Kill the "Kill List"

Obama's Kill List: Silence Is Not an Option

The Editors June 6, 2012 | This article appeared in the June 25, 2012 edition of The Nation.

The “war on terror” has its own corrupting logic, leading otherwise morally responsible leaders to do unspeakable things. Such is the case with the Obama administration’s descent into the world of kill lists and drone assassinations.

The image of President Obama poring over baseball-card profiles of terror suspects in Jo Becker and Scott Shane’s now famous New York Times “kill list” exposé probably pleased the administration officials whose cooperation made the story possible, wrapping the president in glinting “warrior in chief” election year packaging. For those concerned about the constitutional protection of civil liberties and the rule of law, however, that image, and the extraordinary practices it represents, was profoundly disturbing. The drone policy the president has developed not only infringes on the sovereignty of other nations, but the assassinations violate laws put in place in the 1970s after scandals enveloped an earlier era of CIA criminality. The new details about Obama’s assassination program also remind us how the 2001 Congressional Authorization of the Use of Military Force established a disastrous policy of “borderless and open-ended war that threatens to indefinitely extend US military engagement around the world,” in the words of the only member of the House to vote against it, Barbara Lee.

The kill list makes a mockery of due process by circumventing judicial review, and turning the executive into judge, jury and executioner. Even worse, the “signature” strikes described in the Times article, in which nameless individuals are assassinated based merely on patterns of behavior, dispense with any semblance of habeas corpus altogether. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, signature strikes account for most of the attacks in Pakistan today, and they were recently approved for use in Yemen.

One of the darkest aspects of this story involves the administration’s method of counting civilian casualties: The CIA simply assumes that any military-age male in the vicinity of a terror suspect must be a militant too. Thus, counterterrorism chief John Brennan was able to state with a straight face in August 2011 that not one civilian had perished from US strikes outside Afghanistan and Iraq in more than a year—a declaration that was greeted with incredulity and outrage in Pakistan, where witnesses have attested to hundreds of civilian deaths.

The drone strikes are inciting even more anti-American hatred in troubled places like Yemen as well as Pakistan (see Jeremy Scahill, “Target: Yemen,” March 5/12). It is hard to argue that they are making us safer when, for every suspect killed, one or more newly embittered militants emerge to take his place. This is not a prescription for American security but for an endless war that will sap our moral core and put in jeopardy our most cherished freedoms at home.

The new revelations also highlight the dangers of official secrecy, as we now glimpse some of what the administration was hiding through its invocation of the state secrets privilege in court proceedings. But as urgent as the demand for transparency remains, we know more than enough to conclude that President Obama’s continuation and expansion of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” has further eroded legal barriers built over decades to limit executive power. For those who believed Obama would restore the rule of law after Bush’s imperial overreach, learning the details of these operations has been troubling. Liberals raised a ruckus about Bush’s abuses. Silence now is not an option.

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islandman said:

I'd really like it if you changed your name to 'KingofOreo'.

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Redatlit said:

That is how I always read it.

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Web Only// Views » June 8, 2012

The War on Whistleblowers

The Obama administration’s dubiously legal whistleblower crackdown is a genuine threat to democracy. BY David Sirota

When a democracy functions properly, media revelations of executive branch misconduct typically result in an investigation by the legislative branch. Watergate epitomized this healthy dynamic—illegal acts exposed by the Washington Post prompted congressional hearings and ultimately prosecutions. In other words, checks and balances functioned properly, and the system both cleansed itself of wrongdoers and rejected the Nixonian notion that no matter what a president does, it is inherently legal.

So when the New York Times this week ran the headline “Senate Will Investigate National Security Leaks About Terrorism ‘Kill List,’” it was a frightening sign that something has gone horribly wrong since the Woodward-and-Bernstein days.

Some background: Last week, the Times published an expose detailing how President Obama personally orders the execution of American citizens and foreigners that he labels “terrorists.” According to the Times, this program deems “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”; allows the president to be judge, jury and executioner; and operates wholly outside of the law. Indeed, the Times reports that the administration justifies such dictatorial power by insisting that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process can now “be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

However, the memo laying out this utterly preposterous legal theory is secret—and, of course, hasn’t been ratified by any court.

In terms of size, scope and long-term effects, this program makes the Watergate scandal look altogether quaint. You would therefore think that at minimum, even the most flaccid, rubber-stamp Congress might ask a few questions about the president’s “kill list” and the dangerous precedents it sets.

But evidently, you would be wrong.

As the Times noted in that subsequent follow-up story, Congress is focused not on shutting down—or even overseeing—the assassination program. It is instead focused on making sure those who blew the whistle on it are punished. Why? Because that will ensure that other such unauthorized programs can continue.

If you think that description of motive is overwrought hyperbole, think again. As Sen. John McCain (R) made clear, he wants revelations of illegal activity halted and possibly prosecuted specifically because “such disclosures can only undermine similar ongoing or future operations.”

This, of course, is part of a broader campaign against those who are courageously exposing illegality. As former Foreign Service officer Peter Van Buren reports, the federal government is now targeting whistleblowers for recrimination, with “the number of cases (against whistleblowers) suggest(ing) an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does.” That’s right—rather than celebrating the heroes who expose wrongdoing and then stopping the illegal acts, the government is shooting the messengers in order to let the crimes continue.

If you are an Obama partisan who insists the crackdown is appropriate because your favored politician is in power, take heed of the president’s own warning. As he said a few years ago, allowing any executive to ignore the Constitution is problematic because “you never know who is going to be president four years from now.”

You also never know what other executive might make the same moves in your own hometown. After all, if a president is arguing that indictments, juries and trials aren’t necessary to execute someone, it’s not hard to imagine a governor or mayor arguing the same thing when locking people up.

That’s why this war on whistleblowers is not just some theoretical problem only for academics to debate or for foreigners to worry about. It represents a genuine domestic threat to democracy itself. If through our silence and complacency we allow that threat to expand, we shouldn’t be surprised when more of us are in the government’s crosshairs.

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