The Wall Street Journal Mocks Senator Rand Paul's Constitutional Concerns
By Michael Hoffman
www.revisionisthistory.org | March 7, 2013
When President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder channel the policies of George W. Bush they win plaudits from the Money Power and neocon Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
On March 6 Republican Rand Paul filibustered on the floor of the U.S. Senate against the confirmation of John O. Brennan as CIA director, and the prospect of US government assassination of American citizens on American soil. In news reports of the Orwellian corporate media, the word assassination is seldom employed. The preferred cosmetic euphemisms spoon-fed to the infantilized public are "drone strikes, targeted killings" and "lethal military force." God forbid any reporter or official would utter the word “government assassination.” The phrase carrries with it a potential wake-up call which the managers of opinion avoid like the plague.
During his filibuster, Senator Paul eloquently stated, “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”
How could anyone object to Paul’s protest? What is there in the words of this senator that could possibly be objectionable to any supporter of the rule of law and the Constitution? Yet, neocon Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham disparaged Paul's protest.
Graham played the 9/11 card, saying, “The drone program he [Obama] has utilized overseas, I think has made us safer. This idea that we’re going to use a drone to attack an American citizen in a cafe in America is ridiculous...I don’t worry about [drones killing Americans]. Here’s what I worry about: that al-Qaeda has killed 2,958 of us (on Sept. 11, 2001), and is going to add to the total if we let our guard down. And I will do everything in my power to protect this president — who I disagree with a lot — and future presidents in having an ill-informed Congress take over the legitimate authority under the Constitution and the laws of this land to be the commander in chief on behalf of all of us.”
The Wall Street Journal blasted Sen. Paul in an editorial titled, "Rand Paul's Drone Rant” (March 7, p. A16). Here are excerpts:
"...Senator Paul said an 'alarm' had to be sounded about the threat to Americans from their own government...Senator Paul had written the White House about the possibility of a drone strike against a U.S. citizen on American soil. Attorney General Eric Holder replied that...as a hypothetical Constitutional matter, Mr. Holder acknowledged the President can authorize the use of lethal military force within U.S. territory...
"Calm down, Senator. Mr. Holder is right, even if he doesn't explain the law very well...What it (the U.S. government) can do under the laws of war is target an 'enemy combatant' anywhere at anytime, including on U.S. soil. This includes a U.S. citizen who is also an enemy combatant.
"...Mr. Holder is right that the U.S. could have targeted (say) U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki had he continued to live in Virginia. The U.S. killed him in Yemen before he could kill more Americans...if Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms.” (End quote from the Wall Street Journal).
The aforementioned Anwar al-Awlaki was a reckless and foolhardy orator and writer who advocated violence. Contrary to the Wall Street Journal however, there is no conclusive evidence that al-Awlaki ever killed anyone, or ordered anyone to be killed. The U.S. government evidently assassinated him because of the words he spoke and wrote. The same lethal criterion for defining an “enemy combatant" can be applied to radical U.S. writers and speakers who offend His Presidential Majesty.
The George W. Bush administration asserted that the President of the United States could, entirely on his own authority and judgment, designate any American citizen an enemy combatant. Once this absolutist designation was applied, the American citizen could be assassinated by his own government, using an aerial drone, or an FBI, CIA or military intelligence agent, or mercenary contractor.
Bush achieved for himself the same pharaonic power which the crowned heads of Europe exercised over their peons in the eighteenth century. It is one significant reason people fled Europe for America, where a revolution was fought against the tyranny of kings. The twenty-first century "war on terror” has given us King George Bush and now Pharaoh Barack Obama. If Rand Paul is wrong to contest this state of affairs, then the American Revolution was wrong.
(Even Sen. Paul needs to be reminded that focusing primarily on whether or not Obama's assassins will be allowed to perpetrate the killing of American citizens in the U.S. with flying drones, provides a loophole for government assassination of citizens by other, more conventional killing methods).
The root of this harbinger of Federal government tyranny is not limited solely to the European monarchies of old. The assassination praxis which “our" government has embraced is an Israeli doctrine which has been used with impunity for decades against Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state, as well as Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Lebanese. In the Israeli state the security apparatus decides who needs to die and that person is assassinated by poison, gun fire, tank or artillery shells, or air force missiles and bombs. In several cases which this writer has studied, the victim's wife and children die with him -- not because he was using them as a "human shield” -- but because he had sat down to dinner with his family, or been riding in a car with them when Israeli assassins struck.
Israeli assassination doctrine is considered a legitimate part of “the laws of war" according to that august organ of the money bags, the Wall Street Journal. What the plutocrats have papered over is that one reaps what one sows. When the U.S. abandons the rule of law rooted in western Christian civilization, for the misrule that constitutes state terror, it invites a similar response from its adversaries. If it is right to murder anyone who the president labels an "enemy combatant," even a writer or speaker who has never picked up a gun or a bomb, then what prevents Islamic forces from deciding that U.S. invasion troops and U.S. bombs dropped on their wedding parties, homes and villages, are the actions of terrorist enemy combatants who should be, along with their commanders and political leaders, in retribution, targeted and killed?
Bush and Obama, and their handlers, were and are certainly aware of the invitation to retribution which their assassination policy establishes. It should come as no surprise that this is what they deliberately invite, at great cost to our troops and the American taxpayer. Those who control the U.S. government desire a savage war to the hilt against all who stand in the way of the Israeli holocaust against Palestine and Lebanon, and the spread of the international Money Power and its enslaving usury (a fact about which the libertarian Sen. Paul is tragically unaware).
George W. Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney, predicted that the war on terror would last for generations. The Cryptocracy that controlled Bush and now Obama seeks a titanic global struggle, another "Good War” on the World War II model of total mobilization and unconditional surrender, that will firmly galvanize the American people in favor of huge expenditures of blood and treasure; one that will be so brutal it will last for Mr. Cheney’s “generations." Is this not a curse?
According to the Wall Street Journal, those who are receptive to learning about the hidden threat to freedom represented by the executive branch's doctrine of assassination of American citizens, are "impressionable...kids," while Rand Paul is a “ranting...fired-up" hysteric.
But who really is impressionable? The peons who dutifully swallow the official story put forth by the media’s gatekeepers of orthodoxy, or the citizens who ask questions and probe beneath surface appearances and rhetoric?
Moreover, is this writer an enemy combatant for having written this column? Which star chamber, under a cloak of "national security," decides whether I live or die? Are we living in the constitutional republic of America, or the Israeli States of America?
Michael Hoffman is the author of Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not.
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