Rand Paul flip-flops as support for killing United States citizens with drones increases after the Boston Marathon bombing

In my first post with the Boston Marathon bombing as its topic I made the following prediction:

With Dzhokhar  Tsarnaev now in custody and the crisis over (we think) we are going to hear about the need for increased video surveillance on all street corners in major cities and possibly even an increased police presence in the streets, and this will probably be used to justify the domestic drone spying program which is already in the works. This will be the narrative from both the Democrats and the Republicans alike.

  That was not a very difficult prediction to make; after the Sandy Hook massacre the federal government tried to implement legislation which would make the American people less powerful, so with that effort failing it seemed only natural that the federal government would use this terrorist attack to try to make the government more powerful.

  Sadly, but not surprisingly, support is now growing in the government, and among legal scholars, for the targeted drone killing of United States citizens:

I think it’s not inherently illegal to target American citizens so long as American citizens are also combatants in a relevant war. Sometimes U.S. citizens can be classified as enemy combatants” Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University School of Law, told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.

  Okay, that is all very well and good until you remember that Dzhokhar  Tsarnaev is not being tried as an enemy combatant, he has been mirandized and is being afforded a criminal trial as any American citizen should be. We can debate whether or not he ever should have been granted citizenship but he was and now those rights belong to him.

  If this man is not going to be tried as an enemy combatant what does an American citizen have to do to be listed as such? But that might not even matter because some legal scholars believe it doesn’t matter what you call the target as long as you target the right person:

It’s not important [what technology we’re using], what matters is we’re choosing the right target,” he said. “If we’re choosing the right target then we should use the appropriate weapons, we’d be wrong to ban specific technology

  As long as the federal government believes they have targeted a criminal this legal scholar believes the targeting is justified. Forgive me if I am wrong but I thought it was up to a trail by a jury of your peers to decide whether or not the federal government got the right man. Suddenly a trial by jury is being replaced with shoot first and ask questions later.

  But the most troubling news in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing comes from none other than Tea party favorite and supposed libertarian Rand Paul: Rand Paul spent 13 hours filibustering John Brennan’s nomination in order to get the federal government to admit that it didn’t have the power to target American citizens for assassinations by drone strikes, but now he has changed his tune:

I’ve never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on,” Paul said. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and fifty dollars in cash … I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him

  If a man commits armed robbery and engages the police in a firefight of course the police have the right to shoot the man, but now walking out of the store with the money is enough justification to use lethal force from above? What happened to making every attempt to apprehend the person alive and providing him with his constitutional rights!

  We just saw what was basically a police state in Boston and the surrounding towns complete with (voluntary?) warrantless house to house searches being conducted and now we are hearing people like Rand Paul stating that drones can be used to target American citizens in a land which has been deemed a battlefield under the NDAA; if Rand Paul is not on our side nobody is.

  These are scary times we are living in my friends. Where will this end? People with pro-life and second amendment bumper stickers, along with returning veterans have been named as potential threats, can these people be named enemy combatants who would be subjected to drone strikes?