Last Friday, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald took on Bill Maher over the supposedly ‘unique’ danger of Islam on Maher’s show ‘Real Time’ on HBO. Maher has long contended that Islam is an inherently violent religion that poses a greater threat than all other religions.

Greenwald took it to Maher on Friday, and to be frank, made Maher look pretty silly. Maher argued that whenever Muslims are given political freedom, they choose theocracy and extremism. Greenwald pointed out that US involvement in the Middle East is the driving force behind extremism, and that other religions are equally ‘dangerous’ when it comes to promoting violent and oppressive policies (Israel’s occupation of Gaza being a good example).

Greenwald posted this clip blog with the major exchanges:

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Greenwald and Jones: Always right

Let me begin by stating that I do not believe there is an equivalency between conspiracy nut Alex Jones and civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald. Jones peddles loony theories on government plots to destroy freedom that include 9/11, the moon landing, and now the Boston Marathon bombing. Greenwald on the other hand, diligently attacks government for civil liberty infringements and illegal activities abroad. Jones is not concerned with actual evidence, whereas Greenwald meticulously sources his work. You could  have a civilized and rational debate with Glenn Greenwald. You could not with Alex Jones.

But both men have a defining characteristic in common: A complete inability to connect with audiences outside their respective ideological universes.

There are elements of both men’s ideological system that merit serious attention. Scattered between Jones’s angry rants about government killing astronauts and the need to buy gold are genuinely relevant critiques on the ever expanding security state and government’s collusion with Wall Street that creates a corrupt and doomed monetary system. Greenwald’s insights on civil liberties issues are far easier to detect, and often difficult to disagree with. His work on Obama’s drone policies, indefinite detention, and government wire tapping is very important given the issues rarely see the light of day in the mainstream media.

But there is a style and monotony that both deliver their message with that turns off huge amounts of people who would otherwise be receptive to some of the ideas both men put forward.

Alex Jones spends most of the time ranting about pedophile TSA agents  conspiring with the government to turn everyone into slaves, making anything interesting he has to say almost entirely irrelevant. I mean, just try to make your way through this absurd video on the Boston Marathon bombing being a conspiracy to ‘take our guns’ and feel confident saying Jones should be taken seriously on anything else:

Glenn Greenwald’s laser like focus on his pet topics and high handed disdain for anyone who disagrees with is also very hard to swallow for open minded people who would probably agree with him on a lot of issues.

Take for example Greenwald’s blithe dismissal of the liberal site Raw Story because one of its bloggers dared to disagree with him on drones and another wrote posts that supported Obama. Wrote Greenwald:

Raw Story is a moderately well-read political outlet that touts itself as “a progressive news site that focuses on stories often ignored in the mainstream media.” It recently began publishing a blog devoted exclusively to venerating the President and sliming his critics: because that’s so edgy, brave and rare; after all, the meek “MSM” would never dare glorify the nation’s most powerful political official and the party in power, so we really need a brave, dissident anti-MSM site like Raw Story to provide that.

There are a lot of good writers at Raw Story, and they do a lot of good pieces. But if you disagree with Glenn, you are automatically dismissed as a propaganda wing of the Obama administration. Greenwald has even gone as far as comparing a Jewish Obama supporter to Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. I’ve done a fair amount of Greenwald bashing over the last few months, and I don’t feel the need to rehash all the same arguments. But the examples of his annoying piousness and inability to admit being wrong ever are numerous and ongoing (see here for his ridiculous denial that he supported the war in Iraq and here for examples of extreme smugness).

It is hard to imagine that both men don’t care about what they are saying. It takes an extraordinary amount of passion and dedication to write/speak day in, day out on topics that most people couldn’t care less about, and you have to respect their work ethic. But you also have to wonder what the overriding motivator is when them being right supersedes everything else. Jones and Greenwald want people to care about the issues they cover and they do a great job of whipping up anger over them. They have dedicated followers that hang on their every word and go to war for them in the comment section of critical articles (in a couple of hours just check below for examples). But they are not reaching people who don’t agree with them already. I look at the headline of an Alex Jones video segment and tune out. I see Glenn Greenwald writing another scathing attack on Obama’s drone policy and know exactly what he is going to say without reading it. They offer an ideological hardened view of the world that you either accept without caveat, or become an enemy of. The problem is that it then ceases being about the message and more about the messenger. Of course Jones and Greenwald would never accept that criticism and would argue that they work only to enlighten the masses.

But then that is exactly what you would expect.

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Greenwald: Supported the Iraq war whether he likes it or not

Perhaps I should take a break from lobbing grenades at Glenn Greenwald. After all, I do actually agree with him far more than I disagree. It’s just that, well, he’s unbelievably irritating and the more I read him the more annoyed I get.

We had a pretty big traffic spike here at the Banter over the past couple of days, mostly because Sam Harris linked to us in a piece he wrote defending himself from Glenn Greenwald’s assertion that he was a closet racist. I’m actually (mostly) siding with Greenwald on the debate because I find Harris to be a pedantic fundamentalist when it comes to his anti religious views, and I believe Greenwald correctly nails him for disproportionally focusing on Islam. [I see this as a common meme amongst atheist fundamentalists - a complete inability to understand that any ideology, whether it be political, spiritual, religious or economic can be distorted by humans to evil ends. Harris relentlessly focuses on religion - particularly Islam - and it is, to be frank, rather childish. Human conflict almost always boils down to resources and who controls them, and ideology a convenient pretext.]

This isn’t to say Harris doesn’t have anything interesting to say – he does and he makes a number of good points in his debate with Greenwald. Which brings me to the war with Iraq and Greenwald’s infuriating hypocrisy on the subject. Harris linked to a short piece I wrote last year in regards to Greenwald’s initial support for the Iraq war, stating the following:

I have never written or spoken in support of the war in Iraq. This has not stopped a “journalist” like Glenn Greenwald from castigating me as a warmonger (Which is especially rich, given that he supported the war.) The truth is, I have never known what to think about this war, apart from the obvious: 1) prospectively, it seemed like a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; 2) retrospectively, it was a disaster.  Much of the responsibility for this disaster falls on the Bush administration, and one of the administration’s great failings was to underestimate the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people.

Greenwald confessed to general political apathy this in his book ‘How Would a Patriot Act?’ and admitted that despite his doubts about the war:

I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration. Between the president’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.

Fast forward to 2013, and Greenwald apparently didn’t actually give the Bush administration the ‘benefit of the doubt’, ‘trust and defer to them’, or ‘accept their judgement’ that  the invasion of Iraq would have ‘enhanced’ US security. In a piece titled ‘Frequently Told Lies‘, Greenwald penned a lengthy retort to a number of supposed myths told about him by progressives. Amazingly, he stated:

These claim [sic] are absolutely false. They come from a complete distortion of the Preface I wrote to my own 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act?…

When the Iraq War was debated and then commenced, I was not a writer. I was not a journalist. I was not politically engaged or active. I never played any role in political debates or controversies. Unlike the countless beloved Democrats who actually did support the war – including Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – I had no platform or role in politics of any kind.

I never once wrote in favor of the Iraq War or argued for it in any way, shape or form.Ask anyone who claims that I “supported” the Iraq War to point to a single instance where I ever supported or defended it in any way. There is no such instance. It’s a pure fabrication.

So Greenwald didn’t technically support the war because he wasn’t yelling on MSNBC that America should trust George Bush, and you can’t find written record of him saying it either. You see, Greenwald can’t be painted with the same brush he paints everyone else who supported the war with, because was apathetic at the time and didn’t have a blog.

Look, I think it’s a great thing that Greenwald did an about turn on the Bush Administration and their astonishing lies. Greenwald clearly woke up from his apathy and relentlessly cataloged the administration’s severe abuses of power and hammered them for it until Bush and Cheney left in 2008. But he can’t lecture people who initially supported the Iraq war then turned against it when he did exactly the same thing. Virtually everyone who supported the Iraq war has used the same defense – “Had I known then what I know now, I would not have supported it”. Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer, so he knows how to argue on technicalities, and that’s exactly what he is doing – using semantics to disguise the fact that he supported one of the dumbest wars in history.

It’s highly embarrassing  and I understand why Greenwald went to great lengths to obfuscate his support for the Bush administration’s catastrophic decision to invade Iraq.

But he did, and he should be big enough to admit it.

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I’m a fan of Sam Harris. A very big fan, in fact, despite not agreeing with him across the board. His 2004 book, The End of Faith, is just about the seminal guide to refuting faith-based religion through bulletproof fact and near-flawless argumentation. If you’re an atheist, it’s basically, well, your Bible. Harris prides himself on his intellect and on an absolute reliance on reason, which means that he’s a formidable foe to debate simply because his logic is generally made of concrete and titanium. I admit that while Harris himself dislikes having to constantly defend himself against the same ridiculous attacks on his beliefs over and over again — typically from those who either misunderstand statements he’s made perfectly clear or who feel like they need to purposely twist his arguments to serve their own ends — I enjoy watching him rip those who go up against him to shreds. He does it with such confidence but, provided the adversary in question isn’t just being an asshole, with such respect that it makes you glad people like him exist to act as intellectual super heroes when our culture needs them.

One of the more ludicrous accusations that’s been leveled at Sam Harris throughout the years has to do with his supposed tendency toward “Islamophobia.” As with his contemporaries in the “new atheist” movement, people like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, Harris believes that radical Islam represents an especially insidious and dangerous form of faith simply because it often manifests itself in physical violence aimed at both non-believers and believers alike. It may be politically incorrect to say that Islam is the most pervasive and immediate religious threat our world is facing at this moment in its history, but it’s not necessarily factually incorrect. Harris has said many times, while simultaneously pointing out that absolute faith of any kind is a bad and backward thing, that Islam is one of the few religions at the moment that can literally be perverted to the point where it can destroy en masse. He’s also pointed out that while the liberal tendency toward acceptance and multiculturalism is at face value a noble policy, it shouldn’t ever be applied to the exclusion of common sense and a willingness to confront reality. His point is generally that embracing superstition is never a good thing but to wrap your arms around a superstition that can get you killed, simply because it makes you feel like a tolerant person to do so, is madness.

Harris has been pretty damn clear about this. And yet the indignant and sanctimonious articles and essays from members of the professional left still come at lightning speed, aimed at proving Harris is a racist and an Islamophobe for daring to state the incredibly obvious: that Islam, more directly than almost any other religion right now, can indeed be dangerous and humanity pretends that’s not true at its own peril. There have been two such articles in just the past week or so, one at Al Jazeera and the other at Salon.

The regularity and tediousness of these kinds of pieces make them, in Harris’s own words, typically not worth trying to refute at length. Harris figures he’s made his arguments as rationally as possible and his meaning should be crystalline to anyone not either dense or just looking for something to be outraged about. But, surprisingly, he broke down and decided to confront someone over the two most recent attacks on him. What’s really interesting is that he didn’t bother going after the authors of the columns, he instead took issue with someone who had circulated the pieces via Twitter and endorsed their overall points. He did this, it seems, because he couldn’t quite understand why someone he considered a “fellow liberal” and, presumably, a staunch intellectual would miss the point of his statements and perpetuate flawed arguments that amount to a kind of defamation against him. And that would be one of the first inarguable fuck-ups I’ve seen Sam Harris make: assuming that the person he decided to confront was both liberal and an intellect unsullied by agenda.

The person Harris engaged via an e-mail back-and-forth, a transcript of which he published online late last night?

Glenn Greenwald.

I realize that we do a lot of beating up on Greenwald around here at The Daily Banter and I was genuinely loathe to bring his name up yet again, particularly being that I’m the one columnist here who shows him absolutely no respect or deference. But watching an intellectual heavyweight like Sam Harris inexplicably try to reason with Greenwald as a kind of equal, or at the very least someone whose opinion he values, made me want to throw my laptop through a window. It’s one thing to see Glenn Greenwald do his usual smug intransigence shtick on Twitter, blithely batting away the mosquitoes that dare to be a nuisance to him and tossing out his go-to accusations of intellectual dishonesty and blind submission to the cult of political personality, what Greenwald is, of course, above; it’s another thing entirely to watch him have the galactic balls to condescend to someone like Sam Harris. I’m not sure what’s more offensive, that Greenwald arrogantly thought he could punch way above his intellectual weight class or that Harris attempted to treat him as a peer, assuming wrongly that he could have a rational discussion with him and penetrate his force field of pure piety and absolute moral certitude with something as inadequate as logic. Granted, Harris appears irritated with Greenwald right out of the gate in the interaction that he himself instigated, but given that Greenwald was the one who drew first blood by putting his tsk-tsking stamp-of-approval on two columns that accused Harris of racism, it’s not difficult to understand why.

Do yourself a favor and go take a look at the exchange for yourself; it’s not too long, but it’s not something I want to publish here in its entirety and it’ll lose something if I quote it piecemeal.

I think there is one very salient point that Harris makes while frustratedly trying to get through to Greenwald and it has to do with the difference between being against someone personally and being against the ideas he or she believes and espouses. It’s Harris’s answer to the charge of racism:

“Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can’t distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas — like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male “honor” that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls — you are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine.“

To me, this argument has always made perfect sense. It’s the one that’s been at the crux of Harris’s criticism of Islam since the very beginning and in an ironic “hate the sin, love the sinner” way has also been a centerpiece of my own assessment of faith-based religion at the beginning of the 21st century. No one is saying that each and every man or woman who practices a religion — not Islam nor anything else — is a bad person who’s doomed to do horrible things. Very far from it. Unless someone has shown that he or she truly is an extremist bent on taking faith to its most dangerous, but strangely logical, conclusion, that person deserves respect. It’s the faith itself, however — the irrational belief system based on little more than speculation and wishful thinking — that doesn’t automatically deserve to be shown respect and deference. It’s only our culture’s willingness to let a brand of irrationality slide that we’ve bizarrely deemed is somehow socially acceptable that leads to the notion that criticism of religion equals bigotry. Again, Harris’s point that fundamentalist Islam is a different animal within our global culture than, say, fundamentalist Bahá’í — and that purposely not acknowledging this is a political decision rather than a rational one — is essentially right on the money. It may seem as if Harris is specifically targeting Islam in his blistering critiques of faith, but you have to keep in mind that this is a guy who wrote an entire book addressing what he sees as the serious problem of America’s involuntary acceptance of and adherence to Christianity.

But back to the Harris/Greenwald battle. If we were talking about anyone else but the insufferable Glenn Greenwald, I’d be willing to give him or her the benefit of the doubt in the e-mail back-and-forth with Harris, given that Harris is obviously in attack mode right off the bat. But if you think Greenwald would’ve somehow responded in a less prickish and more respectful manner had Harris approached him with a box of chocolates rather than a stern but entirely legitimate line of questioning, you really don’t know Glenn Greenwald. Two years ago we watched him have the colossal nerve to attack Harris’s contemporary, Christopher Hitchens, as a “war zealot” — of course, in another tweeted link to someone else’s story — because of Hitchens’s initial support of the Iraq war while failing to acknowledge his own support of that very same war. It’s silly to assume that he considers anyone — certainly anyone who holds a different opinion from his own — an intellectual equal and someone worthy of uncommon consideration. If you think so much of yourself that you see nothing perilous in condescending to Christopher Hitchens — not fearlessly debating but petulantly condescending to — you’re well beyond being able to be reasoned with.

Greenwald exists in a world of self-created mythology, fueled by a handful of fawning acolytes and a bunch of other people who thought enough of him to take a split second out of their day to click “follow” on his Twitter feed. While he’s generally no match for many of those who choose to confront him on the holes often found in his supposedly bulletproof arguments, he’s absolutely no match for Sam Harris. No one’s saying that Harris is always right, because he’s certainly taken stands that I happen to vehemently disagree with, but his logic is more often than not sound because it represents the very core of his status. His reputation as a thinker and as a critic of religion is based entirely on his ability to wield logic and reason dispassionately, a fact which should be taken into account by those who choose to take him on. A fact which, of course, doesn’t concern a guy like Greenwald one bit, because logic and reason aren’t as important believing that he’s never, ever wrong.

Adding: Greenwald has penned a characteristically lengthy piece about his exchange with Harris in today’s Guardian. I’ll give him this: He spells out his arguments against Harris in a much more cogent fashion than in the e-mails. The problem, though, remains: While it’s fair to say that Harris has been adamant in his criticism of Islam as the most “weaponized” faith currently in existence in the civilized world, you have to take into consideration that not criticizing Islam would again be a political move rather than a rational one. Harris beats up on all faith-based religions and one of his primary complaints about Islam is that it could very well be the only religion in the world right now that people are afraid to criticize because its most extreme adherents will promise violence as a consequence. Also, it practically goes without saying that Greenwald attacks the various sins of the United States when it comes to war, violence and suppression and engages in his special brand of moral relativism to claim that pockets of Christianity are just as physically, immediately dangerous as Islam on the whole. The U.S. has done and continues to do some truly awful things abroad and there’s no denying that your perspective on this is largely based on where you live and what your politics are, and Christianity, meanwhile, is guilty of violence in other ways besides purely physical — although physical would’ve been the order of the day across the board centuries ago. But as a country we’ve never attempted to utterly eradicate through violence Islam or those who practice it; we tend to rise up and smack down those among us who do. And progressives who wish to see Islam made a thing of the past don’t generally hope that Muslims will simply conform to some other religion; they want faith-based religion itself dismissed in the name of reason and rationality.

On that note, and before the comments and e-mails start pouring in, I’m not a fan of Islam the same way that I’m not a fan of Christianity or any other faith; in fact, I spend far more time writing about Christianity — because I find it to be the most oppressive religion in the U.S. by virtue of its ubiquity — than I do about Islam. I’m all about trying to build bridges of understanding and I certainly would never claim that all adherents to any religion are terrible people, but as far as I’m concerned there’s no defense for wholeheartedly believing a notion for which there’s absolutely no evidence.

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I’ll begin today’s column with a serious disclaimer: this is not an April Fools’ Day prank. By now, you’ve probably already stumbled onto three or four prank tweets and Facebook posts, not to mention more than a few headlines, so I’ll spare you the silliness. With that out of the way, it’s with great relief and an equal degree of satisfaction that I can now report that neo-libertarian Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and I agree on drones.

I’m not entirely sure that he’d concur on this point because it’s simply not within his nature to concede to opponents who he considers to be “Obama lovers,” but he does, in fact, share my opinion on drones. And I hasten to add that it’s not necessarily due to my personal efforts at reaching some sort of détente. Colleague and fellow The Daily Banter writer Oliver Willis deserves the vast majority of the credit on this one.

Let’s review how all of this began last week.

On Thursday, Greenwald tweeted the following rather alarmist item, which began a chain reaction that eventually led to a major admission (forthcoming):

Once domestic drones proliferate, will be interesting to see how comfortable Americans are w/them buzzing over their homes & kids’ schools

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 28, 2013

Oliver replied with this appropriately snarky tweet:

also black helicopters and chem trails twitter.com/ggreenwald/sta… — Oliver Willis (@owillis) March 28, 2013

To which, Greenwald hit back with this:

Progressive authoritarianism: is.gd/957YaGv. is.gd/d3w3Hu & is.gd/9k8wst — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 28, 2013

In response, Oliver followed up with a more thorough response in the form of a column on this site titled, “Jackbooted ACLU Thugs Support Drones.” It’s the sort of post that made me stand and applaud. Chez Pazienza and I have been talking about endeavoring as writers to construct that one salient point that breaks through the nonsense and totally changes the terms of the debate, often smashing through the other debater’s view and, in effect, utterly crushing it. It’s a process that justifies what might be seen by some observers as an exercise in futility — beating your face against a brick wall. But Oliver broke through with his “Jackbooted” post. If you notice in Greenwald’s “authoritarian” tweet above, he provided two links to posts about drones by the ACLU, so Oliver used the ACLU’s words from one of the Greenwald-endorsed links against Greenwald — and with laser precision. Specifically, Oliver posted the following blockquote from the ACLU:

Drones should never be used for indiscriminate mass surveillance, and police should never use them unless there are legitimate grounds to believe they will collect evidence related to a specific instance of criminal wrongdoing or in emergencies.

The emphasis is mine, but line catapults off the screen anyway. The ACLU conceded that drones do, in fact, have value in some circumstances: when used legitimately in cases off evidence-collection in a criminal investigation or in case of emergency. In Oliver’s words, the ACLU believes “there IS a use for drones.” If you review the news item about the Maveric drone that was purchased by the Monroe, North Carolina police department, its stated purpose is exactly in line with the ACLU’s parameters.

This blockquote from Oliver is the equivalent of a debating sonic boom. Especially on this issue in which the opposition to drones has been uncompromising and apoplectic — essentially screaming about how drones are an absolute evil and must be stopped without any room for compromise or rational discussion. In other words, there have more attacks on the technology itself (as well as anyone who sees nuance in the issue) rather than the potential for civil liberties and war powers abuses, both of which ought to be front and center rather than secondary.

At this point, we’ll skip ahead to Saturday when the debate resumed. This time, however, the back-and-forth was more direct and culminated with Oliver tweeting the following:

aclu: “Drones should be deployed by law enforcement only with a warrant, in an emergency” bit.ly/14EotPu doesnt sound like a ban.

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) March 30, 2013

Almost right away, Greenwald replied with a tweet that I had to review several times because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

@owillis You’re *totally ignorant* on the drone debate- nobody is calling for a ban, including me – the bill I cited: dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/02/14/bip…

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 30, 2013

And there it is.

“Nobody is calling for a ban, including me.” –Glenn Greenwald

Re-reading that line simply astounds me. Glenn Greenwald, who’s widely regarded as the leading anti-drone writer and activist, admitted that he’s against banning drones. And he did so in an almost matter-of-fact way, as if everyone clearly knows that he’s against banning them. Silly us for not knowing. Of course Glenn Greenwald supports drones in some cases — how could we possibly not know that?!

By admitting that he doesn’t support a ban on drones, he admitted that he supports the use of drones by the government and law enforcement in some capacities, ostensibly in keeping with the ACLU’s parameters. And while he accused Oliver of being ignorant for not realizing that he supports drones, I’m not aware that Greenwald has ever written that he’s against banning drones. Put another way: it’s impossible for Oliver or anyone else to be ignorant of a point that Greenwald has never made. Regardless, it appears as if Greenwald’s view is the same as the ACLU’s view, which, if you boil away the hyperbole, is the same as my opinion. In brief: Greenwald’s view is that drones are useful, but ought to be regulated as evidenced by his inclusion of the Firedog Lake article.

And I agree. Drones need to be regulated due to a variety of potential abuses. I’ve written about this many times. Unlike manned vehicles and boots-on-the-ground, there’s no risk of losing government or police personnel when drones are deployed, so there’s a greater potential for abusing the technology due to its risk-free nature. Therefore, there ought to be systems in place restricting how and when drones should be used. This is the case with almost every form of technology, be it mechanical, medical or military. Thirty states and the U.S. Congress are in the process of examining drone regulations, and the effort is bipartisan. Furthermore, the war powers that have enabled drone attacks and targeted killings in the war on terrorism should be rescinded as soon as possible. David Sirota agreed with me on that point. But for some reason, anyone who expresses these views, including Oliver and I, have been hectored as “authoritarians” or “drone apologists.” Remarkable considering how Oliver went out of his way to underscore “honest concerns” about drones, not to mention the fact that every time I write about drones, it’s almost mandatory that I repeat my views on regulations and so forth otherwise I’m bombarded by “Obamabot” name-calling.

All of that said, there’s really no way to reverse course on drone technology. There will continue to be drones used in various capacities, and Greenwald knows it — to the point of admitting that he doesn’t support a ban on drones. It’s not a matter of drawing the line, as we have with nearly every new technology that’s been introduced.

So maybe it’s overly optimistic of me, but perhaps there’s a way we can all move forward in unison and concentrate on that which can be accomplished in a spirit of rational, reasonable cooperation between the so-called “Obamabots” and the so-called “Emo Progs.”

I really think it can be done.

Seriously.

April Fools.

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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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Dear Bob,

We come to you today as friends, as family, and as people who love you. We’ve come together to face up to our own fears that we’ve let a situation go on for far too long, a situation that’s hurting you and hurting us. It’s something we can’t allow to go on for one more day because you can’t allow it to go on for one more day. We can’t stand idly by and watch you destroy yourself any longer. So as we finally admit it to ourselves, it’s time for you to admit it, too. You have to, if you’re ever going to go on to live a productive life free from the scourge that’s captured your soul and is eating you alive from the inside out.

You’re an addict, Bob.

There, I said it. I said what needed to be said.

You’re an addict, and your drug of choice, the one that’s taken you down a path that can only lead to ruin, is arguing with Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota.

I thought maybe you were getting better, that maybe you were beginning to understand that trying to reason with two people who are thoroughly unreasonable was the equivalent of hitting yourself repeatedly in the head with a phone book. Or maybe watching the last fifteen minutes of Requiem for a Dream on endless repeat. I figured that what with the newly minted outlook we saw from you last week — with the commendable but incredibly naïve desire to try to speak in sensible, nuanced terms to two men who make a tidy living for themselves being petulant, intransigent ideologues suddenly replaced by the fiery “fuck those guys” that comes with a necessary acquiescence to reality — you were getting better. But alas, I came home from work last night, logged onto my computer, and there you were, launching tweet after tweet in the direction of both of them — taking on Greenwald and Sirota at the same time in a futile suicide run — and I realized that you were completely lost.

It’s okay, Bob. It’s not your fault. It’s your disease. The disease of being a rational human being and expecting that everyone else is as well. Or if not, that the irrational can always be swayed by good arguments and bulletproof facts.

And so, that’s why we’re all here today. Again, because we love you and we want to see you healthy and leading a productive life rather than psychically waterboarding yourself over and over again, thinking that you’re making a difference. You’re never going to convince Greenwald and his submissive bottom to see reason. I know you think you made progress last night because they conceded that stripping Barack Obama of the powers granted to him by the AUMF was a good idea, but trust me — that’s just the disease talking again. They’re never going to give in. The careers they’ve spun out of their own self-righteousness are simply too lucrative, the adulation from their mindless acolytes too intoxicating.

You have to get help. And if you don’t, we can no longer enable your delusion, no matter how good your overall intentions may be. You may not love yourself enough to do what’s best for you, but we do. So, please, make the decision here and now that you’re going to take a stand, confront your demons, and move forward with your life a happier, healthier person. As the Serenity Prayer says, you have to learn to accept the things you cannot change — and there isn’t a chance in hell you’re ever going to change the minds of a couple of assholes like Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota.

Besides, if you at long last make the decision you need to make here for your own sanity, I promise to get help for my need to post silly meta-columns when I’ve temporarily run out of real subjects to write about.

Love and Cookies,

Chez

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When I began the day, I promised myself I wasn’t going to write about drones or Glenn Greenwald or the war on terrorism again, mainly because I’ve written four consecutive posts on the topic with slowly diminishing levels of reception and popularity. I should probably move on for a few days and cover one of my other ongoing narrative beats, but as you can plainly see, I simply can’t help myself. In fact, I started an entirely different post today (about this) until a tweet appeared on my screen that was utterly irresistible. And so I called an audible mid-play and opted instead to write about drones and Glenn Greenwald. Again.

Why? You’ll understand after you read this tweet:

The link takes you to a story out of Monroe, North Carolina, where the local police department has ordered — stop the presses and alert Code Pink! — a drone to augment its law enforcement efforts.

Based on Greenwald’s tweet, you might be thinking, Holy crap on a stick! Drones patrolling the skies of Monroe, North Carolina (wherever that is) — launching Hellfire missiles at moonshiners and Big City carpetbaggers! It’s the rise of the machines! Damn you, Skynet! Run away! Run away! DRONES!

But of course this tweet was a stellar example of the hyperbole that Greenwald markets to his followers on the drones issue. The sensationalism works especially well on Twitter with people who merely read the screaming slug-line and frantically retweet it without clicking the link. If we merely read the text, we’re led to believe that local police departments are evolving into huckleberry-sized drone franchisees of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism weapon of choice. And, worse, it appears as if terrifying drones have been “married” to the (admittedly worthless) drug war. Drones and the drug war: an incendiary Venn Diagram guaranteed to spark a geyser of outraged megadittoes from Greenwald’s acolytes. What ho?! Local Gomers pursuing harmless, giggly pot smokers with drones?! Due process is truly dead! IEEEEE!

If we click on the article itself, however, we quickly discover what’s really going on.

1) The drone is a Maveric UAV, designed and marketed by a local Monroe outfit called Condor Aerial. Maverics don’t carry weaponry of any kind and can’t provide long-term surveillance due to its maximum 90-minute flight time.

2) Based on the news story, the police department intends to use the drone essentially as they would a helicopter for the stated purposes of “rescue, natural disasters, pursuits and other aerial needs,” including situations like “a bank robbery, or any incident where the officers are pursuing someone on foot.” Though at $44,000, the drone is considerably less expensive to purchase and maintain than a chopper. Unless the drone develops artificial intelligence and begins to think for itself, I’m having a difficult time distinguishing it from any other law enforcement aircraft beyond the fact that its pilot is on the ground. And, hell, they can put a deadly police sniper on a helicopter. Not so with the Maveric.

3) The word “drugs” or the phrase “drug war” don’t appear anywhere in the article. I have no idea where Greenwald got the idea that the Monroe PD was hunting drug dealers or users, but there’s not a single mention or even a hint to that effect. Though I suppose it’s possible, it’s definitely not a fact pulled from the article he linked.

4) The Maveric has been available since 2003 and 160 law enforcement agencies nationwide are already using similar tools.

5) And finally, here’s a photo of the Maveric drone:

Scary, huh. It looks like a stubbier, steampunkish B52 or maybe the dropship from the Aliens movie, capable of totally blasting you into vapor. Now imagine Barney Fife in Bungledick, North Carolina with this behemoth war machine at his disposal.

But wait. Before you lapse into an oh-so-sweet Outrage Coma because it’s a big scary drone, here’s the Maveric shown to scale:

I hasten to note that I pulled this directly from the Condor Aerial website and I absolutely didn’t Photoshop anything. Yeah, so, it’s tiny. When I saw this pic, I actually said out loud to no one, “It’s a radio controlled toy airplane with a fancy camera!” I mean, if the police began to chase you with this thing, you could feasibly thwack it out of the sky with a tennis racquet or a well-aimed dodgeball.

Conclusion: it’s not the kind of “drone” Greenwald wanted you to think it was.

Seriously, though, I absolutely agree that it’s always a good idea to keep a tenacious eye on government authority. Anyone who’s read my posts against the (formerly) naked body scanners and the pervasive fearmongering of the previous administration knows I’m hardly a fan of government overreach on this front. But if we, as citizens and activists, want to be taken as grown-ups, it seems to me as if we need to pick our battles wisely, and this stupid little toy (albeit an expensive stupid little toy) probably shouldn’t be one of those battles.

As for Greenwald, the misleading nature of his tweet speaks volumes about how not every screed he blurts into the tubes should be taken as gospel. Rather, he’s an activist who’s clearly willing to grab any miniscule dollop of nothing and, using his obvious talent for writing, expand it into something that you should be outraged about — or else you’re an apologist for sinister personality cults and power-drunk Authoritarian zealots. It’s a compelling yet deceptive rhetorical cocktail: here’s an obvious trespass you should be viscerally offended by, and, if you don’t mash the panic-button because, say, you realize that this big bad drone is really a radio controlled toy, here’s a hearty pile of shame-on-you to suck on. I don’t know for sure, but it seems as if Greenwald believes that by issuing hyperbolic missives peppered with this-other-smart-person-agrees-with-me-so-I’m-right-and-you’re-not-one-of-us shaming, he’ll be seen as a steadfastly vigilant activist even if not everything he writes passes the sniff test. It’s all a means to an end. If he can make his disciples poop their big boy pants about the Monroe PD’s “drone,” he’s scored a crucial push-back in his ongoing struggle against the forces of evil. Evil toys.

Okay then. That’s all. For now.

What’s next?

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This has been alluded to a couple of times here over the past two days, mostly by the always thoughtful and analytical Bob Cesca, but as usual I’ll be the one to dispense with all the pleasantries and just come right out and say it: Fuck Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota. Fuck them because their opinions don’t deserve to be taken the least bit seriously. Their supposedly bottomless reservoir of intellectual honesty is really puddle-deep and, in fact, they’re nothing more than what their fiercest critics have always accused them of being: sanctimonious jokes who pretend to be dedicated, indignant fighters of all manner of civil liberties injustices when in reality they’ve bequeathed to themselves wide latitude to choose which sins to prosecute and which to forgive or overlook completely. They don’t care about all affronts by authority to your civil rights. They only care about the select few they’ve chosen to plant their flag in and dig deep on and if their slavish devotion to those signature issues happens to force them into a position of defending a set of civil rights offenses they care less about but which are in the grand scheme no less awful, then so be it.

By now you’re probably aware of David Sirota’s full-throated support of Rand Paul’s supposedly principled stand against the confirmation of CIA chief nominee John Brennan. (I say supposedly principled because in reality what Paul did was little more than a giant helping of PR stagecraft, one aimed at both improving his Q-Score ahead of 2016 and grabbing onto an Obama “scandal” that might actually have legs for a change.) It came a few days ago in a Salon piece called “Liberals Should Proudly Cheer on Rand Paul,” in which Sirota jumped on board the “Stand with Rand” bandwagon, calling Paul’s filibuster of Brennan “heroic” and decrying progressives’ pointing out Paul’s history of near-unparalleled paleoconservatism and disregard for civil rights protections as an “insidious” example of unforgiving partisan politics. Sirota, of course, being an enlightened being who cares about the issues rather than the people espousing them and who’s immune to such philistine notions as partisanship — he’s his own man, dammit — is willing to set aside the fact that, when not giving lip service to the drone issue, Paul is regularly speaking out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sponsoring “personhood” amendments that would end abortion across the board, and equating his very rich self to a “slave” in the face of Obamacare (what Lawrence O’Donnell called the statement most “unhinged from reality and decency” ever uttered in the Senate).

But, you know, Rand Paul doesn’t like drones — so who gives a damn about all that other unpleasant stuff. Why let it intrude on the comfort of your very specific outrage?

If Sirota was merely jumping on the bandwagon, though, Glenn Greenwald, as you might expect, was towing it behind his 18-wheeler Prius. I’m not going to run down the various ways Greenwald has spun himself into apoplectic circles over the tendency of anyone with a brain and an appreciation of recent history to openly mock Rand Paul’s Senate floor stunt and to attempt to add context and nuance to the drone debate; Cesca’s done a mighty fine job of that over the past couple of days. I have no idea how he does it, to be honest, since I consider any attempt to penetrate Greenwald’s force-field of pious intransigence an act akin to hitting yourself repeatedly in the head with a phone book, but I applaud Cesca’s apparently involuntary need to try to reason with the unreasonable. He may not exactly be the mental patient whisperer, but he damn sure tries and that’s to be commended, I suppose. Suffice it to say, Greenwald isn’t attacking Rand Paul for basically being a racist and misogynist whose entire shtick involves pandering to the paranoiacs of the prepper crowd; he’s attacking those who dare to attack Paul, and all because he happens to agree with Paul on one single issue. But in Greenwald’s world, it’s the most important issue in the universe. The only issue. The one he’s been relentlessly, obsessively fixated on for months and months at the exclusion of all other considerations.

And that’s the thing I can’t get my head around, the thing that should give you all the permission you need to, if you haven’t already, completely disregard everything that comes out of the mouths of these two narcissistic idiots.

It comes down to this: Why is it so easy for guys like Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota to give a pass to Rand Paul’s stance on every other issue besides his phony outrage over the Obama administration’s use of drones, while never giving Obama himself an ounce of credit for any of his myriad progressive stances, instead holding him up as some kind of tyrant because of the one issue they seem to think is above all others? The easy answer, of course, is that Greenwald and Sirota have made very nice careers for themselves out of being the exhausting, screeching opposition to power, whatever that power may happen to be and no president will ever be given the benefit of the doubt, no matter what he or she has done that they should logically support. So they’re careerists, fine. The problem is that they’re careerists who wrap themselves in the flag of ultimate, dispassionate intellectual honesty — and that’s a bunch of crap. They’ve picked their battle and will now fight it to the death, regardless of whatever new information comes to light, what nuance is offered, or what self-contradictions it should by all accounts force them to face up to. They’re Greenwald and Sirota and they hate drones. GRRRR! “Dial 1-800-555-DRONES, and leave the ‘ES’ off for Endless Sanctimony!” I’m violating my own policy of not giving a damn about these two and those like them by writing about them. That’s how well their anti-Obama career track has paid off: people who genuinely don’t think they’re worth mentioning are mentioning them anyway.

Thankfully, Sirota, who in keeping with personal tradition I have to mention wrote an entire book blaming our current political climate on Ghostbusters and Die Hard, just got his ass handed to him by the person whose original piece his painfully dumb Salon column was pegged off of: Adele Stan. She destroys him in a response piece that not only highlights his hypocrisy and mindless allegiance to one pet issue, it also manages to get a retraction out of Salon. Greenwald, meanwhile, is facing the usual backlash for his special brand of condescending nihilism, but it goes without saying that any criticism fired at him will merely bounce off the adamantium hull of his monumental ego. Still, it’s important, if not exactly fun, to be reminded why the opinions of guys like Sirota and Greenwald just don’t matter.

I guess that’s one thing we can all be thankful for: they never let us forget how thoroughly ridiculous they are.

Glenn Greenwald Honorary, Not Entirely Necessary Update, 3-13-13: Needless to say, Sirota is less-than-pleased with my characterization of him. In fact, this little diatribe of mine started an entertaining “discussion” on Twitter last night between him and MSNBC contributor Goldie Taylor. Feel free to read about it here.

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Sulaiman Abu Ghaith

As I’m sure you’re aware by now, the usual suspects are engaged in a group freakout over the president’s lack of consideration for civil liberties in the war on terrorism so much so that some, like David Sirota and Glenn Greenwald, have aligned themselves with crackpot hooplehead Rand Paul, who has little if any regard for the civil liberties of women and minorities (see also his support for personhood amendment, his support for states rights’ nullification and his opposition to key sections of the Civil Rights Act).

Regardless of these brain-scrambling alliances, I haven’t read a single article by some of these activists in which they, 1) acknowledge the president’s efforts to wind-down military commissions, and 2) acknowledge the fierce political resistance the administration has confronted every time it’s attempted item number one.

Here’s why I bring this up. While everyone was losing their shpadoinkle in the Holder/drones fracas, exaggerating and misrepresenting what the administration’s policies are regarding domestic use of lethal military force, news broke that Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law and an “official spokesman” for al-Qaida had been captured alive in Turkey and was extradited to New York City where he plead not guilty to terrorism charges in federal court.

Briefly, I half-wondered whether some of the drone insanity last week was deliberately orchestrated as a distraction while Abu Ghaith was shuffled into New York for trial without hardly anyone noticing. If it was, in fact, intentionally planned that way, the administration played it quite well because when Eric Holder and the White House had previously announced that terrorism trials would be moved to American soil back in 2009 and 2010, everyone lost their minds.

As promised, on his second full day in office, the president signed Executive Order 13492, which closed the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The plan was to move the 240 detainees to the empty Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois until they were put on trial in the federal court system, not unlike Abu Ghaith. But as soon as it was announced, heads began to explode. No one wanted suspected terrorists in their backyards, even though ostensibly far worse criminals were already being held in various prisons. Stirred up by the mass outrage, the U.S. Senate voted 90-to-6 to cut the necessary $80 million (pocket change for the government) to close the facility. The Democrats — many of them liberal Democrats, like Russ Feingold, as well as liberal superhero Bernie Sanders — voted to cut the funding under the dubious excuse that the president didn’t have a plan for the closure. Ron Wyden, who, last week, helped Rand Paul with his filibuster, also voted to cut the funding. Other top-shelf senate Democrats who voted against the closure included John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Sherrod Brown, Barbara Boxer and the late Daniel Inouye.

Inexplicably, the press and too many liberal bloggers to this day continue to accuse the president of breaking his promise to close Guantanamo. I’m not sure what they expect the president to do in this case. Should he defy Congress and do it anyway? If so, wouldn’t that fly in the face of the rule of law and separation of powers? You can’t have it both ways: either the president should play by the rules, or he should be allowed to act on his own accord as a unitary executive.

Anyway, that was just the beginning. Later, Congress refused to provide funding for the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with co-conspirators Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, in New York City per the administration’s plan. This after extensive protests that included the families of 9/11 victims as well as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. In early 2011, Congress further blocked the closure of Guantanamo by passing an amendment to that year’s NDAA which outright banned the use of Pentagon funds to close Guantanamo. And as if that wasn’t enough, late last year, the senate voted again, this time 54-41, to block the transfer of the Gitmo detainees to American soil. In fact, every NDAA has included language to block the closure in spite of veto threats by the president.

Glenn Greenwald in his usual cloak-and-dagger conspiratorial style wrote that Obama never intended to “close Guantanamo,” (his scare-quotes) and, instead, simply wanted to create “Gitmo North” where indefinite detention would continue, but worse: Greenwald argued that indefinite detention would be imported to the United States — predictably hyperbolic language intended to scare readers into thinking the next step is indefinite detention of you. Not surprisingly, he skimmed over the fact that 30 detainees would’ve been summarily released, while 100 more would’ve been prosecuted in court. That’s more than half of the detainees, and that was simply the plan at the outset. Who knows how many others would’ve been shuffled through federal trials with due process if Congress had allowed the prison to be closed. Greenwald went on to accuse the president of being a civil liberties dilettante — dabbling in symbolic, “pretty” gestures. Interesting how Rand Paul’s brief dabbling in anti-drone rhetoric and filibusters was unquestionably embraced.

In the midst of being attacked by all sides on the issue, Holder said the following in a speech to the American Constitution Society:

…victory and security will not come easily. And they won’t come at all if we adhere to a rigid ideology, adopt a narrow methodology, or abandon our most effective terror-fighting weapon — our Article Three court system. [...] And I will continue to point out one indisputable fact, which has been proven repeatedly, during this Administration and the previous one: in disrupting potential attacks and effectively interrogating, prosecuting, and incarcerating terrorists — there is, quite simply, no more powerful tool than our civilian court system.

Again, I’m still not sure how Rand Paul’s brief, superficial and opportunistic tourism through the land of anti-drone apoplexy is considered earnest and genuine, but Holder’s remarks in defiance of Congress about upending military commissions and providing due process for accused terrorists is seen as a conspiratorial flimflam.

Back to Abu Ghaith. His domestic trial in federal court isn’t quite a sure thing yet because some of the same protesters are lining up against Holder’s process of unraveling the military tribunals and bringing more terrorists into the Article III system. In that regard, it ought to be applauded as a victory for due process and a victory for those of us who support an end to the war on terrorism. However, in so far as there continues to be wartime military commissions, we only need to return to the Rosetta Stone solution for ending all of this: an immediate repeal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force and the end of the war on terrorism, along with its adjoining war powers, including the justification for indefinite detention of enemy combatants.

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