torture and obama's drone program

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/02/torture-and-obamas-drone-program.html



Last week, John Yoo, the Bush Administration lawyer who authored the infamous “torture memos,” which offered a legal rationale for waterboarding and other forms of prisoner abuse, leapt at what he saw as an opportunity to castigate Obama for worse behavior. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley, denounced Obama’s remote-controlled targeted killing of terror suspects by unmanned aerial drones as a far greater assault on human rights than anything he had ever facilitated.

“Rather than capture terrorists—which produces the most valuable intelligence on al Qaeda—Mr. Obama has relied almost exclusively on drone attacks, and he has thereby been able to dodge difficult questions over detention. But those deaths from the sky violate personal liberty far more than the waterboarding of three al Qaeda leaders ever did,” he wrote.

Yoo is not alone. Several people have argued that partisanship, not principle, is the only reason that members of the mainstream press haven’t treated the disclosure of a Justice Department white paper on the targeted killing of Americans, obtained by NBC, with the same outrage as it did the torture memos. Andrew C. McCarthy, writing on the National Review’s Web site, declared, “My, how the worm has turned.” He went on to assert, “The breathtaking hypocrisy of the Obama Democrats is what screams off the pages of the ‘white paper’ ” on drones. He ridiculed Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, for arguing previously that terror suspects should be tried, when possible, in the criminal-justice system while simultaneously supporting their death by drone. “Ah, but arbitrary power to kill citizens—now, that’s a different story,” McCarthy wrote.

At Reason, the libertarian outpost, Nick Gillespie suggested that liberals’ lesser outrage at Obama’s drones than Bush’s “enhanced interrogations” amounted to a kind of intellectual corruption. “This isn’t ultimately about ideological hypocrisy—of liberals changing their tune once their guy is in office—but something much more basic and much more disturbing. It reveals that for all their crowing about being watchdogs of all that is good and decent in society, when push comes to shove, too many journalists are ready and willing handmaidens to power—including the power to kill.”


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