Defending 'Taking Out' Assange

If you've missed outrage over Time magazine's Michael Grunwald tweet last night here's a report along with the deleted message:  "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."   He defended for awhile, then said it was "dumb."  When he deleted it he seem to convinced by someone saying he was only helping Assange supporters. 

UPDATE:  The great Amy Davidson of The New Yorker hits Grunwald, taking a wider view:

If dumbness were the only issue we’d be done. But this one deserves being talked about a bit more, less because Grunwald still seems a bit oblivious as to what was wrong with what he said (though there’s that) than because it encapsulated something hazardous about the current moment, for journalists, for anyone who cares about civil liberties, and for the political culture more generally. ...

And his tweet resonated, perhaps unluckily for him, because of the timing and tone, and above all because it did, concisely and unpleasantly, state the terms of a debate that, partly because of Edward Snowden, is at a critical point. The drone-strike defense, should it come to that, has already largely been written, not in tweets but in executive memos and classified opinions.

My book on Bradley Manning (with Kevin Gosztola) is the only one that covers the full story--from the leaks to current trial.  My new ebook on Kurt Vonnegut has just been published.    Some of my other books at right rail of this blog.