“I don’t want to just end the war,” Barack Obama said in January 2008, “but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”
That was a line which seduced many a progressive across America during the presidential campaign and it’s one reason so many now feel betrayed. Either Obama later had a change of heart, or he knew at the time that he was cynically making a vacuous statement for the sole purpose of hooking a slice of the electorate — one that might be sufficiently inspired to provide useful foot soldiers in his campaign.
Reflecting some of that sense of betrayal, David Bromwich writes:
It has lately become usual for right-wing columnists, bloggers, and jingo lawmakers to call for the assassination of people abroad whom we don’t like, or people who carry out functions that we don’t want to see performed. There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked in the past year, and especially in the past six months. Why? A major factor was President Obama’s order of the assassination of an American citizen living in Yemen, the terrorist suspect Anwar al-Awlaki. This gave legal permission to a gangster shortcut Americans historically had been taught to shun. The cult of Predator-drone warfare generally has also played a part. But how did such remote-control killings pick up glamor and legitimacy? Here again, the president did some of the work. On May 1, at the White House Correspondents dinner, he made an unexpected joke: “Jonas Brothers are here tonight. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” The line caught a laugh but it should have caused an intake of breath. A joke (it has been said) is an epigram on the death of a feeling. By turning the killings he orders into an occasion for stand-up comedy, the new president marked the death of a feeling that had seemed to differentiate him from George W. Bush. A change in the mood of a people may occur like a slip of the tongue. A word becomes a phrase, the phrase a sentence, and when enough speakers fall into the barbarous dialect, we forget that we ever talked differently.
I’m not sure about Bromwich’s claim that the turning point was 2003.
Relatively early in America’s expansionist history, the slogan, “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” positioned extra-judicial killing at the center of a conception of justice in which the gun was elevated to the status of a sacred instrument.
It should have come as no surprise a week after the September 11 attacks, that a cowboy in the White House would try shaping the American mindset into one necessary for war, by employing those words.
President Bush said yesterday that he wanted Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile, “dead or alive” in some of the most bellicose language used by a White House occupant in recent years.
“I want justice,” he said after a meeting at the Pentagon, where 188 people were killed last Tuesday when an airliner crashed into the building. “And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ”
He then seemed to temper his remarks by adding: “All I want and America wants is to see them brought to justice. That’s what we want.”
Almost nine years later, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that the same mindset was still at work — in spite of the Democratic president’s campaign promise — and assured Congress that bin Laden “will never appear in an American courtroom.”
The clichéd phrase, “bring to justice,” even if it might seem to preclude the justice of extrajudicial killing, nevertheless connotes justice as the exercise of power — not the enactment of a legal process that should by definition have an unpredictable outcome.
Which brings us to the American wrath now being directed at Julian Assange. His “crime” — the fact that most Americans wouldn’t be able to say what crime he might have committed hasn’t dampened their desire to see him punished — has I believe less to do with national security or legal statutes than the simple fact that he and WikiLeaks have embarrassed America. How dare a scruffy Australian have the audacity to do that?
Imperial power has no humor and responds to the smallest affront with fierce indignation.
RE: “And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ” – George W. Bush
HUD BANNON: “Well, I’ve always thought the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner. Sometimes I lean one way and sometimes I lean the other.” – Hud (1963)
A PERTINENT FACEBOOK GROUP
Name: George W. Bush Virtual, Alternative Presidential Library
Category: Common Interest – History
Description: A group for individuals who seek to commemorate the true legacy (as opposed to the fictional, fabricated, ‘official’ legacy) of George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009.
LINK – http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=324239910435
Assassinating political enemies is of more recent vintage than 2003, for sure. There were many failed attempts on Castro dating back to the 60’s.
You’ve made some hasty claims about Law, Justice, and Power.
I disagree with them … and I had one of the finest legal educations in America: A judge cut off my exposition, by telling me,
“Young man, the LAW has nothing to do with JUSTICE!”
(Fortunately, the jail had a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” 😉
Indeed, there is no necessary relation between Law and Justice.
Justice is an *ethical* principle. If you want to claim that following legal procedures will ensure justice, then you ignore the role of POWER in determining what is Law.
“The law, in its magnificent equality, prohibits both princes
and commoners from sleeping under bridges, or begging in the streets.”
U.S. constitutional LAW also prohibits the public from engaging in an “ex post facto Taking” of the *unethical* profits made by financial elites, as they severely damaged U.S. National Security via economic sabotage.
Do you consider that prohibition “Justice”?
I also believe you are mistaken that American public sentiment against Assange is primarily due to embarrassment (deflating national “prestige”), rather than harm to (perceived) “National Security”.
(Indeed, the POWER of an individual or nation is inextricably intertwined with PERCEPTIONS of power. That’s partly why we’re still in Iraq — to preserve our bluff that we “stay the course” until we “win” … or at least until we ensure the “bad guys” cannot claim that they won.)
If you recall polls from early in both Iraq wars, the American public overwhelmingly supported *censorship* of mainstream press reporting, precisely on grounds of (vague) “National Security”.
Given the Volume (emotional, as well as column-inches) of coverage
demonizing Assange as an alien-looking anarchist/terrorist with
“bad haircuts” (I kid you not), it’s no surprise the American public
doesn’t want to have to *think* about complex detailed facts.
And under no circumstances, do we want to ponder agonizing questions about whether conflicting “domestic” interests have *international* contexts and consequences!!!
(E.g, these days, very few Americans know about the Iran-Contra affair, and the curious timing of Iran’s release of the American hostages — just minutes after Reagan was inaugurated.)
Instead, we want to achieve Emotional Closure, with our comfortable Worldview safely intact — so, “Shoot first, ask questions later.”
if one man
kills another
‘with cause’
it’s murder
if we, as a nation
kill one man
without cause
it’s murder
definition : murder
noun
‘the unlawful premeditated killing
of one human being by another’
verb
‘kill [someone]
unlawfully and with premeditation
—
don’t worry
dante has a place for us
but it’s gonna be warm
pack only shorts
and hawaiian shirts
no cold drinks
allowed
Just a few points: First, I suggest you discover and follow 911Truth; second, memories are short; and third, politicians lie. And last the President is only nominally the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. He’s a marionette, and the string-pullers remain in the shadows of the intelligence establishment, which has now grown to epic size.
SOB.