Glenn Greenwald’s ongoing crusade against anyone who dares to see nuance in the debate over targeted killings and the war on terrorism has risen to a not-so-surprising new level. Namely, Americans who oppose targeted killings of American citizens on American soil today, but who once supported the targeted killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, are racists. Furthermore, Greenwald made it perfectly clear yesterday that if anyone sees civil liberties and war powers as dual priorities in this area, and drone hysteria as a secondary distraction, they’re simply drone apologists.

Now, if you’ve read any of my articles over the years, you’d know that I have a fairly well-tuned racism radar. I’m not afraid to point it out when I see it, and I think I have the education and expertise to recognize it, even when it’s insidiously covert. But it’s a huge stretch to call the disparity between support for the killing of Al-Awlaki in 2011 and the less enthusiastic support for drone strikes in 2013 as racism. Greenwald is over-reaching times a thousand — taking an extreme posture (again) as a means of scolding and shaming anyone who doesn’t exist within his conspiratorial neo-left/libertarian clique. I’ll get into the ultimate in Greenwald shaming at the end of this post.

First, let’s look at the polling. Greenwald began by citing new Gallup numbers showing that Americans, by a margin of 52-41, oppose the targeted killing of U.S. citizens who are suspected terrorists. He compared these numbers with a totally different poll from a different pollster taken immediately following the targeted killing of Al-Awlaki with the following results: “69 per cent of respondents think the action taken by the US Government to kill Anwar al-Awlaki was justified.”

Can you spot the two major issues here? The sources and the dates.

It’s a Gallup poll, and if you happened to have followed Gallup’s recent track record, especially during the election, it’s hardly the gold standard for polling any more. Specifically, Gallup was the least accurate of all 23 top level polling outfits, showing Romney with a 7.2 percent average lead among likely voters, according to Nate Silver. Not only that, but it was the third election in a row in which Gallup has been wildly off the mark. Maybe Gallup isn’t the best poll to be citing here.

Meanwhile, the Al-Awlaki poll Greenwald cited was from October, 2011, just after Al-Awlaki was killed, and, oddly, it was a poll from Angus-Reid Public Opinion. Does it ring a bell? No? Me neither. I did some further digging around on polling numbers from that period of time and discovered a YouGov poll (more accurate than Gallup on the election, by the way) that showed support for targeted killings of U.S.-born enemy combatants at 43 percent — just two points higher than the support for the policy in yesterday’s Gallup poll. In other words, support for targeted killings of U.S. born enemy combatants has remained about the same since Al-Awlaki was taken out in Yemen.

What we’ve discovered from polls over the years is that whenever questions are more specific, we tend to learn more about what people are thinking. Duh. For example, when pollsters asked voters whether they supported the broad and often overwhelming concept known as “Obamacare,” 56 percent of voters said they opposed it. But when asked about specific provisions in the law, voters generally supported it — some by supermajority margins. Furthermore, polling results tend to shift wildly based on the whimsy of our townsfolk-from-The-Simpsons attention spans. We just change our minds a lot. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it sucks.

The reality is that it’s a huge stretch to define causality in polling, especially polling taken from two different polling outfits at two different periods of time and with two different methodologies. This leaves a huge and deliberate gap through which Greenwald was able to comfortably drive his agenda. Namely, the discrepancy must either be due to Rand Paul’s super-amazing (but confused and opportunistic) filibuster calling attention to the issue, or that the name “Al-Awlaki” must have stirred up anti-Muslim racism on behalf of enough voters to form the apparent gap between support in 2011 and opposition in 2013.

As for Al-Awlaki himself, Greenwald goes on to defend the al-Qaida operative’s American citizenship as an impenetrable safeguard against being killed. While I believe the war on terrorism has gone on for too long and the president’s war powers must be rescinded by an act of Congress and signed by the president himself, I can also understand the historical and legal wartime justification for killing Al-Awlaki. This doesn’t make me a drone apologist or a war on terrorism apologist. It simply makes me a realist who’s pointing out the nuance in the situation. The president was given war powers by Congress to take out al-Qaida terrorists regardless of national affiliation. As a clear member of al-Qaida, Al-Awlaki, regardless of where he was born, plotted to kill Americans via the Christmas Day “underpants” bombing, among other instances, and his citizenship history is spotty at best. According to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against terrorism, Al-Awlaki fits within the legal framework of the law as an al-Qaida operative and is therefore fair game.

Greenwald, however, thinks in absolutes and defines Al-Awlaki as undeniably American, writing, “From a legal and constitutional perspective, there was not a single person “more American” than he. That’s because those gradations of citizenship do not exist.”

But it’s not that simple, especially in the context of a war (regardless of whether you support it, the AUMF-authorized war has to be the context of the debate). We only need to repeat the often-cited example of Confederate soldiers, as well as contemporaneous wartime citizen operatives, who were killed by the American government in the hundreds of thousands even though they were all natural-born citizens of the United States. Not to belabor the point, but there were also American-born Germans who enlisted in the Nazi army at the outset of World War II who were subsequently killed in combat. Take away the war context, and the government-sanctioned targeted killing of U.S. citizens without due process is extraordinarily illegal and, needless to say, immoral to the extreme. But in the war context, it’s legal, however you might peg its morality.

Of course I absolutely agree that there’s anti-Muslim extremism, hatred and racism in America. It’s very much alive. But defining it as the cause of the polling gap, given the awkwardness of Greenwald’s numbers, cheapens and randomizes the racism claim. It’d be like claiming that the difference in the aforementioned Obamacare polling was purely driven by racism when it’s obvious that it was more a matter of specificity than racial bias.

Besides, generally speaking, the most vocal anti-Muslim racists also believe President Obama himself is a secret Muslim jihadist who’s quietly replacing the Constitution with Sharia Law while engaging in a Benghazi conspiracy to cover up the fact that Chris Stevens was allegedly trafficking Libyan arms to pro-al-Qaida Syrian rebels. Incidentally, Saint Rand Paul believes in this conspiracy theory so much so that he grilled Hillary Clinton about in a Senate hearing — shamelessly on the record. It’s difficult to believe that the hard core racists in America also support the policies of a president who they believe is one of the “evildoers.”

Greenwald continues by employing the If The Evildoers Were White Swedes fallacy, suggesting that if we were using drones to terrorize and kill white babies, drone apologists would be more outraged. Maybe so, unless those Swedes had sworn a religious oath to kill Americans and Israelis at any cost, and had killed 3,000 Americans in lower Manhattan. Racism against Muslims surely exists and has fueled support for war on terrorism, but I don’t see it as a broad systemic catalyst — at least not within the numbers Greenwald cited. (By the way, this argument eerily reminds me of the far-right gibberish about how liberals are clearly racist because if African-American Barack Obama had instead been white Anglo “Barry Smith,” he never would’ve been elected.)

What ultimately discredits Greenwald’s entire article, though, is when he accuses “Democratic partisans” of anti-Muslim racism based on the socioeconomic privilege of those so-called partisans.

Greenwald concluded, “The people who insist that these abuses are insignificant and get too much attention are not the ones affected by them, because they’re not Muslim, and thus do not care.”

Put another way: drone apologists, in his view, don’t care about brown Muslims so kill ‘em all. This is where the motivation for his post becomes clear. His intention is obviously to smear anyone who doesn’t megaditto his dogma as being motivated by privilege and thus racism against Muslims. Whereas Greenwald’s assertion that the polling gap is driven by racism is a stretch, this is total flailing. It can’t be because some of these so-called “partisans” see nuance in the issue or because some commentators are trying to set priorities and insert some rationality into the debate — it’s obviously because they hate Muslims and don’t really care if they’re indiscriminately killed. Speaking for myself, I’d prefer to see the war on terrorism end today. However, I don’t see how screaming “baby killer!” will expedite the cause given what I know about the president and his administration. I also don’t mind calling out massive inaccuracies and nonsensical smears because such behavior only discredits the broader goals and priorities of the movement to wrap things up.

But I guess that makes me a racist drone apologist. Even though I’m, you know, not.

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Glenn Greewald and Jane Hamsher: No fans of President Obama

By Bob Cesca: There’s a “cold” civil war among progressives that’s always existed, but it’s been rapidly heating up since the earliest days of the 2008 campaign. The most visible front of this feud is taking place between prominent bloggers, on Twitter and, well, right here on The Daily Banter.

I’ve written about this topic extensively over the years, and on more than one occasion I’ve been caught up in the middle of it all. First, during the 2008 campaign, I endorsed President Obama quite early in the process and subsequently engaged in the contentious primary battle between Obama supporters and Clinton supporters. It baffled me how progressives could support Hillary Clinton given some of her tactics (a bit of fear-mongering and the like), her moderate third-way DLC politics and well as her early support for the Iraq War. And I made my opinions about her abundantly clear. If you’d like a solid retelling of the progressives in-fighting during the primaries, check out Eric Boehlert’s wonderful Bloggers On The Bus.

The primaries gave way to mixed and ambivalent support for the president during the general election. The PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass) evolved into the current movement of progressives who universally oppose the president and, more importantly, ridicule anyone who dares to defend his record so far — even in a piecemeal way. More on that presently.

The first major battle following the primaries took place around the inauguration when progressives were divided over the president’s choice to inclused pastor/profiteer Rick Warren as the invocation speaker. Personally, I was loudly against Warren appearing at the inaugural, due to his various anti-gay remarks and my general opposition to mixing state and church matters. Following that fracas, progressives were divided over the stimulus. Some argued that it was too small, others argued that it was the best the president could achieve. I’ve always thought the stimulus was too small, but there wasn’t enough congressional support for a larger amount. Next up, the healthcare reform bill divided progressives over the president’s lack of support for single-payer, and some progressives theorized that the president was also opposed to the public option. I knew single-payer was never promised and was completely impractical given political and economic realities in Washington and nationwide. If it was proposed as the centerpiece of healthcare reform, the whole thing would have never been taken up by Congress resulting in a major failure on healthcare — again. However, I blogged extensively about the importance of the public option and how critical it was to the success of the legislation. (In fact, Rachel Maddow once quoted one of my columns in which I made the pitch that reform without a public option would be a nightmare.) But when the dust cleared and tempers had subsided, I began to see the benefits of the bill and my prior hard-line opinion softened to the realities of the bill and all of its highly positive aspects, including massive subsidies for middle class families, new rules about preventative care, birth control, pre-existing conditions and a massive expansion of Medicaid. After healthcare was the Afghanistan surge, the continued existence of the prison at Guantanamo, the apparent lack of speed on LGBT issues, drone strikes and the assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki.

Just about every move by the president has subdivided progressives along the following lines.

Group #1. The Neo-PUMAs. Many of those who have taken a consistent anti-Obama approach are beyond convincing. They’ve indelably decided that President Obama is “worse than Bush” and other pejoratives, and will never be convinced otherwise. They feel as if they’re doing the right thing by holding the president accoutable at all costs and, in their mind, with the same ferocity they used against George W. Bush.

Group #2. The Obamabots. There’s a considerable counter-movement of bloggers and Twitter denizens who actively denounce the Neo-PUMAs while pitching the president’s record from a more supportive and positive angle. Their primary goal, which is a noble one, is to make sure the president is re-elected as a means to long-term progressive successes.

Group #3. The Pragmatic Progressives. The rest of us are generally supportive of this president (overlapping with Obamabots), but have also opposed his policies — quite loudly on occasion. Some Neo-PUMAs consider Pragmatic Progressives to be across-the-board Obamabots, and I know this because I consider myself part of this third group even though I’m sure you can find plenty of progressives who have insultingly labeled me an Obamabot despite the fact that I opposed the president’s actions on a variety of issues beginning the ones I listed above, and especially including the debt ceiling deal and regarding various deficit reduction measures. That said, I believe I have a realistic view of the importance of the president’s considerable list of accomplishments beginning with The Rescuing Of The Economy From A Second Great Depression, as well as a strong sense of the political obstacles that are preventing the president from taking a more progressive approach to his agenda. And I think I’m in good company here.

Whatever we want to call these generalized groupings (I hasten to note that there are overlaps and additional smaller groups), and regardless of who occupies their ranks, these divisions have always existed in some form or another, but the success of the Obama campaign in 2008 and the inspiring potential of this administration have amplified the differences in the movement.

Prior to the 2008 primary fight, earlier rifts in the progressive movement, especially during the 2000 election when Ralph Nader picked up the support of progressives to the detriment of Al Gore’s campaign, have haunted and exacerbated the current civil war. The Neo-PUMAs are mostly willing to accept Democratic/progressive electoral defeat and the election of more Republicans in the name of left-wing ideological purity. Obamabots are unwaveringly pushing back against that in the name of victory, and Pragmatic Progressives agree about the urgency of re-electing the president, but they’re not quite as combative against Neo-PUMAs.

And that leads me around to the point of this post. There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing on the issues, as Ben Cohen wrote here. But the tactics being employed by certain “combatants” are counterproductive to their respective groups and, consequently, counterproductive to the goals of progressivism. After all, the aim of all three groups is to work diligently and patriotically towards more progressive voters, more progressive lawmakers and more progressive legislation. Admittedly, I’ve written some things on occasion that have been more than a little incendiary about fellow progressives, and, suffice to say, when someone writes something I don’t like, I’m going to say so. Always. I don’t care who it is, how hip they think they are, or who his or her friends happen to be. But no matter what I end up blurtng out — or what I carefully construct using research and numbers — I always try to keep the following three principles in mind.

1) Modulating our loudness. If we’re always yelling, then we’re easier to ignore. Oh, it’s just the left and their screeching again. But if we remain proactive, if we give credit where credit is due and pick our battles, then, when we have to get loud, we get noticed. Rachel Maddow is a good example of modulating her tone. When it comes to the administration, she’s always been fair and reasonable, yet tough when necessary. So when she has to yell, it really, really resonates.

2) Smart accountability. Holding the president accountable is, naturally, important and inherent to how democracy should function. Government Of The People was established as a means of checking power. It’s our patriotic duty to call out our leadership whenever necessary. But as movement activists, we have to be cautious that we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot by unfairly and mercilessly attacking our allies — and by “allies” I mean this: we want the White House to listen to our ideas, and this White House is more likely to listen to progressives than any administration since FDR. But if we add fuel to conservative fires either by perpetually fostering progressive disillusionment or by offering up easily-repeatably memes to conservative anti-Obama operatives, then we empower the opposition and frighten away our allies. If we kneejerk about a news story and make accusations against the administration that simply aren’t backed up by facts and/or political realities, then we look like spastic idiots. If we only write about administration mistakes or, as Scahill said the other day, “murders,” then we signal to our friends and readers that the administration is a disaster when, in fact, its liberal accomplishments are quite significant.

3) Winning the debate on the ground. How do we make America more progressive? By changing minds. Yelling at the president won’t change the fact that a considerably large chunk of the American electorate is moderate, undecided and independent. The Democrats need the middle in order to win because the left simply isn’t large enough, and if we systematically and deliberately change minds — if we’re disciplined about taking the longview approach and convincing voters that progressivism is the best way to govern, then we will eventually force politicians to move leftward as the electorate does.

Honestly, I’d like to see a lot more of this from all factions of the movement. Even if we disagree on the details of what it means to be a progressive, we should be unified around More Progressivism. Agreeing to the spirit of these three principles will help to get us there. Otherwise we’re screwed and we might as well forfeit the nation to conservatism.

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(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Chris Woods: Two US reports published on May 29th provide significant insights into President Obama’s personal and controversial role in the escalating covert US drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

In a major extract from Daniel Klaidman’s forthcoming book Kill Or Capture, the author reveals extensive details of how secret US drone strikes have evolved under Obama – and how the president knew of civilian casualties from his earliest days in office.

The New York Times has also published a key investigation exploring how the Obama Administration runs its secret ‘Kill List’ – the names of those chosen for execution by CIA and Pentagon drones outside the conventional battlefield.

The Times’ report also reveals that President Obama personally endorsed a redefining of the term ‘civilian’, which has helped to limit any public controversy over ‘non-combatant’ deaths.

Civilian Deaths from Day Three
As the Bureau’s own data on Pakistan makes clear, the very first covert drone strikes of the Obama presidency, just three days after he took office, resulted in civilian deaths in Pakistan. As many as 19 civilians – including four children – died in two error-filled attacks.

Until now it had been thought that Obama was initially unaware of the civilian deaths. Bob Woodward has reported that the president was only told by CIA chief Michael Hayden that the strikes had missed their High Value Target but had killed ‘five al Qaeda militants.’

Now Newsweek correspondent Daniel Klaidman reveals that Obama knew about the civilian deaths within hours. He reports an anonymous participant at a subsequent meeting with the President: ‘You could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man.’ Obama is described aggressively questioning the tactics used.

Yet despite the errors, the president ultimately chose to keep in place the CIA’s controversial policy of using ‘signature strikes’ against unknown militants.That tactic has just been extended to Yemen.

On another notorious occasion, the article reveals that US officials were aware at the earliest stage that civilians – including ‘dozens of women and children’ – had died in Obama’s first ordered strike in Yemen in December 2009. The Bureau recently named all 44 civilians killed in that attack by cruise missiles.

No US officials have ever spoken publicly about the strike, although secret diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks proved that the US was responsible. Now Klaidman reveals that Jeh Johnson, one of the State Department’s senior lawyers, watched the strike take place with others on a video screen:

Johnson returned to his Georgetown home around midnight that evening, drained and exhausted. Later there were reports from human-rights groups that dozens of women and children had been killed in the attacks, reports that a military source involved in the operation termed “persuasive.” Johnson would confide to others, “If I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession.”

Aggressive tactics
Klaidman describes a world in which the CIA and Pentagon constantly push for significant attacks on the US’s enemies. In March 2009, for example. then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen reportedly called for the bombing of an entire training camp in southern Somalia in order to kill one militant leader.

One dissenter at the meeting is said to have described the tactic as ‘carpet-bombing a country.’ The attack did not go ahead.

Obama is generally described as attempting to rein back both the CIA and the Pentagon. But in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki – ‘Obama’s Threat Number One’ – different rules applied.

According to Klaidman Obama let it be known that he would consider allowing civilian deaths if it meant killing the US-Yemeni cleric. ‘Bring it to me and let me decide in the reality of the moment rather than in the abstract,’ an aide recalls him saying. No civilians died that day, as it turned out.

Redefining ‘civilian’
In its own major investigation, the New York Times examines the secret US ‘Kill List’ – the names of those chosen for death at the hands of US drones. The report is based on interviews with more than 36 key individuals with knowledge of the scheme.

The newspaper also accuses Obama of  ‘presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers,’ and of having a ‘Whack-A-Mole approach to counter-terrorism,’ according to one former senior official.

It is often been reported that President Obama has urged officials to avoid wherever possible the deaths of civilians in covert US actions in Pakistan and elsewhere. But reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane reveal that Obama ‘embraced’ a formula understood to have been devised by the Bush administration.

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

So concerned have some officials been by this ‘false accounting’ that they have taken their concerns direct to the White House, according to the New York Times.

The revelation helps explain the wide variation between credible reports of civilian deaths in Pakistan by the Bureau and others, and the CIA’s claims that it had killed no ‘non-combatants’ between May 2010 and September 2011 – and possibly later.

The investigation also reveals that more than 100 US officials take part in a weekly ‘death list’ video conference run by the Pentagon, at which it is decided who will be added to the US military’s kill/ capture lists. ‘A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the CIA focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes,’ the paper reports.

But according to at least one former senior administration official, Obama’s obsession with targeted killings is ‘dangerously seductive.’ Retired admiral Dennis Blair, the former US Director of National Intelligence, told the paper that the campaign was:

The politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.

This article was originally published on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

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By Bob Cesca: Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday and the issue of the president’s targeted predator drone killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki came up. Naturally, since it’s one of his pet topics, Glenn Greenwald spoke against the assassination, while Sullivan and Maher spoke in support of it.

Greenwald’s ongoing defense of Al-Awlaki is based on the fact that the al-Qaeda operative was born in the United States, and therefore, as a U.S. citizen, he ought to be somehow grabbed and afforded due process by our justice system.

I have some very strong views on this issue — all of which circulate around the general idea that the moral and legal aspects of war, like politics, are never black-and-white. It’s entirely judged in shades of gray. I’ll get to that momentarily. Meanwhile, after watching the debate on Real Time, I posted the following item on my blog and added the following remarks:

As soon as someone takes up arms against the United States, they’ve entered a field of battle, and a war, of sorts, is engaged. Likewise, if a criminal aims a deadly weapon at a soldier or law enforcement officer, that criminal runs the risk of being fatally shot — and it’s perfectly legal to do so.

While that example isn’t exactly a 1:1 analogy, since Al-Awlaki wasn’t literally aiming a weapon at an American when he was killed, another point of comparison is the U.S. Civil War in which half the nation seceded and took up arms against the U.S. military and president. Should Lincoln, who considered the Confederates to still be Americans, have spared the 250,000 rebels who were killed during that war after they collectively threatened the stability of the United States? Clearly, and for a variety of reasons, the U.S. military effort during the Civil War, while brutal, was justified. Similarly, Sullivan brought up the American-joining-the-Nazi-Army concept.

I agree with Greenwald that due process and justice is crucial — but only in criminal cases where the assailant isn’t engaged in a shooting war against American citizens and soldiers.

Glenn Greenwald responded on Twitter and the following conversation took place:

GLENN: You’ve embraced the core Bush/Yoo Terror theory: no rights for **accused combatants, and the President alone decides. Congrats

@PHPRESS: Bob hates our freedom. He’d prefer a totalitarian state with a powerful dictator, the tiny penis syndrome.

GLENN: Only when there’s a Democrat in office – he’ll discover the Constitution again when there’s a Big Bad Republican

ME: So I’ve abandoned the Constitution for party politics? This kind of kneejerk reaction is poisoning the debate, Glenn.

GLENN: I just explained the *substance in the last tweet – you`ve embraced the Bush/Yoo theory – now that there’s a Dem

ME: No. Bush/Yoo justified torture, rendition, wiretaps, suspension of habeas etc – all of which I oppose, irrespective of party.

GLENN: Hilarious: it’s OK to KILL ****accused combatants w/o judicial review, but not to eavesdrop on them or detain them w/o it

ME: There’s a clear distinction! Al-Awlaki is ONE instance. Torture, wiretaps, etc are happening secretly on a widespread basis.

GLENN: Wheter you admit it or not, you`re arguing Bush/Yoo: accused combatants have no rights, and the President alone decides

ME: No, there are shades of gray here and you know it. Eg: you defended Ron Paul on terrorism even though he voted for the ’01 AUMF and introduced HR3076.

ME: War, like politics, is murky. We can justify Hiroshima but condemn Dresden. Praise FDR’s liberalism but condemn Japanese camps.

On a certain level, I understand Greenwald’s perspective here. He’s against war. It’s always difficult — if not impossible — for a pacifist to justify military fatalities of any kind. In Greenwald’s view, the Al-Awlaki killing is additionally heinous due to the man’s citizenship and the governmental powers used to bring him down. That said, war and how it’s prosecuted is not unlike politics — only with funny hats and firearms. It’s a muddy, murky endeavor with massive gray areas where morality (or immorality) literally collides with human bodies.

The leaders who play the game operate on the fringes of what’s possible, practical and acceptable. As I referenced above, Lincoln’s actions during the American Civil War would have absolutely forced Greenwald into apoplectic shock. There was the suspension of habeas corpus even though suspending the writ is assigned to Congress in Article I. Subsequently, there was Lincoln’s attempt to arrest Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney who objected to Lincoln’s suspension of the writ — an action that would have precipitated a massive constitutional crisis around the separation of powers. There was Lincoln’s authorization of “total war” — civilians became fair game for General William Tecumseh Sherman and other commanders. American civilians.

The end result was victory for the United States, the Constitution and for the American democratic experiment.

Fast forward to World War II and FDR, the great liberal president of modern times, also careened well beyond the bounds of what we would consider to be decent, moral and constitutional. Developing the atom bomb alone — the mere development of it, much less the use of it by President Truman — was a trespass far more serious than anything Presidents Bush or Obama have done in pursuit of terrorists. Couple that with the firebombing of civilians and the indefinite detention of Japanese-Americans and, again, there would have been a major freakout had “Glennzilla” existed at that point.

None of this is meant to forgive the questionable policies of the executive branch in wartime. I’m simply drawing from historical examples to illustrate the murkiness of war.

Clearly many of the actions initiated by the Bush administration should never have been engaged. Torture, wiretapping and data-mining, suspension of habeas, extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention are blights on the American record, and the same goes for the several policies that have been continued by the Obama team. But when we’re engaged in military action against a defined enemy — al-Qaeda — killing its leadership, be it Osama Bin Laden or Al-Awlaki, on the world’s battlefield is one of those fringe actions that, while not savored, are necessary. If you participate in plots to kill Americans in a declared war, you run the risk of being killed in retaliation. That’s a matter of war: killing or capturing the enemy before they do the same to you.

As I tweeted to Greenwald, Ron Paul, for all the praise heaped upon him by Greenwald as a anti-terror-war hero, sponsored HR3076 which authorized the raising of a mercenary army to capture or kill Bin Laden and al-Qaeda terrorists. This was Ron Paul in legislative action and not Ron Paul the campaigner. Very, very murky.

On the “kill the enemy” note, Greenwald attempted to catch me in some hypocrisy when he tweeted, “Hilarious: it’s OK to KILL ****accused combatants w/o judicial review, but not to eavesdrop on them or detain them w/o it.” Yes, okay. It’s a contradiction but it’s intellectually honest. In all wars, it’s permissible to kill the enemy even though it’s also a crime torture the enemy. In one case, the enemy is dead. In latter case, the enemy is totally alive but in considerable pain. Death is the acceptable option. Weird how that works, but it’s true.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting here that given the choice (and I underscore given the choice — in other words, if we have to do something), I’d rather have unmanned drones engaged in targeted strikes than to send soldiers into hostile areas in the context of yet another hot war.

Admittedly, this all seems cloudy. It always does. There are very few absolutes. And it’s only made cloudier when broad assumptions are made and black-and-white generalities are hurled at people with whom we share some common ground. If Greenwald and his acolytes were aware of my writing, they would know that I’m not an across-the-board apologist for the Obama administration. I strongly believe the president has been successful and historic given the divisiveness in Washington, but much like every president before him, he’s made mistakes. It’s part of the job. And I’ve attempted to evaluate the mistakes and successes based on historical precedent, as well as their impact on American democracy. Yet instead of debating the murky areas of warfare and politics point-by-point, we too often end up debating the other participant’s character, and unfair assumptions are injected into the discourse — he or she is an “Obama lover” and so on.

I simply wanted to hear what Greenwald has to say about HR3076 or FDR’s handling of World War II or Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War as it relates to modern events. But mainly, and more than anything else, I want to know how the president was expected to arrest Al-Awlaki without risking American casualties — a very real possibility when we’re talking about Greenwald’s alternative capture-and-arrest plan. Which plan is better: Killing Al_Awlaki outright; arresting him and risking the death or deaths of American soldiers; or simply ignoring the al-Qaeda problem?

If we can have that discussion, I’m all in.

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