The leaking of a secret US government White Paper setting out the supposed ‘legal’ justification for killing US citizens abroad using drones has lifted a corner of the veil that occludes the policy of the Obama Administration in this area. David Cole has thoughtful piece about this in The New York Review of Books. Sample:

On Monday, NBC published a leaked Justice Department “white paper” laying out the Obama administration’s case for when the president, or indeed any “informed, high-level official” of the federal government, can authorize the secret killing of a US citizen without charges, a hearing, or a trial. The paper, which appears to summarize a still-classified internal memorandum drafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to authorize the targeted killing in September 2011 of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, provides more detail than has yet been made public about the administration’s controversial drone program.

Consistent with the positions taken in public speeches by former State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh, Attorney General Eric Holder, and White House counterterrorism advisor and CIA director-nominee John Brennan, the sixteen-page white paper argues that killing a US citizen with a drone and without trial is legal under domestic and international law, even if the individual is far from any battlefield, not a member of al-Qaeda, and not engaged in planning an imminent attack on the United States. To date, much of the concern about the administration’s drone program has stemmed from its largely secret character; unfortunately, the more we learn, the greater those concerns become.

Drone warfare is the coming thing, and it’s already a much bigger deal than most people realise. It’s more serious, in a way, than cyberwarfare. And yet it receives very little attention.

When Aaron Swartz was arrested in 2011, the first thought that came to mind was Alexander Pope’s famous question.

As usual, my friend Larry Lessig nails it:

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April.

Yep, especially the observation about the architects of the banking catastrophe dining with the Obamaa and the Camerons of this world.

LATER: Seb Schmoller has had the good idea of putting links to the best tributes in one place.

Terrific Guardian piece by Emer O’Toole about the subliminal racism of much Western comment about the horrific death of an Indian rape-victim. Male violence against women is depressingly common in most societies — including our own. So, as O’Toole points out, there’s “a misplaced sense of cultural superiority” underpinning much Western media coverage of the Indian atrocity:

For example, this BBC article states, as if shocking, the statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours. That equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately four times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; in the US only 24% of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction. This is the strange kind of reportage you tend to get on the issue.

Lovely New Yorker piece by John Cassidy. Sample:

One of the frustrations of economics is that it is hard to carry out scientific experiments and prove things beyond reasonable doubt. But not in this case. Thanks to Osborne’s stubborn refusal to change course—“Turning back would be a disaster,” he told Parliament—what has been happening in Britain amounts to a “natural experiment” to test the efficacy of austerity economics. For the sixty-odd million inhabitants of the U.K., living through it hasn’t been a pleasant experience—no university institutional-review board would have allowed this kind of brutal human experimentation. But from a historical and scientific perspective, it is an invaluable case study.

At every stage of the experiment, critics (myself included) have warned that Osborne’s austerity policies would prove self-defeating. Any decent economics textbook will tell you that, other things being equal, cutting government spending causes the economy’s overall output to fall, tax revenues to decrease, and spending on benefits to increase. Almost invariably, the end result is slower growth (or a recession) and high budget deficits. Osborne, relying on arguments about restoring the confidence of investors and businessmen that his forebears at the U.K. Treasury used during the early nineteen-thirties against Keynes, insisted (and continues to insist) otherwise, but he has been proven wrong.

With Republicans in Congress still intent on pursuing a strategy similar to the failed one adopted by the Brits, this is a story that needs trumpeting. Austerity policies are self-defeating: they cripple growth and reduce tax revenues. The only way to bring down the U.S. government’s deficit in a sustainable manner, and put the nation’s finances on a firmer footing, is to keep the economy growing. Spending cuts and tax increases can also play a role, but they need to be introduced gradually.

From the you-couldn’t-make-it-up department, a report in today’s Irish Times.

It was first used to enable Pope John Paul II to safely navigate the throngs who turned out for his historic visit to Ireland in 1979 – but from tomorrow the iconic Popemobile will be available for hire for stag and hen parties and corporate gigs.

The venture is the brainchild of businessman Paddy Dunning, who came into ownership of the Popemobile when he acquired the Wax Museum some years ago from former politician Donie Cassidy.

Mr Dunning has given the Popemobile a €60,000 makeover and added a Mercedes chassis. It will hit the road again tomorrow, when it will be showcased along with wax statues of Jedward at the Wax Museum in Dublin.

According to a promotional pack, the vehicle has 15 seats, including the original “pope’s chair”. Mr Dunning plans to charge up to €300 an hour plus VAT for use of it .

He said the chair used by the pope was kept in his mother’s home in Greenhills, Dublin, while the vehicle’s makeover was completed.

“Nuns over from Rome were in my mother’s house to see it,” he said.

The promotional pack lists a number of possible uses, including “hen and stag [nights], Debs and photo calls”.