In an article noting a gradual but measurable increase in CIA’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assassinate terrorists I was struck by how ironic, predictable and asinine was the criticism by human rights groups.

[Wa. Post] About 20 percent of CIA analysts are now “targeters” scanning data for individuals to recruit, arrest or place in the cross­hairs of a drone. The skill is in such demand that the CIA made targeting a designated career track five years ago, meaning analysts can collect raises and promotions without having to leave the targeting field.

Critics, including some in the U.S. intelligence community, contend that the CIA’s embrace of “kinetic” operations, as they are known, has diverted the agency from its traditional espionage mission and undermined its ability to make sense of global developments such as the Arab Spring.

Human rights groups go further, saying the CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The CIA doesn’t officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules.

“We’re seeing the CIA turn into more of a paramilitary organization without the oversight and accountability that we traditionally expect of the military,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Now, these are the same human rights groups that have criticized all non-lethal avenues of action that the CIA could possibly take. Human rights groups like the ACLU were against enhanced interrogation, against interning terrorists as POWs at Guantanamo and other military facilities (another irony considering they had for so long lobbied that Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists be treated as standard prisoners of war, such as German and Japanese POWs kept in military camps until the end of the Second World War), against rendition, against solitary confinement (seriously), against military tribunals, even against the same kind of wiretapping and hidden surveillance that has been employed against organized crime for decades. Having used friendly court districts packed with bleeding-heart liberal judges to sue all possible non-lethal actions that the federal government could potentially take against enemies who disguise themselves as civilians, hijack aircraft and slam them into buildings, it is only natural that this government decided that the best way to deal with terrorists was to kill them rather than capture them.

What else did they expect would happen?

From the Esquire article. (Part 2 here).

Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn’t jump from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn’t jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.

Oh, no. You have to fall.

Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

Bibi — now there’s a guy who can give a kick-arse speech! He’s is Israel’s Ronald Reagan. He’s the Jewish Gipper!

[Benjamin Netanhayu] So now here is the question. You have to ask it. If the benefits of peace with the Palestinians are so clear, why has peace eluded us? Because all six Israeli Prime Ministers since the signing of Oslo accords agreed to establish a Palestinian state. Myself included. So why has peace not been achieved? Because so far, the Palestinians have been unwilling to accept a Palestinian state, if it meant accepting a Jewish state alongside it.

You see, our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state. This is what this conflict is about. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews said yes. The Palestinians said no. In recent years, the Palestinians twice refused generous offers by Israeli Prime Ministers, to establish a Palestinian state on virtually all the territory won by Israel in the Six Day War.

They were simply unwilling to end the conflict. And I regret to say this: They continue to educate their children to hate. They continue to name public squares after terrorists. And worst of all, they continue to perpetuate the fantasy that Israel will one day be flooded by the descendants of Palestinian refugees.

My friends, this must come to an end. President Abbas must do what I have done. I stood before my people, and I told you it wasn’t easy for me, and I said… “I will accept a Palestinian state.” It is time for President Abbas to stand before his people and say… “I will accept a Jewish state.”

Those six words will change history.

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” — Barack Obama, 5/19/11.

The statement above by the president is a rather simple sentence that to the layman and amateur no doubt sounds innocuous enough, but in reality goes against more than 50 years of bipartisan United States policy. It is one thing to declare the 1967 borders as an eventual goal, and quite another to declare it a starting point for peace. Perhaps after 100 years of peace, without rockets striking its citizens, Israel could agree to such borders. But today? Ridiculous. It’s suicide.

If the president’s statement was unintended it underscores his administration’s lack of foreign policy credentials. Worse, if the statement was calculated, it undermines that region’s only true liberally-constitutional democracy on the eve of a United Nations vote to recognize — albeit nonbinding — Palestinian statehood.

Indeed, that’s the first and foremost reason why Israelis today are feeling alienated by the Obama administration: his timing. The UN is perpetually, vigorously and disproportionately adopting measures against Israel. Why now give them excuse to blame unrest on borders? (A study in 2004 found that the UN Commission on Human Rights had condemned Israel 26 different times while not a single Arab state had ever been condemned. Israel has never been a member of UN Security Council, while 16 different Arab states have. Examples go on and on).

Understand what Obama did a few days ago — in a speech, an otherwise good speech, attempting to point out the Arab Spring, emphasizing the importance of bringing liberty and democracy to that region, voicing admiration and support for protesters from Syria to Egypt to Bahrain — Obama unwittingly or not gave the Arab states and its UN sympathizers a just cause to instead blame all that region’s problems on Israel by dictating an impossible condition for peace!

Furthermore, by stating — as American policy, mind you — that the United States believes the starting point to peace are the pre-1967 borders (a.k.a. the Green Line) it gives Palestinian terrorist groups the green light to reply with potential violence to any concession by Israel short of that unrealistic measure.

And it is unrealistic. It is also, more on point, irrelevant to peace!

After all, the idea of Middle East peace presupposes that all parties want peace, does it not? Given the number of foreign Arab and Islamic governments providing terror groups with cash for killing Israelis its reasonable to ask who wants peace in the Middle East beyond Israel and the West.

Were the solution for Middle Eastern peace as simple as returning to 1966 borders Israel would do it in a heartbeat. But people who believe that the Green Line border should be the starting point ignore a basic truth: For 20 years, from 1948 until 1967 Israel was repeatedly attacked by Arab states and non-state terror groups alike. So therefore, why would one ever think that the 1967 border matters?

Rather, it is the very existence of Israel that is the unjustified impetus of their violence. The ruling party in the Palestinian Territories, Hamas, has stated explicitly in its Charter/Constitution the God-ordained murder of Jews and destruction of the state of Israel replaced with an Islamic state: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory). Hamas Charter Article 7 adds, “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Their charter is filled with anti-Semitic hate speech.

Likewise, the leaders of Hezbollah and other Arab terror groups have frequently stated that “Palestine” consists of “all the land from the river [Jordan] to the sea [Mediterranean].” That is Israel!

So, imagine if Canada’s constitution called for the destruction for the United States, or if the Mexican constitution called for the murder of non-Hispanic persons in all of North America? How more serious would we view security? Now, imagine if the Canadian and Mexican populations outnumbered the US population 150 million to 6 million. And imagine if they had repeatedly attempted invasion of Israel and continued to hurl rockets at its citizens. How might we react to our supposedly biggest ally’s president stating we need return to an indefensible border in places just 10 miles wide — half the width of the Washington beltway?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retorted with reality, this which most reasonable Westerners, Obama included, understand: “Events in the region [all the recent protests] are opening people’s eyes to a simple truth: The problems of the region are not rooted in Israel.” Indeed. But Obama’s words nonetheless are digested by the masses of ignorance across the world, and those that would seek to use Israel as the Middle Eastern whipping boy.

“Why has peace eluded us?” explained Netanyahu this week:

“Because so far, the Palestinians have been unwilling to accept a Palestinian state if it meant accepting a Jewish state alongside it. You see, our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state. This is what this conflict is about. … President Abbas must do what I have done. I stood before my people, and I told you it wasn’t easy for me, and I said… “I will accept a Palestinian state.” It is time for [Palestinian] President Abbas to stand before his people and say… “I will accept a Jewish state.” Those six words will change history.”

But now for the final sad truth, and Bibi Netanyahu knows this, as does Obama — Mahmoud Abbas is far too weak a leader to stand up to Hamas, and therefore as long as he rules there will be no peace.

Despite the favorable outcome a week ago, it doesn’t change the fact that the Obama Democrats are still woefully wrongheaded on our counter-terrorism policies. Here’s Bill McGurn:

During the 2008 campaign, for example, Mr. Obama asserted it was “the fact” that Mr. Bush “championed a strategy that distracted us from capturing bin Laden, that focused on Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11.” Now, however, we learn that we discovered the courier’s close tie to bin Laden through a top al Qaeda operative, Hassan Ghul, captured in 2004 . . . in Iraq.

During the campaign, we learned that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogations were “torture” plain and simple—”something that undermines our long-term security.” Now we learn that these interrogations in fact gave us operable clues about the courier’s identity.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama told a crowd at an Iowa rally that he was “frustrated with warrantless wiretaps and the undermining of our civil liberties”—and he voted against allowing the National Security Agency to listen in on foreign terrorists calling the U.S. (before flip-flopping on the issue six months later). Now we learn that intercepts of overseas phone calls helped give us the courier’s real name.

So obvious are these connections that Mr. Obama’s smallness in not admitting them is now working against him. For it invites the question that both Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum effectively raised in last week’s debate among would-be GOP contenders: Would we ever have gotten bin Laden if then-Sen. Obama’s policies had been put into effect instead of Mr. Bush’s?

… If human intelligence is so vital—as we saw in the strike on Abbottabad—why does the administration have no plan for capturing, detaining and interrogating terrorists? With Pakistan having shown pretty clearly how untrustworthy it is, does it really make sense to take the CIA out of the interrogation business and rely on the Pakistanis for information? And so forth.

In short, the issue is not who deserves credit for getting bin Laden, but what policies will best keep America free from attack going forward.

Here’s former Attorney General Michael Mukasey:

Osama bin Laden was killed by Americans, based on intelligence developed by Americans. That should bring great satisfaction to our citizens and elicit praise for our intelligence community. Seized along with bin Laden’s corpse was a trove of documents and electronic devices that should yield intelligence that could help us capture or kill other terrorists and further degrade the capabilities of those who remain at large.

But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we’ll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. The administration also hounds our intelligence gatherers in ways that can only demoralize them.

Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.

That regimen of harsh interrogation was used on KSM after another detainee, Abu Zubaydeh, was subjected to the same techniques. When he broke, he said that he and other members of al Qaeda were obligated to resist only until they could no longer do so, at which point it became permissible for them to yield. “Do this for all the brothers,” he advised his interrogators.

Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.

Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden’s couriers that helped in last weekend’s achievement.

The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name—”enhanced interrogation techniques”—so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.

The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It’s available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.

In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.

Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say “reopening” advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.

Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the “dirty little secret” of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable.

It is debatable whether the same techniques would be lawful under statutes passed in 2005 and 2006—phrased in highly abstract terms such as “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment—that some claimed were intended to ban waterboarding even though the Senate twice voted down proposals to ban the technique specifically. It is, however, certain that intelligence-gathering rather than prosecution must be the first priority, and that we need a classified interrogation program administered by the agency best equipped to administer it: the CIA.

We also need to put an end to the ongoing investigations of CIA operatives that continue to undermine intelligence community morale.

Acknowledging and meeting the need for an effective and lawful interrogation program, which we once had, and freeing CIA operatives and others to administer it under congressional oversight, would be a fitting way to mark the demise of Osama bin Laden.

Hey, I’m glad he’s dead. I know, I know, we’re not supposed to celebrate anyone’s death. In fact, it wasn’t even a full day after the news of Bin Laden’s death that I had to hear from presumptuous moral-equivalence preaching factions amongst media and social networks about how embarrassed they are to see any fellow Americans show any joy or positive emotion over the death of the murderer of 3,000 Americans (not to mention the the October 12, 2002, Bali bombings, or the March 11, 2004, Madrid bombings, or the July 7, 2005, London bombings, and so on).

The hand-wringer’s code word instead became “relief.” You are only allowed to express “relief” that OBL is dead, not happiness, you see, because in the second-grade logic of the moral equivilist expressing any joy over a terrorist’s death makes us no different than the terrorists, or at least no different than, say, the Palestinians caught on tape celebrating the murder of 3,000 civilians on 9-11. See: “Cycle of violence” and all of that nonsensical garbage, as though defending oneself is the same as trying to push a lawful and recognized nation of peoples into the sea.

Faster than you can say “Bleeding-heart, context-lacking UN lover” a supposed quote from Martin Luther King popped up all over the social media Internet, claiming, “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” Just one problem — MLK never said that. Facts? No matter. A five-minute Google search won’t stop the moral equivilist locomotive once it gets going. And the speed at which it propagated — faster than any false narrative that National Security Adviser John Brennen could even muster! — underscored its fabricated intentions.

Sure, maybe the quote captures the spirit of MLK’s thinking, and many are saying it’s not such a stretch or no different than, say, the MLK quote that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” Well, there’s a time for MLK’s thinking, and there’s a time for the Navy SEAL instead. You either get that or you don’t. As for me, I like to think that the last light Osama saw was the muzzle flash from a Navy SEAL’s Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying to abandon moderation. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be cases in which an expression could become pornographic, embarrassing or extreme. Albeit, chanting “U-S-A” is more appropriate at an Olympic event than for the death of a murdermarytr-preaching terrorist. Lack of couth aside — and from what I’ve seen such celebrations were mostly from college youths who were 10 years ago too young to understand how our world forever changed — if you take joy in Bin Laden’s death, don’t be cowed into shame. It doesn’t make you a monster, or the same as the terrorist, or someone with blood lust, or even less enlightened than the self-righteously moral equivilists claim themselves to be. And, certainly, OBL’s death may not change much operationally (and yet, never underestimate the loss of a leader — they are not often easily replaced).

Likewise, if you’re sad over his death — because the loss of life and recollections of dark times, etc. — I will respect that too, but don’t hold yourself somehow superior to those feeling in a more elated mood.

And while we’re at it, it’s also perfectly acceptable to be happy for the circumstances of the mission. It’s okay to be okay that Bin Laden may not have had a firearm, and may not have used women as a human shields. Maybe it would have lightened the heavy conscious of the hand-wringer, but it changes nothing.

It’s also perfectly natural to want to see the photographic evidence of Bin Laden. True, a lack thereof does not make a conspiracy — the nuts are nuts and weave their logic accordingly. All the more reason one rationale of the Administration — that they had a DNA match and thus needed no photograph for proof — was truly ridiculous. We’re talking about an Arab street that believes that Jews were told to stay home on 9/11, and a Truther fringe that thinks federal agents somehow secretly and quietly planted explosives in the twin towers. Do you really think they’re going to accept, “Trust us, we have DNA evidence?” No, the reasons for the evidence are many, and include less tangible things as affirming to terrorists how bipartisianly serious and persistent we remain in hunting them and crushing their morale, historical record, and for some, just plain closure.

Indeed, it’s not just the president or liberal Democrats who would have us all take a quaalude. Here’s the epitome of knuckle-headed moral equivalence from Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers: “Imagine how the American people would react if Al Qaeda killed one of our troops or military leaders, and put photos of the body on the Internet.” Did Chairman Rogers really compare al Qaeda terrorists and self-ordained Islamic rulers to our professional soldiers and duly-elected representatives? Isn’t it great how Chairman Rogers can see the photos but the constituents paying his salary cannot? Can we get a little less lecture with your hypocrisy, Congressman?

But most of all, one should be overjoyed with U.S. military forces, the guys and gals who keep us safe.

You see, that Navy Seal is the same guy who hasn’t seen his family in 10 months, who routinely humps about a 50-pound rucksack across the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iraq and other armpits of the planet while our hand-wringing moral equivilists shake fingers and tut-tut with one another in their virtual chat rooms and otherwise second-guess and draw comparisons between our accountable military forces versus unaccountable, non-state sanctioned, illegal-combatant terrorists who highjack passenger planes for guided missiles.

Like I said, you either get the difference, or you don’t.

Solid points by Eugene Robinson, a rare occasion we’re in agreement:

Why? Because while gory photographs would have inflamed some jihadists and wannabes, I believe they would have disillusioned and deflated others. A heroic myth of invulnerability had been built around bin Laden. He was supposed to have cheated death while fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, walking tall through fields of fire as the bullets somehow missed. He escaped the Americans who cornered him at Tora Bora. He evaded capture for a decade, despite the best efforts of the West’s spies and soldiers.

Showing him in death would definitively refute any notion that bin Laden enjoyed some kind of divine protection. The myth would die with the man.

It’s also true that photographic evidence would silence most, but not all, of the conspiracy theorists (who are surely putting on their tinfoil hats as we speak). But this is just a secondary consideration, because the wing nuts won’t get any traction. I doubt that even Donald Trump is going to endorse a theory that requires calling Navy SEALs a bunch of bald-faced liars — not to mention the entire military and intelligence chains of command.

The reason to display the photos is to show bin Laden for what he really was: not a holy warrior, not a holy anything, but a deluded mass murderer who met the end he so richly deserved.

Great tongue-in-cheek post by IowaHawk. Read the whole thing:

Who is to credit for this rebirth in American national unity? First and foremost, we must cite the leadership of President Obama. Like many Americans – and the Nobel Peace Prize committee – I naively feared he was actually serious when he initially proposed shutting down Guantanamo, trying detainees in American civilian courts, and prior consultation with the international community. Little did I know that this untested young Commander-in-Chief would muster the courage to read his weekly Gallup numbers and, in one daring unilateral extra-judicial targeted hit job, toss aside every single idiotic foreign policy principle of his election campaign. Perhaps most satisfyingly, it was a mission made possible thanks to information extracted by methods he previously banned as “illegal torture.”

But this triumphant new era in situationally-unified American bloodlust does not belong to the President alone; we must also cite Congress’s born-again waterboarders like Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and their newfound enthusiasm for what (at least until 9pm Sunday) they would have once considered illegal military murder squads. Neither can we forget the watchdogs of America’s press, who have shown unprecedented ethical flexibility in shedding their long-held Gandhi moralism and embracing their inner Rambo.

Hey, was this part of the War on Terror, or just Overseas Contingency Operations?

Ha! I’m laughing at the su-perior liberal rationale! Seems we’re all a bunch of targeted-assassination lovers these days.