Be Safe or Sorry?

John Hanrahan has a concern or two (hundred) about the increasing war against our democratic rights in the name of security.  Here is a short excerpt from a very long article.

(We can) Wage secret wars and semi-covertly unleash cyber attacks and drone strikes in any country against any putative enemies – as defined by the Obama administration – and don’t worry about international and national legal niceties or congressional approval, much less having open, public debate about our overt and covert war-making? Fine, as long as you keep us safe and don’t tell us about the civilian casualties we and our NATO allies cause or the number of new enemies we create through our military adventurism – unless, of course, those civilian casualties are caused by governments in Libya or Syria or the like. After all, we are the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, and the rules don’t apply to us.


If I were a foreign correspondent coming to the United States, what would I see? A two-plus-centuries old democracy where over the course of little more than one decade first one president and then his successor have assumed or been granted awesome powers for the government to assassinate citizens and non-citizens alike who are deemed to be dangerous to the state – anywhere in the world, merely on the say-so of the president that these are dangerous individuals; to detain individuals indefinitely without trial; to conduct warrantless surveillance of individuals; to subject persons accused of crimes against the state to trial by a military tribunal rather than before a civilian court; to bring some defendants deemed to be particularly dangerous to proceedings before secret tribunals; to arrest and hold indefinitely without charge not only suspected terrorist enemies of the state but any person deemed, without trial, to be giving ill-defined “material support” to such enemies; to remand prisoners to custody in other countries whose governments are known for torture policies; to set up secret prisons for terrorist suspects in other countries; to invade and occupy and bomb other countries that pose no direct or imminent threat to his own nation; to wage secret wars using elite military units, without open consultation with the legislative branch or the citizenry; to unleash armed drone strikes and assassinations in any country felt to be harboring dangerous enemies of the state, with or without authorization of the leaders of those countries, and with or without knowledge of specific terrorists residing in those countries; to bring espionage –espionage! – charges in record numbers against government whistleblowers, accusing them of disclosing information about illegal government spying or government lying about matters of national security and war; to keep one accused whistleblower in solitary confinement, often stripped naked, for eight months, even refusing a United Nations human rights investigator’s request to interview him, and so on. And I would see self-serving, dangerous legal opinions, used first by one president to justify torture, and then by his successor to assassinate via drone or other methods any person deemed by presidential fiat to be a terrorist enemy of the state.