The John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society heard this week a defense of the U.S. policy of using unmanned drones to kill targeted terrorists and enemy combatants in other counties, even if the targets are U.S. citizens. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder defended the same policy during a speech that same day at the Northwestern University law school.
Holder’s — and President Obama’s — embrace of this policy of targeted killings prompts the following reactions from Peter Wehner.
The first is that Holder and the man he serves, Barack Obama, continue to discover that governing is a good deal harder than ignorantly popping off during elections, which they did plenty of in 2008. They didn’t know nearly as much as they thought they did and were not nearly as wise as they thought they were.
My second reaction is that Holder and Obama’s positions are morally indefensible, at least based on their previous standards. How on earth could they bemoan Enhanced Interrogation Techniques of three terrorists who (a) survived the ordeal and (b) elicited information that saved many innocent American lives while giving the green light to kill American citizens overseas, and to do so without the benefit of a trial?
A third reaction: Where is the outrage of the left? You remember the left – men and women who wrote and spoke out almost on a daily basis that EITs were staining America’s reputation, a violation of human rights and international law, and a moral offense of the highest order. Yet here we have Obama’s attorney general defending the targeted killing of American citizens. This shows you how deeply partisan, and ultimately insincere, the concerns were for many who feigned moral outrage during the Bush years.
