Two stories in as many days have managed to raise a number of necessary questions regarding Obama’s use of drones to attack alleged terrorists in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Yesterday’s New York Times article, that isn’t entirely adversarial to the Obama Administration, but does much to offer insight into the drone program and the secret “death panel” that Obama himself presides over, promotes the kind exposure that is worthy of a topic that up until recently, wasn’t getting the kind of attention it warranted. It clearly is meant to progagandize Obama by making him look like a strong and measured leader who isn’t afraid to make tough decisions, but nevertheless there are a handful of sections that actually pose meaningful questions.
Today’s Washington Post piece about the most recent civilian casualties from a drone attack in Yemen, and how it’s becoming increasingly clear how unprecise these weapons are, is another story that poses serious, if not obvious, questions. This piece didn’t get the same lengthy spread the NYT story did, but it was found on the front page of the WP, an encouraging sign for future disclosures on the subject.
What’s been remarkable, when listening to the administration comment on the drone program, is the complete lack of accountability for how inaccurate these weapons are. The civilian body count that has been confirmed on the ground in places like Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, in no way aligns with the administration’s estimates of collateral damage. What we often read in the mainstream press is that a drone strike kills “militants”, but offers no insight into who they are or what organization they support. It’s long been thought that the government has favored the ambiguity of the word militant, for exactly this reason. In fact, as the NYT points out, Obama himself has manipulated the term “militant” in such a way that now represents “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”, killed in a drone strike. The idea being that if someone was killed in a suspected terrorist location, then “they were probably up to no good” as an anonymous Obama official said, and therefore it’s logical to label them a militant, unless more specific identification can prove otherwise after the strike. The NYT piece goes on to say:
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single non-combatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.
Consider the audacity of this move very carefully and reverse the scenario. Imagine indiscriminate bombs being dropped in the US, in remote places that were inhabited by a variety of people, many of whom are completely innocent of any crime. And imagine these indiscriminate attacks coming from a supposed ally. Then imagine that this supposed ally had implemented a law stating that it could legally bomb someone, in our country, without actually knowing the identity of the person at the time of attack, particularly if this person happens to be in a “suspicious” area. Imagine learning that you are guilty by association (guilty until proven innocent) and therefore assumed to be a “militant” simply because of where you live. If you are killed, and a conflicting narrative about who you really are happens to inconveniently arise, then the supposed ally will simply offer a statement saying that they are in a war with people who are attempting to do harm to their nation, and in an effort to protect their interests, sometimes innocent people get killed. And we, as the nation that suffer this reality every day, are supposed to accept this?
Or consider, as Will Bunch posits, how similar the statement “they are probably up to no good” sounds like George Zimmerman’s “looks like he’s up to no good” comment about Trayvon Martin, shortly before killing him. Remember when Obama addressed the nation, telling us that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon? The compassion displayed in that moment when it was so clear how dangerous racial prejudice and profiling is, is now being strongly contradicted by Obama’s willingness to allow mortal strikes to be carried out on human beings simply because of their location, gender, and age. But this is largely ignored because the people being killed are Middle Easterners, who we’ve been taught to view as sub-human.
The WP piece interviewed several Yemeni human rights activists and former government officials, all of whom agree that the more we bomb and kill civilians, the more the local population will be attracted to anti-American sentimentality. How could they not? It doesn’t take a calculated effort on the part of al-Qaeda to sway those that witness every day, relatives and close friends being murdered. When it becomes clear that the lives of these people do not mean much to us in places like Yemen and Pakistan, how could you expect them not to sympathize, and in many ways support, al-Qaeda? It’s simply illogical to think anything different. There are no American faces on the ground, attempting to explain our reasoning for the constant bombardment of these villages and towns. There is no restitution paid to the families of innocent civilians who lose their loved ones. And even if there were, the Yemeni people understand, as do most Middle Easterners, why the US is there and what we really care about. Our rhetoric might be lofty, but it’s pure obscurantism aimed at our own people. Our actions, to people in the Middle East, couldn’t be more transparent.
The NYT piece, in attempting to cast Obama in a favorable light that illuminates his tactical understanding and willingness to make tough decisions, inadvertently underscores how adept Obama is at manipulating the legality of an assassination, by means of interpretation. The NYT says:
But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.
One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according to interviews with both administration and Pakistani sources.
The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administration’s criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan.
Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.
“Many times,” General Jones said, in similar circumstances, “at the 11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target had people around them and we were able to loiter on station until they didn’t.”
But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.
In the “War on Terror” the only valid interpretation of the law is the President’s, and innocent people die as a result of this interpretive power. Nationalists will applaud this, as both Republicans and Democrats have done. They feel Obama’s willingness to kill is a sign of strength. For those of us that believe in the inalienable rights that should be extended to all of humanity, Obama’s convenient interpretations have dire consequences. I still have no grasp of what we are doing in these countries, other than the obvious imperial interest of securing access to oil. As far as I can tell, we’re not liberating anyone. We’re killing the people we’re supposed to be liberating.
What one also gleans from both stories, is that the Obama administration appears to be too quick to resort to drone attacks. There is a sense that Obama is almost trigger happy. The NYT continues:
In Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants.
But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.
Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States, and they have even given them a new name — TADS, for Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret — part of a pattern for a president who came into office promising transparency
As the author implies with his last statement concerning Obama’s failed promise of transparency, the administration claims that the criteria for “signature” strikes is tighter than it is for “personal” strikes; but as long as the “details are a closely guarded secret”, we must either choose to trust that our leaders are meticulous regarding who they kill, or that it defies logic to think that a strike made on a person we don’t have to identify, has a tougher criteria than a strike where the person’s identity must be confirmed. The evidence on the ground is overwhelmingly against the administration on this point.
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The need for secrecy is personified in the handling of the drone strike that killed Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as his sixteen year old son, who were both American citizens at the time of their assassinations. That Awlaki was anti-American, and that he was supportive of the Muslim effort to expel American armed forces from the Middle East, cannot be disputed. But at the time of his assassination, Awlaki had not been charged with a crime- at least not openly- and to this day the Obama administration refuses to make public, the legal justifications for his murder. Awlaki was exercising his 1st Amendment right to free speech, which guarantees that an American citizen can say whatever he believes, openly and without fear of persecution, no matter if it is inflammatory or disagreeable to the US government. The 1st Amendment was created for the very purpose of protecting political speech. The founders recognized that in a democracy, one must be allowed to voice dissent and to have freedom of expression to shape constructive debate. If Awlaki was guilty of a crime, or if he was directly involved in a terrorist attack on the US, we still don’t know. My suspicions are that Obama didn’t like Awlaki’s message. He was influencing young minds with radical interpretations of Islam and with anti-American sentiments, much of which he could justify by telling his listeners to simply look outside their window. Our imperial occupation of the Middle East was no secret to these people. Invariably, through covert planning, Awlaki was reviewed on Obama’s death panel, and found guilty of a crime the administration hasn’t acknowledged, and consequently sentenced to die by drone strike. Two weeks later, Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, who was by all accounts innocent of any terrorist affiliation, was killed by a drone not far from where his father had been struck. Why he had been targeted, is a mystery. The NYT captures the administration’s perspective:
In the wake of Mr. Awlaki’s death, some administration officials, including the attorney general, argued that the Justice Department’s legal memo should be made public. In 2009, after all, Mr. Obama had released Bush administration legal opinions on interrogation over the vociferous objections of six former C.I.A. directors.
This time, contemplating his own secrets, he chose to keep the Awlaki opinion secret.
“Once it’s your pop stand, you look at things a little differently,” said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s former general counsel.
Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a “Nixon to China” quality. But, he said, “secrecy has its costs” and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny.
“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,” Mr. Hayden said. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe.”
What is most extraordinary about Awlaki’s assassination, is the way it was secretly justified by Obama and his DOJ. Obama’s legal shrewdness enabled him to interpret the constitution in such a way, that the 5th Amendment’s guarantee of due process was proclaimed, despite that so-called process being conducted behind closed doors with the suspect in absentia. The article states:
That record, and Mr. Awlaki’s calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.
Mr. Obama gave his approval, and Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011, along with a fellow propagandist, Samir Khan, an American citizen who was not on the target list but was traveling with him.
This supposed “satisfaction” of the guarantee of due process, is such an incredible interpretation of the 5th Amendment that former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald actually stated that it might be the most egregious assault on civil liberties in his lifetime. This subversive and self-serving interpretation is not only an unprecedented attack on our civil liberties, but on the entire legal system itself. The supreme insult, which is an extension of Obama’s policy on secrecy, is the administration’s refusal to specify any information behind the “internal deliberations” that decided in favor of Awlaki’s assassination. Ultimately this interpretation made “executive process” a legal alternative to due process, justified by the “War On Terror” and the need for national security.
Americans are so indoctrinated by fear that we hardly raise an eyebrow. We normalize injustices like this because we’ve been molded to believe that our government cares about us and always has our best interest in mind. We are taught to believe that the threat of terror is omnipresent, and that in desperate times we must be prepared to do what is necessary to protect our people. This is propaganda. It is pandering to a complacent and gullible public that believes everything at face value, particularly when it comes with a hint of fear. The simple fact is we’ve got a Nobel Peace Prize winning president that has a “Kill List” and a “Kill Panel” that he uses to rationalize the assassinations of “terrorist threats”. There is zero oversight in this process. And because the process still can’t be confirmed or denied in federal court, and is being leaked under highly controlled circumstances, what we know is shrouded in mystery and comes with an implicit request, which is simply that we “trust Obama” to make the right decisions.
Decisions about American citizens being killed, as well as taking responsibility for large numbers of civil deaths by way of drone attacks, should be openly shared and acknowledged. The American people deserve to know what’s being done in their name around the world. It’s apparent that like Bush, Obama cannot accept this, and therefore refuses to allow the information to be made public. This is the imperial mind personified. This is what happens when we allow fear to dictate policy. This is what happens when we stand by and allow it to gain power. This is but one more sign, of an evolving surveillance state that is slowly encompassing all that we learn, know, and do. How much is enough?
Rounders and Rogues 