Scahill: Rand Paul is a Libertarian. I think it’s really unfortunate that the one senator that started to raise legitimate questions not just about the drone program but the targeting of U.S. citizens and what’s the standard, how does an American get on the kill list, how do they get off the kill list, how do you surrender to a drone.
I would say that about a third of Rand Paul’s filibuster was sane and some of the best information that’s been put on the public record, and then the other two-thirds was this kind of bizarre Tea Party carnival where it was almost like a burlesque show or something.
They roll onto the floor of the Senate and it was like a hodgepodge of every crazy conspiracy theory that they have about President Obama – how he wants to come after the Tea Party zine editor in a café in Montana, and they’re going to drone-bomb this person from the Tea Party.
I think it was a sort of two-edged sword. On the one hand I’m glad that Rand Paul did that, and he tried to hold up the nomination of Brennan on these very serious issues. On the other hand, I think it diminished the seriousness of the issue, because quite frankly, I think Rand Paul has utterly reprehensible views on so many things.
We could spend hours talking about some of the despicable positions of Rand Paul and other people within the Tea Party. On this issue, I do think that he was being sincere in wanting to raise issues about it, but then he flips his position on it a couple weeks later and talks about drone-bombing someone who robbed a liquor store.
So that’s unfortunate. If someone like – if we had a credible Democratic senator, someone like Dick Durbin out of Illinois, who said, “You know what? I’m a major supporter of this president, but this has gone too far and I want to hold serious hearings of this to see is our national security being degraded by our pursuit of a small group of terrorists and our killing of a larger group of civilians? What are the actual national security implications of that?”
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/investigative-journalist-jeremy-scahill/
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