On first glance, it is a simple question to be laughed at or outright dismissed because someone with a lack of knowledge on the Global War on Terrorism would think it could never happen. That is how a number of people who consider themselves to be “serious” individuals reacted to the question of whether the president could authorize a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil, which Senator Rand Paul forced Attorney General Eric Holder to answer without equivocation. However, when considering all the powers both President George W. Bush and now President Barack Obama have claimed and embraced in the Global War on Terrorism to target, isolate and sometimes even neutralize individuals without probable cause and only on mere suspicion, it seems much less looney to ask with a straight face.

In an an arrogant riposte to an earlier posting of mine, Lawfare blogger and member of the Hoover Institute Task Force on National Security and the Law, Benjamin Wittes, proclaimed he is “Happy to be a government proxy.”

Wittes’ tongue may seem somewhat in cheek, but he really means it. “Government proxy” how? In my earlier article criticizing both Wittes and Adweek columnist Alex Koppelman for their poorly resourced and vituperative articles attacking Scott Horton’s investigation of the 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees, published by Harper’s Magazine in January 2010. Department of Defense investigations had labeled all three deaths suicides.

A lot of people were apparently very upset when Scott Horton won the National Magazine Award for Reporting this year. None less so than Adweek’s Alex Koppelman, who wrote a hit piece on Horton’s work that made its way around the Net. But Koppelman’s analysis is wrong in many aspects, and not least in his misrepresentation of an independent autopsy of one of the deceased detainees, which said concluded something very different than what he reported.