Post by duke on Feb 21, 2013 13:34:17 GMT -5
American Assassination History for Dummies
The idea that President Obama's extrajudicial drone-assassinations of American citizens is "unprecedented" and "radical" is to ignore decades of recent history.
February 20, 2013 By Mark Ames This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.
It's hard to have a serious conversation about America's drone assassination policy when no one seems to have a basic grasp of recent history. This cultural amnesia epidemic is starting to get me down— which is partly my fault for paying more than two minutes' attention to Twitter at a single go.
The problem starts with Reagan, as problems so often do. Most people on the left take for granted that Reagan's executive order 12333 "banned assassinations" — which is not just a false interpretation, but really awful mangling of one of the dark turning points in modern American history.
That same ignorance of the history of assassination policy runs right through today, with the repetition of another myth: That President Obama's extrajudicial drone-assassinations of American citizens is "unprecedented" and "radical" and that "not even George Bush targeted American citizens."
The truth is a lot worse and a lot more depressing.
To understand the backstory to Reagan's deceptive "assassination ban" in 1981, you have to know a bit about what was going on in the 70s, that brief period of American Glasnost, in the aftermath of Watergate and the military's collapse after losing Vietnam.
All sorts of dirty Cold War secrets were pouring out in that brief period — in late 1974, Seymour Hersh broke the story that the CIA had been illegally spying on thousands of American antiwar dissidents inside of our borders, in violation of the law and the charter that brought the CIA into existence . Later, Vice President Rockefeller's report said the CIA spied on 300,000 Americans. <snip>
www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/american-assassination-history-dummies
The idea that President Obama's extrajudicial drone-assassinations of American citizens is "unprecedented" and "radical" is to ignore decades of recent history.
February 20, 2013 By Mark Ames This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.
It's hard to have a serious conversation about America's drone assassination policy when no one seems to have a basic grasp of recent history. This cultural amnesia epidemic is starting to get me down— which is partly my fault for paying more than two minutes' attention to Twitter at a single go.
The problem starts with Reagan, as problems so often do. Most people on the left take for granted that Reagan's executive order 12333 "banned assassinations" — which is not just a false interpretation, but really awful mangling of one of the dark turning points in modern American history.
That same ignorance of the history of assassination policy runs right through today, with the repetition of another myth: That President Obama's extrajudicial drone-assassinations of American citizens is "unprecedented" and "radical" and that "not even George Bush targeted American citizens."
The truth is a lot worse and a lot more depressing.
To understand the backstory to Reagan's deceptive "assassination ban" in 1981, you have to know a bit about what was going on in the 70s, that brief period of American Glasnost, in the aftermath of Watergate and the military's collapse after losing Vietnam.
All sorts of dirty Cold War secrets were pouring out in that brief period — in late 1974, Seymour Hersh broke the story that the CIA had been illegally spying on thousands of American antiwar dissidents inside of our borders, in violation of the law and the charter that brought the CIA into existence . Later, Vice President Rockefeller's report said the CIA spied on 300,000 Americans. <snip>
www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/american-assassination-history-dummies