Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, co-founder of the Senate Tea Party Caucus, told reporters that “the United States was right to go into Pakistan without the country’s approval to find Osama bin Laden and that otherwise the al-Qaida leader may have escaped,” reports the Salt Lake Tribune.
“I’m glad that it was unauthorized and unilateral because if we had gone through the step of trying to get permission [from Pakistan], I strongly suspect that we would have lost the opportunity to take him out,” Lee said in a conference call following a meeting with military officials. In other words: If “we” hadn’t been willing to commit an act of criminal aggression against Pakistan, Dick Cheney’s proprietary death squad (sometimes referred to as Seal Team 6) wouldn’t have been able to murder an unarmed criminal suspect after he was in custody. Such is the logic of Empire — and Lee apparently considers it his role to tutor Tea Party activists in such matters, lest their growing discontent with the Obama administration mature into principled opposition to the Regime and its apparatus of mass murder.
The son of former U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee, Senator Mike Lee has served as general counsel to former Utah Governor (and aspiring Republican presidential candidate) Jon Huntsman, Jr., and been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. He is a darling of the Federalist Society, which served as an incubator for the Bush administration’s fascist policy prescriptions concerning presidential “war powers.”
Like many Republicans who fetishize “the text and history of the Constitution,” Lee subscribes to the maxim inter arma, silent leges — in time of war, the laws fall silent. He has repeatedly called for putting the axe to the root of the Welfare State, while allowing the Warfare State to continue to grow unabated.
10:32 am on May 4, 2011
