connected to al-Qaida, while the latter gives the government the go-ahead to target a suspect even when the officials, in the words of the memo, have no "clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future." The document, likewise, sheds little light on who makes the final decision, saying only that such determinations can be made by an "informed, high-level official of the U.S. government."

The most troubling part of the document for me, as it reads write out of Animal Farm, Watership Down, 1984, or the movie Brazil, is the following passage:

Finally, the Department notes, that under the circumstances described in this paper, there exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional questions. It is well-established that "matters intimately related to foreign policy and national security are rarely proper subjects for judicial intervention..."   

Please take the time to read the actual white paper so matter-of-factly titled "Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa'ida or An Associated Force". 

What do you all make of this stuff? Are you surprised? Comfortably numb? Indifferent?

  DOJ White Paper on Drone Strikes by