Patterico
Patterico’s Pontifications
3/11/2013
…First, there is the point made in the headline of this post. Remember how Lindsey Graham chided his Republican colleagues for supporting Rand Paul?
To my Republican colleagues: I don’t remember any of you comin’ down here suggesting that President Bush was going to kill anybody with a drone. I don’t even remember the harshest critics of President Bush on the Democratic side. They had a drone program then. So what is it all of a sudden that has this drone program has gotten every Republican so spun up? What are we up to here?…
The New York Times article answers that question, and here is a big part of the answer: President Bush never deliberately killed an American as an enemy combatant without trial.
It was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, intense deliberation by lawyers working for President Obama and turf fights between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., whose parallel drone wars converged on the killing grounds of Yemen. For what was apparently the first time since the Civil War, the United States government had carried out the deliberate killing of an American citizen as a wartime enemy and without a trial….
The complete article, with video, is at Patterico’s Pontifications.
