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Anwar Alaki’s innocent kid didn’t get 90 seconds to say shit. Instead he and his fellow cafe members were droned to death because he “should’ve picked a better father.” Yet Garcia who already had multiple court cases establishing that he was in fact removable is taking up orders of magnitude more air time. I wonder why that is?
As I recall the Anwar Alaki case actually got quite a lot of airtime, at least in the circles I inhabit.
To be clear I was talking about his kid. And it was nothing like with Garcia.
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Two reasons:
You may think that killing someone is the worst thing someone can do to them, but as a litigator, I can assure you that is not the case. Any case with a live victim who can testify and enjoy the proceeds of the suit directly will collect more than a wrongful death action where the injury is determined by extrinsic evidence and the proceeds go to the family. Garcia is currently in jail and the administration (presumably) has the power to get him out, and there is action in the court system almost daily. It has implications for the administration's policies going forward. Alaki wasn't in the news until several years after his death, and while the surrounding circumstances certainly had implications for policy, they weren't as salient.
Criticism of the Obama administration came mostly from Democrats, and internecine wars aren't going to make the news as much as wars that have cross-party intrigue. The media outlet furthest to the right condemning the attack was the New York Times editorial board. Fox News, on the other hand, was going so far in the other direction that even the administration was telling them to stop. If the country is roughly split half and half R/D, and only half the Ds are making a controversy about something, it's not going to catch on, especially if see No. 1.
I don't know how old you are or the social circles you run in, but among left-of-center people at the time there was definitely a fatigue about Obama setting in. The whole Clinton–Kerry foreign policy machine seemed like a continuation of the failed Bush policies, or for that matter the 20th Century foreign spook shit writ large. And then on the other side, you had Republicans who said he wasn't being aggressive enough. I'm beginning to suspect that the whole turn toward what would become wokeness in late 2014 was largely an attempt to reconnect with a leftist base who had largely become frustrated with his schtick.
I don’t think anything you write there is the true reason. First, wrongful death suits are pretty much orthogonal to how the public thinks about these things (ie most people would be more concerned about the government having the ability to summarily execute them as opposed to jailing them). Second, the killing of Alwaki wasn’t years old; it was prominent. If memory serves Rand Paul filibustered over it.
No, I think the true reason is that progressives and their media allies don’t really care about due process; it is used as a weapon. They don’t like Trump deporting illegals so they brought up this case where there is a silly argument over due process (nobody disputes the core underlying fact that he ought not be in the US) and are trying to use it to paint with a wide brush.
So yeah I dont think progressives in toto are being honest here though that doesn’t mean the person I’m responding to is being dishonest.
We can quibble about the timeline, but, Rand Paul (whose speech was in 2013) aside, Progressives were, by and large, the only people arguing for Awlaki's civil liberties. Again, it would help if I knew how old you were at the time, what media you were consuming, and what kind of company you kept, but as someone in his late 20s who listened to either NPR or Democracy Now! on his way to work but would occasionally switch over to right wing talk for a change of pace and whose friends were (mostly) Democrats, NPR and Democracy Now! were regularly running segments talking about how much of a travesty Alwaki's death was. Right wing talk radio, in a rare move, defended Obama's actions, while at the same time criticizing him for not being aggressive enough. They thought the standards the administration used to determine the guys was sufficiently dangerous to merit extrajudicial execution were too high.
I was in college at the time. Regardless, I think practically it was a relatively small story.
It was in the news briefly when it happened, and there wasn't a lot of ongoing action to keep it in the news for an extended period. But a year or two after it happened it turned into a cause celebre among libertarians and progressives about the excesses in the war on terror that the Obama administration wasn't backing down from, and it was discussed more frequently on magazine shows, in op-eds, and on so-called alternative media. And it wasn't so much an onslaught as it was that it would come up every couple weeks (Oh, Amy Goodman is having Glenn Greenwald on again, etc.). If this guy had died I suspect we'd see something similar here, but since there's ongoing action in the story, it's going to be in the news more.
I think you are mistaken—if this guy died there’d be attempted riots. This is getting noise because progs need immigrants in their voting bloc.
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I still remember people calling Glenn Greenwald a closet rightwinger for pointing this sort of stuff out, and if "fatigue" is an appropriate response to a citizen being sentenced to death without a trial (and the execution resulting in the death of his underage son that wasn't even given a process-free death sentence), than I think shrugging and moving along should be a valid reaction to sending a non-citizen back to his country, even if it violated process and resulted in him being thrown into a prison.
I’m pretty sure the kid was assassinated in a separate drone strike in a cafe.
Damn, I always thought he just got hit by the same bomb as his dad.
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Sorry, I did a bad job of explaining what I meant there. I wasn't using fatigue as a justification for lack of interest. What I meant was that this execution, combined with a bunch of other shit Obama did on the foreign policy front, let to a fatigue with the administration among more progressive voters, particularly younger ones. Obama was elected largely on the promise that he'd back away from the aggressive war on terror policies of the Bush administration. In the '08 GOP primaries you had people like McCain and Fred Thompson who were doubling down on this position. Then Obama comes in and while he was eventually able to get out of Iraq, he doubled down on Afghanistan without making any progress, invaded Libya, wasn't able to close Gitmo, drew lines in the sand in Syria, oversaw an NSA domestic spyiung program, and was now droning US citizens. He was able to make up some of this ground by moving to the left on social issues later in his second term; this ended up being good for him personally, but it wasn't enough to save Hillary Clinton, whom millennials didn't like to begin with and was largely seen as the architect of some of these adventures. The fatigue that I'm referring to is the fatigue with the entire Democratic establishment that led to Bernie Sanders almost giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in 2016, a fatigue that was largely the result of the Obama administration's more conservative views on civil liberties.
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