"The American Lockdown State"
(Sadly...a snip (due to copyright) from the whole article...but the full article is worth a read given the PUSH BACK against those of us who are worried about John Brennan's appointment and have concerns about new legal arguments from the "White Paper" released by Newsweek Reporter) BTW: Those DU'ers who are concerned about Drones and want some information outside MSM or here might want to bookmark it and read when you have the time to digest it and post either an argument or why you find you might agree with it. Hopefully...anyway...
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The American Lockdown State
Post-Legal Drones, the Bin Laden Tax, and Other Wonders of Our American World
by Tom Engelhardt
Post-Legal Drones and the New Legalism
Once upon a time, an argument over whether such drone strikes were legal or not might have had some heft to it. After all, the United States was once hailed, above all, as a “nation of laws.” But make no mistake: today, such a “debate” will, in the Seinfeldian sense, be an argument about nothing, or rather about an issue that has long been settled.
The drone strikes, after all, are perfectly “legal.” How do we know? Because the administration which produced that 50-page document (and similar memos) assures us that it’s so, even if they don’t care to fully reveal their reasoning, and because, truth be told, on such matters they can do whatever they want to do. It's legal because they've increasingly become the ones who define legality.
It would, of course, be illegal for Canadians, Pakistanis, or Iranians to fly missile-armed drones over Minneapolis or New York, no less take out their versions of bad guys in the process. That would, among other things, be a breach of American sovereignty. The U.S. can, however, do more or less what it wants when and where it wants. The reason: it has established, to the satisfaction of our national security managers -- and they have the secret legal documents (written by themselves) to prove it -- that U.S. drones can cross national boundaries just about anywhere if the bad guys are, in their opinion, bad enough. And that's “the law”!
As with our distant wars, most Americans are remarkably unaffected in any direct way by the lockdown of this country. And yet in a post-legal drone world of perpetual “wartime,” in which fantasies of disaster outrace far more realistic dangers and fears, sooner or later the bin Laden tax will take its toll, the chickens will come home to roost, and they will be able to do anything in our name (without even worrying about producing secret legal memos to justify their acts). By then, we’ll be completely locked down and the key thrown away.
Full Article is available at this link......
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/05-3
