Heather Hurlburt Quoted in Politico On Drones and Rand Paul
Hawks scoff at Paul’s drone warnings
By: Philip Ewing
March 07, 2013 | AP
Hawks and conservatives blasted Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster on Thursday, widening a divide inside the Republican Party between traditional hard-power advocates and the nascent coalition of libertarians and liberals worried about the potential overreach of the U.S. drone program.
Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina took to the Senate floor Thursday morning to slam the underlying concept behind Paul’s talkathon — that a president could use a drone to kill a U.S. citizen inside the United States.
“To somehow allege or infer that the president of the United States is going to kill somebody like Jane Fonda, or somebody who disagrees with policy, is a stretch of the imagination which is, frankly, ridiculous,” McCain said. “Ridiculous! I don’t disagree we need more debate, discussion and, frankly, probably more legislation,” he said, but a scenario like Paul’s “brings the conversation from a serious discussion about U.S. policy to the realm of the ridiculous.”
Paul began filibustering the nomination of John Brennan to become director of the CIA on Wednesday morning and talked until early Thursday, finally yielding the floor after nearly 13 hours of criticism of President Barack Obama and many Senate colleagues for what Paul called their timidity about drones. He drew support from several Republicans who took the floor for prolonged questions to give him breaks — senators whom McCain singled out on Thursday for special criticism.
“In this quote-debate-unquote yesterday, I saw colleagues of mine who know better come to the floor and voice this same concern” — about U.S. drone strikes — “which is totally unfounded,” McCain said. “To somehow say, someone who disagrees with American policy, who may demonstrate against it is somehow a member of an organization which makes that individual an enemy combatant, is simply false.”
Graham also singled out the Republicans who joined Paul — including newcomer Ted Cruz of Texas; Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania; Mike Lee of Utah; Marco Rubio of Florida and even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — asking where they’ve been in previous drone debates.
“To my Republican colleagues, I don’t remember any of you coming down here suggesting President [George W.] Bush was going to kill anybody with a drone,” Graham said. “I don’t even remember people saying that about President Bush on the Democrat side. They had a drone program back then. What is it all of a sudden that’s gotten every Republican so spun up? What’re we up to here?”
McCain read from a Thursday Wall Street Journal editorial that also faulted Paul for what it called a “stunt” that added nothing to the national understanding about drones given the remote possibility for the scenario about which Paul warned.
“He needs to know what he’s talking about,” the Journal wrote.
But even if traditional hard-power advocates dismissed Paul’s warnings as “ridiculous,” in McCain’s phrase, there was hope among a nascent coalition of libertarians and liberals that Paul’s high-profile performance might actually push change at the White House or Congress.
“I actually think it will have moved the needle — it was the culmination of a bunch of other things that didn’t get so much attention,” said Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the left-leaning National Security Network.
“There’s been a lot of grass-roots activity on this, left and right, and I have to say it has taken us by surprise just how much energy was reflected in what you saw last night,” Hurlburt said.
Any time there’s agreement between senators as disparate as Paul, McConnell and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — a drone skeptic who joined Paul’s filibuster for a time on Wednesday — it can signal broad support, Hurlburt said.
“There’s a strong undercurrent of discomfort both in the national security elite and in the U.S. at large with the technology of war, how we’re deciding how we make war,” she said. Paul’s filibuster, she argued, “moves it to a level where you have all these disparate … groups and turns it into something where it’s not just something where libertarian lawyers, human rights lawyers are upset, and it starts to turn it into something broader.”
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