COMMENTARY | By this writing, I hereby bequeath to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) the legal authority to strike me down with a Predator drone should I ever become a “senior operational leader of Al Qaida” or “its associated forces.”
I don’t believe constitutional due process laws apply to battlefield situations, whether the president is named George Bush or Barack Obama.
Today, Fox News reports that Senate committee members will gain access to classified drone documents pertaining to John Brennan’s nomination to become head of the CIA. During the process, Brennan will face equally barbed questions from both the political right and the political left.
Easiest to understand is criticism from the right, which plainly derives from the colossal hypocrisy of the Obama administration. The expansion of the drone program is quite a flip-flop for Obama who, as senator, excoriated the Bush administration on the initiatives of the “War on Terror.”
“Enhanced interrogation” being too gritty in the liberal perception of military operations, the Obama administration sought something more sanitary, finding it in an expanded drone program. An armed predator drone does not directly put ground troops at risk, and cleans up after itself.
The drone controversy boiled up this week as the result of an Obama administration policy paper recently obtained by NBC News. The “white paper” presented a legal justification for the expansion of the drone program to include non-judicial execution of al Qaida leaders, even if they happen to be American citizens, as was Anwar al-Awlaki.
My Twitter timeline is full of protestations of how awful it is to kill an American citizen who has taken up arms against other American citizens without a thorough judicial review. Was Jimmy Lee Dykes served with a search warrant? Not according to the Los Angeles Times.
Many grass-roots conservatives are blinded by indignation at the administration for force-feeding Obamacare, gun control, trillions in deficit spending, and “global warming.” They tend to lash out at Obama’s about-face on terrorism, even while most support doing what is necessary to protect America from terrorists with neither boundaries nor rules of warfare.
This is simply wrong.
At the same time, President Obama’s decidedly left-leaning political tendencies undermine the realpolitik epiphanies he has experienced as president, and will be difficult to overcome. But that doesn’t change the fact that the “War on Terror,” alive and renamed, goes on under dangerous and bloody circumstances.
Anthony Ventre is a freelance writer and a Yahoo! contributor in news, commentary, and financial writing.
