Free At Last! Yemeni Reporter Who Exposed U.S. Missile Strike Goes Home After 3 Years in Jail

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SEN. TED CRUZ: It has been reported that president—under the Obama administration, approximately 395 people have been killed by drone strikes. Are you aware of any reasonable argument that it is somehow more protective of human rights, more protective of civil liberties, to fire a missile at someone from a drone and kill them than it would be to detain them and interrogate them, determine their guilt or innocence and determine what intelligence might be derived from that individual?

FRANK GAFFNEY: I’m probably not the best arbiter of what is humane. You have people on this panel who’ve spent a lot of their time dwelling on that. I kind of focus on national security. But just as a human being, I will tell you I think if you kill people, that typically is less humane than incarcerating them. Letting them—letting them starve to death is, in my judgment, less humane than feeding them involuntarily, if necessary.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Frank Gaffney, Center for Security Policy, testifying at the Guantánamo Bay prison hearing yesterday in the Senate. Jeremy Scahill?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, these—you know, Frank Gaffney is a notorious, discredited neocon. The fact that he was even testifying, you know, talks about the seriousness of that hearing. But let’s be clear here: The Republicans, during their administration, their sort of reign of terror, were Murder Incorporated, where torture was the official policy. They didn’t even—they didn’t pretend to act like it was some abomination that happened once in a while. They were killing people in massive numbers in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, all around the world. So the fact that these guys are now trying to say, "Well, the Obama administration, because he dismantled the interrogation program, is somehow less humane than we were," is just a sick joke. I mean, the fact is that Obama continued many of the worst policies, on a counterterrorism level, that were built up under the Bush and Cheney administration. And these Republicans, they would love to be doing exactly what Obama is doing. They’re just attacking him because he’s Obama. But they love his so-called national security policy. At the end of the day, they’re being motivated more by their own partisan agenda. And it’s an attempt to argue—and it’s an insidious argument—that torture is actually a policy that the United States should fully embrace once again. That’s what they’re trying to do here. But they quietly love the Obama administration’s drone policy and counterterrorism policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we are going to leave it there, and I want to thank you both for being with us. Rooj Alwazir, thank you for joining us, Yemeni-American activist, speaking to us from Washington, D.C. And Jeremy Scahill, producer and writer of the documentary film, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. He’s also the author of the new book by the same name. Jeremy is national security correspondent for The Nation and also a correspondent for Democracy Now! His film Dirty Wars is still in theaters around the country, also available on demand on your cable network. It is anIFC film.