liberal killings...

How Liberals Kill

First, running the Legal Advisor’s Office at the U.S. State Department does not mean full freedom of action. In the words of the late international law eminence Tom Franck, at State the legal culture “is that of the defense counsel when it finds ways to justify, post hoc, the client’s actions, rather than that of an expert advising the client to choose the best legally-permissible course of action.” In short, the primary function of State Department lawyers is to come up with legal rationalizations that can pass the smell test. On some small issues, they may have a policy role, but on the big issues—making war, use of drones, setting up prisons outside the reach of any law—their voice is faint, even negligible. Liberals who expected that Harold Koh, the scourge of waterboarding, would bring a human rights sensibility to major foreign-policy issues were going to be disappointed.

Then there is Koh himself. He gained fame in lefty circles for his work to free and grant legal-immigrant status to Haitian refugees warehoused at Guantanamo—yes, it’s been a detention camp before—in the early ’90s. But Koh’s foreign-policy views and opinion of America’s rightful role in the world fit snugly into the Beltway consensus. Israel and Palestine? According to Koh, America was an honest broker in this conflict until Bush and Cheney disengaged in 2001, “with consequences akin to removing adult supervision from a playground populated by warring switchblade gangs.” One might question the aptness of this metaphor since America gives $3 billion dollars a year in military aid to one of these “switchblade gangs,” a patronage relationship that, in the eyes of the world and the parties in conflict, has always disqualified us from being neutral arbiters.

As for Afghanistan, like most international jurists Koh barely bothered to justify the 2001 invasion as a no-brainer exercise of legitimate jus ad bellum. Wasn’t Osama bin Laden there somewhere? That the 9/11 hijackers received much of their indoctrination and training in Hamburg and South Florida should not get in the way of using Afghanistan as an easy target for American vengeance and/or deep concern for the plight of oppressed Afghan women.

For Koh is a true believer both in international law and the inherent goodness of America. His quibble with the doctrine of Exceptionalism is that our reluctance to heed international law prevents us from fulfilling our exceptionally positive role to the max.

At the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva, Hersh criticized President Barack Obama, and alleged that US forces are engaged in "battlefield executions."

"I'll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan," Hersh said. "They're being executed on the battlefield. It's unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn't necessarily get reported. Things don't change.:

"What they've done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban," Hersh added. "You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they're Taliban, you must turn them free.

"What it means is, and I've been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place," he continued. "Well, if they can't prove they're Taliban, bam. If we don't do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that's going on now."