The United States Air Force's Global Hawk unmanned spy plane at the Royal Australian Air Force Base, Edinburgh near Adelaide, sits on the tarmac after making a non-stop flight across the Pacific April 24, 2001.
What hath Rand Paul wrought? Maybe this: A new Gallup poll conducted after the Kentucky Senator’s epic filibuster finds that a majority of Americans–52 percent to 41 percent–now oppose killing U.S. citizens overseas with drones. As Dave Weigel notes, that figure is well down from the finding of a February 2012 Washington Post survey. It’s worth reiterating here that just three four of the thousands of suspected bad guys (and innocent bystanders) killed by drones over the past decade have been Americans. Only one, the al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was a specific target. The others, including Awlaki’s 16-year-old son and the al Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan (who died with Awlaki), were what the military likes to call “collateral damage.” (The fourth was killed in the very first known drone strike of the “War on Terror.”)
A paltry 13 percent of Gallup’s respondents endorsed the even narrower scenario that so concerned Rand Paul: killing American citizens “who are suspected terrorists” here at home. A whopping 79 percent oppose it. (Actually, Paul seemed worried about something even more specific: that Obama might casually kill Americans here at home who have vague or even no ties to terrorism–a position that only someone rooting for Obama to be a Saddam Hussein-style dictator would openly support.)
This rising concern about whether the war on terror is coming home might be a good occasion to note some history that has apparently gone unmentioned in recent weeks.
According to Vanity Fair writer Kurt Eichenwald in his recent book 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, the Bush White House originally sought express authority from Congress right after 9/11 to wage the war on terror on U.S. soil. White House lawyer Timothy Flanigan, Eichenwald writes, originally drafted language for a use-of-force resolution that authorized the president:
To use all necessary and appropriate force in the United States and against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons [emphasis added]
When Flanigan and his White House colleagues sat down with Democratic Senate aides on Capitol Hill to negotiate the language that Congress would vote on, geography became an immediate point of contention:
Several of the [Democratic] staffers focused on the words in the United States, which followed the phrase granting the president the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force. Use of force inside the country? That was unprecedented. The congressional side dug in, and the four words were cut.
So, no killing at home allowed, right? Not quite. The deletion of “in the United States” seems not to have had substantial legal implications. Government lawyers and national security specialists generally agree that nothing in the final resolution Congress approved on September 14 imposes any geographic limitation on the terror war, and that it therefore can apply to the U.S. as easily as to Afghanistan. (The core issue, at least as the courts and two administrations have interpreted it, is who qualifies as an enemy, not where the enemy is.)
Moreover, according to a Bush administration official familiar with those negotiations, there was explicit discussion of whether to add the term “abroad” after the word “force” (i.e. in place of “in the United States”). But that never happened. And Eric Holder‘s not-exactly-airtight letter to Paul affirms how the Obama administration reads its powers.
Might be time to break out the catheter, Senator Paul!