Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Senators! Tell President Obama he is WRONG!

This is how Harry Reid should feel
about drones, don't you think?
taken from nicedeb.wordpress.com
If President George W. Bush were still in office, the Senate would be jumping up and down about the drone attacks that violate Constitutional law and kill American citizens without due process. Remember when liberals were horrified about the illegal detention of suspected terrorists people who looked scary at Guantanamo Bay? (I still am, for the record.) Why aren't we even more angry about the unlawful killing of American citizens without due process, and drone strikes that kill so many civilians

President Obama cannot be held to a different standard than George W. Bush was. He cannot hide behind the Powers of War forever, and isn't he a Constitutional scholar? In this case, I absolutely believe he is abusing his powers, and I cannot believe people are not more angry about this. Drone strikes are inherently undemocratic, and in my opinion, do not make us safer in the long run, just as holding prisoners illegally at Guantanamo did not make us any safer. It's total bologna. 

The only dude worth watching on that there TV...
taken from blogcritics.com
The episode of Moyers & Company that aired on February 1, 2013 was on this very topic, and the two panelists, Vicki Divoll, a former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and deputy legal advisor to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, and Vincent Warren, the Executive Director of the Center of Constitutional Rights, made a very strong case against the President's current policies. 

Although there were many moments during the discussion that I found myself going, "Yes! Exactly! Why aren't we more upset about this?" I thought there were several quotes that made this point much more sustinctly than I ever could- These people are S.M.A.R.T. (Moyers does it right, doesn't he? Just love him.) Here were a few of my favorites:

"I'm not convinced that the US doesn't torture at this moment just because President Obama said that we don't. One of the reasons why I'm not convinced is because there is so much information that is still remaining classified, that there's so much work that the Obama administration could have done, particularly in the last term, around pursuing accountability for the Bush administration that they're not doing," said Vincent Warren. 

Isn't the resemblance a little scary with regard
to torture/drone attacks/lack of accountability
when it comes to this stuff? Creepy...
taken from washingtonsblog.com
Yes- why didn't President Obama pursue accountability for those involved with the torture and illegal detainment that the Bush administration loved so much? Remember? He said he was going to. I remember in 2009 when everyone was saying, "the past is the past. Liberals need to just let it go." Well, it seems that they listened, and apparently even followed suit. We can't trust this administration when it comes to torture either. And Guantanamo is still alive

"Anwar Al-Awlaki, he's a United States citizen born in New Mexico. I'm not saying he's not, probably wasn't a very bad man. But that's hardly the point. We have lots of very bad people, who perhaps we would like to put behind bars or even execute, depending on your point of view on those things...there's plenty of evidence that lots of people are suspected of doing lots of things. And that doesn't mean we shoot them from the sky," said Vicki Divoll. 

If we are shooting people "from the sky," why should we think we are any better than the people we are fighting against? We cannot fight terrorism with terror, and I think we have to call President Obama out on this load of bologna.  Vicki Divoll made the argument that the Senate needs to make the first step.  Liberals, personal politics win over partisan politics in this case! If Democrats do not hold each other to higher standards than those of the Bush administration, who will? We know it won't be the Republicans...



*I encourage you to watch the entire episode of Moyers & Company, which you can find here


2 comments:

  1. I've been waiting for this post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In a "Julia is such a liberal freak" kind of way, or a "If Julia doesn't think Obama is full of bologna, then she is a total hypocrite" kind of way?

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