Actually, Congress voted to authorize military force against everyone who was involved with, or a member of the organization who, carried out the 9-11 attacks. I’m not trying to say that you can’t criticize Bush, but Congress gave him the ability to wage this war, and contrary to the implication in your comments, he did not seize it unilaterally.
It is also not an exaggeration to say that Bush could order a nuclear first strike on my house. (Seeing how I live in DC, I’m betting he won’t do it.)
Now, one thing I don’t understand about your posts: do you keep saying that we’re targeting people who were “deemed evil-doers.” Since we’re talking about people who are said to have been involved in the bombings of US embassies, are you saying that you do not believe they were involved in the bombings, or that they are not really evil-doers? I’m rather confused.
The United States Navy has specific targeting criteria when it comes to the color of the targets skin. The further away from “white” the target is, the higher the desired blast radius. Upon decent, the warhead detects the skin color of the target and adjusts the blast radius accordingly. If an Ivy League graduate or “corporate robber baron” is detected at the last minute within the impact zone, the explosion is aborted.
But other presidents have done this sort of thing w/o any such authorization, so I don’t know that he needed it this time. I think the real activity that authorized was the invasion of Afghanistan (that is, to put combat troops on the ground). Clinton didn’t have any explicit authorization to lob missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan after the embassy bombing in 1998 did he? And when Reagan tried to take out Kadafi? And when Carter sent the military mission into Iran?
Tonight there was a Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate on CNN.
The moderator (Wolf Blitzer) posted a hypothetical question: (Paraphrased)
“If Osama Bin Laden was indentified as being in a location in Pakistan, and you had only 20 minutes to act on the info, would you order a military strike? A show of hands, please.”
Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Biden, Richardson responded with a “yes”. Kucinich, “no”. Gravel was off camera, so I couldn’t see how he voted.
I thought, because of the parrallel with the OP in this thread, this might be interesting to you folks.
It never ceases to amaze me how terrorists are always surrounded by so many" innocent civilians".
The person who actually pulls the trigger/presses the button doesnt operate in a vacum.
The people who perform the intelligence ,propoganda,recruiting,financing and logistics functions are just as much terrorists as the the actual killer/s,
The killers could not perform the killings if they didnt have the assistance of the others
i.e. If he/she hasnt got a weapon then the potential victim would still be alive , so the person who procurred it ,the person who delivered it,the person who found the victims location /routine and all the others are directly reponsible for the victims death.
They are not innocent ,if a woman is a terrorist then she is no more innocent thena male terrorist even if she is a mother, though for some reason the media seems to think otherwise .
There also seems to be some sort of idea that the U.S. should get these killers extradited through due process and tried in court etc.etc.
From Somalia ?
The British Gov. had enough problems getting known terrorist killers extradited from The Rep. of Ireland ,from the third world could be a trifle difficult and lengthy process is my guess.
May we please drop this canard? Bush announced to the nation quite some time ago that “This is not a war on Islam.” He has also praised the service of Muslims in the US Armed Forces and even issued celebratory (I guess that’s the word I’m seeking) messages to them for Muslim holy days.
As a point of idle curiosity, what’s the lethal radius of a 5-inch shell? And how much do they cost? I seem to remember reading that 155mm shells are something like 50,000 a pop.
Well, two points of idle curiosity, I guess…
Suppose a serial killer was hiding in someone’s house on your street. Would you be in favor of the Navy lobbing 5" shells at a house down the street to kill him?
If not, why not?
The reason that you gave for why you would not want the Navy firing artillery shells into your neighborhood is the same reason we should not be firing artillery shells into other peoples’ neighborhoods.
I have no idea about the first, but as for my WAG on the second, I can’t imagine that a 5" projectile could cost more than $1,000 each. We’re talking about a heavy casing, a fuze, explosives, and propellant, very simple stuff. If there were sophisticated guidance electronics, then that higher figure might make sense (there are laser guided artillery rounds now in use).
The MSNBC story says that the targets were hiding in a thicket, not a neighborhood. I do not live in a thicket. Were I to live in a thicket in Somalia, I take your point that I would be very displeased at 5 inch shells raining down on my neighborhood/thicket, and anyone living in that foliage would likely have a very bad day. However, since the military seemed to understand that they were attempting to bombard a thicket and not a residential neighborhood, I’m not sure you can complain about endangering innocent lives (unless you have some information that the MSNBC story is inaccurate). Therefore, I think you have given an unapt comparison between bombarding a serial killer living on my street and bombarding some thicket-hiding mass murderers who had just engaged in an hours-long gun battle which wounded five non-US soldiers who were trying to apprehend them immediately prior to the shelling.
In an update, it appears that the US Navy’s bombardment (described here as a missile attack) killed 6 suspected Al Qaeda members who passports list them as being from the US, Sweden, Britain, and elsewhere. In related news, there was a suicide bombing attempt on the Prime Minister of Somalia, which is an attack blamed on Al Qaeda as well. Who knows if these reports are one hundred percent accurate, but I am not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a handful of people who are believed to have been responsible for terrorist bombing that killed hundreds of people, arrive in armed boats, do battle with Somalia’s security forces (such as they are, and I use that term lightly), and then take to hiding in the brush.
I mean that they are suspected of being evil-doers. They have not been proven to be evil-doers. And if congress authorized the assassination of anyone involved with Al Qaida, did they only require that someone in the U.S. government assert that someone was a member? No proof or even solid evidence is necessary? The U.S. can assert that I am a member of AQ and poison my drinking water tomorrow?
Congress gave Bush the power to wage what war? A war against a concept (terror)? Bush does take unilateral power when he and his administration reserve the right to deciderer who they consider an evil-doer without any legal proceedings. I have a quaint belief that end-runs around due process are rather poor form for the “shining beacon of justice of the world”.
didn’t the Joseph Conrad novel describe the futility of this? Sounds like the US Navy has blown off $100,000 of ammunition, to no observable purpose.
Strange, how people don’t realize that guerilla soldiers aren’t likely to hang around to presnt a stationary target.
There are thickets in neighborhoods. Come to my neighborhood and I’ll show you some. Neither one of us knows how close civilians are likely to be found to this thicket, nor do we know what information the Navy had on that subject before they started shooting (but one of us is pretending to know). That’s why I was careful to word my post as a broad guideline instead of confining it specifically to this one situation. The thread had already gone off into somewhat broader territory.
Strawman. You don’t have to live in the thicket, you can live down the street from the thicket and still not want 5" shells coming in.
John Mace quoted the law which authorized the president to go after Al Qaeda. It is indeed a very broad law. I would have to defer to constitutional experts on the question of how the law applies to American citizens who may be involved with Al Qaeda, because that seems like a complex topic (esp. WRT the Padilla case).
I cannot argue that we have captured people who are very likely falsely accused and put them in Guantanamo. However, when we’re talking about this situation here, in which a few dozen heavily armed people get involved in a firefight with Somali, Ethopian and apparently US military forces who are trying to capture them, it is simply absurd to say that we have an obligation to not kill them because there’s a chance that they might not be who we think they are. All the evidence available says that these guys were in fact shooting at military forces trying to capture them before the Navy was called in; so is your answer to let them go if they don’t surrender?
Where are you getting the idea that this shelling occurred in a populated area? The MSNBC story seems to say that the Al Qaeda types were driven out of some type of fishing village, and that the Navy was called in to attack them as they were withdrawing from the fight. If it did indeed occur in an undeveloped area, where no innocents were put at risk, do you still think we should not have shot at these guys who fled from an hours-long firefight into the thicket?
Did you even bother to read the AUMF before putting out that rant? Can you point to the part of that AUMF which supports your argument?
As I mentioned above, pretty much every president in recent history took some type of unilateral, not-approved-by-Congress action like this. The SCOTUS has never ruled, and I can guarantee that it won’t rule, against such actions. OTOH, the SCOTUS has ruled about what the federal government can and cannot do to US citizens, particularly on US soil. The idea that the AUMF might give the president the power to poison your drinking water is, to be charitable, simply idiotic.
It’s really just more the impression I get from the right-wing punditocracy, who appear to be fanning the flames of a clash of cultures rather than appealing to moderate Muslims, as lip-service only very early on would have had us doing.
This is akin to saying that during the War of 1812, our soldiers should not have fired artillery or musket at armed men wearing red coats marching in formation until we had established, through due process, that those men were, in fact, the enemy.
Trying to kill someone whom you are actively engaged in a military “conflict” with is not an “end run around due process” it’s fighting a war, and war by its very nature involves violence and killing. In this particular incident, we received intelligence that suggested extremist fighters of some sort were active in Somalia and were at that very moment shooting up Somalian security forces (a term I also, like Ravenman use lightly) and in general making trouble of themselves. Further intelligence also suggested they’d arrived in Somalia on small, heavily armed boats a few days later. In short, we received intelligence that our enemies were here, and we attacked there. The AUMF is broad, and sure, it doesn’t allow us to just shell up any country we want. I mean, I don’t think the Spanish would have appreciated us lobbing shells into Madrid because we knew some members of Al-Qaeda were in the city. However, in this case we had specific intelligence about our enemy being present in a relatively specific area and our shelling was generally supported by the “government” of Somalia, as its security forces had just fought a nasty skirmish with these extremists who had retreated to a thicket where they could not easily pursue (the fact that Somalia’s regional governor said the area was one where it was hard for its people to operate in suggests to me it was very rugged country and not an area with a bunch of houses and apartment complexes.)