Columnist Endorses War Crimes Against al Qaeda Because They Murdered a Journalist
I had never heard of Alex Beam before today, but his column in today’s Boston Globe crossed my email (h/t dakine01) and I am still fuming at his cavalier endorsement of war crimes. Perhaps even more infuriating, though, is that Beam’s endorsement of war crimes is an aside tossed in while Beam is making an argument with which I otherwise agree.
Beam’s central point, as he suggests in his title for the column,”A double standard on war crimes?”, is that while John Yoo has been widely vilified for his role in authoring the OLC memos that authorized torture, David Barron and Martin Lederman haven’t been attacked nearly as aggressively for authoring the OLC memos under which Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed in Yemen. My only quibble with that point is that Beam’s roster for the torture memos should be expanded to also include at least Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury. His argument:
So, which is the greater crime against the Constitution that all three men swore to uphold? Waterboarding Al Qaeda suspects or killing US citizens? Yoo has been vilified from Marin County to Munich for his legal opinion. If the Obama lawyers are facing job loss or tenure revocation, I haven’t heard about it. This is not a subject they care to discuss.
Beam relies on Mary Ellen O’Connell of Notre Dame to further his argument:
“I do think the two cases call for a different level of criticism,’’ she says. “Isn’t killing worse than torture? Even if the arguments to support torture are weaker arguments, it seems to me that the US should err on the side of the strictest compliance of the law when it comes to taking somebody’s life.’’
Where is the outrage, I asked? It won’t come from the right, she pointed out, “because the policies that Obama is pursuing are basically the same policies that Bush pursued.’’ So where are the principled men and women of the left? “Some of the people who criticized Yoo and his colleagues are in the administration,’’ she answered. “Marty Lederman was a critic of John Yoo, and now he’s writing the memos. So he’s not going to criticize himself.’’
I agree that Lederman and Barron should be subjected to the same level of criticism as Yoo (and Bybee and Bradbury), although I’m less inclined to make a distinction between the crimes of murder and torture. I find both equally heinous and never justified under any conditions. As O’Connell points out, the torture arguments likely were much farther outside the law than the extrajudicial execution arguments, but I still can’t join her in making killing artificially a higher crime than torturing.
But here is the jaw-dropping problem with Beam’s column. Just a bit over halfway through the column, we get this paragraph:
Two points. First, I’m all for waterboarding Al Qaeda bad guys, and the disappearance of al-Awlaki and his ilk by whatever means necessary bothers me not a whit. Read more →