Like the killer drones that inspired the filibuster, Kentucky US Senator Rand Paul and US Attorney General Eric Holder were all over the US and world airwaves this past week. The difference between the filibuster and the subject of that piece of political theater is that the drones are still there---correspondence from the AG notwithstanding.
In reality we know and will know very little about the UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) much less the true policy on their use---possibly ever.
What we do know is frightening enough. The US president and his handlers have seen fit for some time now to summarily order the execution of anyone, including US citizens, anywhere in the world perceived by them as evil-doers just as monarch after monarch did the same throughout the Dark Ages.
These hits on those accused but not convicted requires crossing borders and using the air space of sovereign nations to commit what is essentially murder on the basis of a naked allegation.
It’s among the many reasons the Founders sought to make this nation an enclave immune from the irrational and capricious some might judge psychotic actions of irrational, capricious ,and psychotic leaders with passive-aggressive tendencies .
Throughout the Middle Ages anyone even perceived as a potential enemy of the state (the monarch) could be deprived of life, liberty and happiness for certain on the whim of the monarch. There was no American Civil Liberties Union, no NAACP, no MALDEF to come to the rescue of the accused. There was no Constitution. There was no Bill of Rights. There was no notion of “due process.”
Now, it seems that a nation that has all of those legal rights that some highly placed individuals have termed “quaint” notions have all but chosen to fore-go them treating those notions as mere trappings. After all if the president says “they” are guilty, then by god “they” must be!
It reminds me of the words inscribed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
First they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
Who will be left to stop the drones?
From Texas Red: a cratered landscape of for profit prisons, deplorable apartheid public education, lack of healthcare and politicians and majority population intent on keeping it that way…
Hasta Siempre,
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