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View Full Version : 11 Years Later, Senate Wakes Up to War on Terror’s ‘Battlefield America’




jct74
03-07-2013, 04:59 AM
good article from Wired.com


11 Years Later, Senate Wakes Up to War on Terror’s ‘Battlefield America’

BY SPENCER ACKERMAN
03.06.136:33 PM

Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster will inevitably fail at its immediate objective: derailing John Brennan’s nomination to run the CIA. But as it stretches into its sixth hour, it’s already accomplished something far more significant: raising political alarm over the extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year “war on terrorism.”

The Kentucky Republican’s delaying tactic started over one rather narrow slice of that war: the Obama administration’s equivocation on whether it believes it has the legal authority to order a drone strike on an American citizen, in the United States. Paul recognized outright that he would ultimately lose his fight to block Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief and architect of much of the administration’s targeted-killing efforts.

But as his time on the Senate floor went on, Paul went much further. He called into question aspects of the war on terrorism that a typically bellicose Congress rarely questions, and most often defends, often demagogically so. More astonishingly, Paul’s filibuster became such a spectacle that he got hawkish senators to join him.

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All this may be unsurprising coming from one of the Senate’s premiere civil libertarians. But as the filibuster picked up more and more media attention — and especially social-media attention — hawkish senators began joining in. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) praised Paul’s efforts at compelling transparency from the White House. What Paul is arguing is “no less important than our Constitutional government itself,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), no dove.

It would be foolish to presume that Paul’s moment in the spotlight heralds a new Senate willingness to roll back the expanses of the post-9/11 security apparatus. Rubio, for instance, stopped short of endorsing any of Paul’s substantive criticisms of the war. But Paul did manage to shift what political scientists call the Overton Window — the acceptable center of gravity of discussion. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan), the hawkish chairman of the House intelligence committee, put out a statement that started out subliminally criticizing Paul but ultimately backing him on the central point.

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read more:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/03/rand-paul-filibuster/?cid=co6223434