Meanwhile, it also recently came out that the
New York Times, among other papers, sat on knowledge of the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia for over a year because, get this, the paper was concerned that it might result in the base being closed.
As
old friend David Sirota noted,
Times ombudsman Dean Baquet blazed a burning new trail in the history of craven journalistic surrender when he admitted the paper's rationale in an interview. "The Saudis might shut [the base] down because the citizenry would be very upset," Baquet said. "We have to balance that concern with reporting the news."
As if to right this wrong, the paper today ran an editorial, "
A Court for Targeted Killings," which proposed that the government create a (probably secret) tribunal to which intelligence services would have to present evidence before drone-bombing a suspected enemy combatant.
The paper
, which originally proposed the creation of such a court
in 2010, suggested that the new court be modeled after the secret court created in the wake of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FISA court was designed to give a fig leaf of judicial review to secret wiretaps of suspected foreign agents without having to make the government's evidence public.
But the paper itself noted the comical record of the FISA court as a check on governmental power – in its entire history of 32,000 wiretap applications between 1979 and 2011, it
rejected only 11. Still, the paper said, the creation of such a court would "ensure that the administration's requests are serious."
So the newspaper's bold proposal to right the moral wrong of killing people not only without trial but without charge is to create a secret court that they themselves admit would be little more than a rubber-stamp. Hilariously, the
Times editorialists seemed afraid even to propose this much, reassuringly adding, toward the end of their commentary, that the court they propose to create would not actually have any power at all or curtail executive power in any real way:
The court would not be expected to approve individual drone strikes, and the executive branch would still be empowered to take emergency actions to prevent an impending attack.
Thank God for that!
The
Times editorial is a kind of moral lunacy that Joseph er, the author of
Catch-22, captured in his play,
We Bombed in New Haven, which was about an American Air Force commander instructing a squadron to bomb a series of ridiculous targets.There's a
great scene where some of the men ask "Captain Starkey" why they've been asked to bomb Istanbul:
Starkey: Because we're a peace-loving people, that's why. And because we're a peace-loving people, we're going to bomb Constantinople right off the map!
Bailey: Why don't we just bomb the map?
What the
Times proposes is the same sort of thinking. In their minds, the problem with our drone program isn't that we're murdering masses of people, it's that we're doing it without the appearance of legality. It looks bad on paper – so let's leave the problem, but fix the paper. Bomb the map, in other words.
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