By
David Martosko
......
Posted by Peter Van Buren at 5:00pm, February 16, 2014.
Imagine
this: a president and his top officials as self-professed assassins --
and proud of it, even attempting to gain political capital from it.
It’s not that American presidents have never been associated with
assassination attempts before. At a National Security Council meeting,
Dwight D. Eisenhower personally ordered the CIA to “eliminate” Congolese
Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, then feared as a future “Castro of
Africa.” “After a dead silence of fifteen seconds,” Tim Weiner tells us
in
Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA, “the meeting went on.” And of course, the Kennedy brothers were
directly involved in at least one of the many Agency
attempts to kill Fidel Castro, while the CIA of Lyndon Johnson’s era mounted a
massive assassination program
in Vietnam. Still, in those days, something dark and distasteful clung
to the idea and presidents preferred to maintain what was called
“plausible deniability” when it came to such efforts. (In 1981, by
Executive Order, President Ronald Reagan actually banned assassination by the U.S. government.)
Now, top officials connected to the White House
proudly leak
details about their ongoing efforts to use drones to assassinate
obscure suspected terrorists in the backlands of the planet. They take
pride in comparing their activities to a religious calling. They want
the public to know that they and the president spend significant time
and effort on such “targeted killings.” The most recent case to see the
light of day is the
prospective assassination of an American citizen and suspected “al-Qaeda facilitator,” evidently in the tribal borderlands of
Pakistan. When it comes to this possible future assassination, they seem eager to emphasize
via leaks the care they are taking in preparing the way.
In the process, they have produced legalistic documents so secret that they
can’t be shown
to the public, though their existence and import can indeed be
publicized. These justify to their satisfaction the killing of
Americans without what once would have been considered “due process” or
any role whatsoever for the actual legal system. The president and his
top officials are ready at a moment’s notice to
discuss in public, with a
legalistic turn of mind
and a finicky attention to bureaucratic detail, whether such killings
can properly be carried out in the U.S. as they are abroad, or whether
the angels of death
should be the U.S. military or the CIA -- as if this were of any legally binding import. (Congress, in turn, has been
balking
at appropriating money for the military to take over more of the CIA's
drone killings.) No less striking, the media is by now almost instantly
bored with such reports, which prove, at best, to be minor one-day
ripples in the vast tide of the news.
And in the face of all this,
Americans seem to exhibit a remarkable lack of interest. The
transformation of the White House into a killing machine? Whether any
of this has anything to do with legality? More than 12 years after the
9/11 attacks, it's evidently just everyday life in America. That the
president is our
assassin-in-chief
and that drones are acceptable weapons of choice in such killings are
givens. It's also a given that, in the name of American security,
anything goes as long as it's wrapped in an exculpatory, feel-good
legalistic package, even if it bears no actual relationship to what
Americans might once have called legality. Today, Peter Van Buren,
ex-State Department whistleblower,
TomDispatch regular, and author of
We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, explores the deep derangement of all this and what it means in the building of a “post-Constitutional America.”
Tom
Drone Killing the Fifth Amendment
How to Build a Post-Constitutional America One Death at a Time
By Peter Van Buren
Terrorism (ter-ror-ism; see also terror) n. 1. When a foreign organization kills an American for political reasons.
Justice (jus-tice) n. 1. When the United States Government uses a drone to kill an American for political reasons.
How's that morning coffee treating you? Nice and warming? Mmmm.
While you're savoring your cup o' joe, imagine the president of the United States hunched over his own coffee, considering the murder of another American citizen. Now, if you were plotting to kill an American over coffee, you could
end up in jail on a whole range of charges including -- depending on
the situation -- terrorism. However, if the president’s doing the
killing, it's all nice and -- let’s put those quote marks around it --
"legal." How do we know? We’re assured that the Justice Department tells
him so. And that’s justice enough in post-Constitutional America.
Through what seems to have been an Obama administration leak to the Associated Press,
we recently learned that the president and his top officials believe a
U.S. citizen -- name unknown to us out here -- probably somewhere in the
tribal backlands of Pakistan,
is reputedly planning attacks against Americans abroad. As a result,
the White House has, for the last several months, been considering
whether or not to assassinate him by drone without trial or due process.
Supposedly,
the one thing that’s held up sending in the drones is the
administration’s desire to make sure the kill is "legal." (Those quotes
again.)
Last May, Obama gave a
speech
on the subject. It was, in part, a response to growing anger in
Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere over the CIA’s ongoing drone
assassination campaigns with all their “collateral damage,” and to the
White House’s reported “
kill list.”
In it, he insisted that any target of the drones must pose "a
continuing and imminent threat to the American people." At the time, the
White House also issued a
fact sheet that stated: "Lethal force must only be used to prevent or stop attacks against
U.S.
persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible and no other
reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat effectively." While
that sounds like a pretty imposing set of hurdles to leap, all of the
"legal" criteria are determined in secret by the White House with advice
from the Justice Department, but with no oversight or accountability.
Even
then, it turns out that the supposedly tortured deliberations of the
administration are not really necessary. Despite the president’s
criteria,
according to
an unnamed administration official quoted by the Associated Press,
Obama could make an exception to his policy and authorize the CIA to
strike on a one-time
basis, no matter what the circumstances. One way or another, it is Obama who decides who to kill and when.
Short-Term Questions
At
this point, it’s unclear just why the Obama administration leaked its
plans in reference to this errant American abroad. After all, official
after official has insisted that Edward Snowden’s revelations of secret
NSA documents have caused terrorists to
change their communication tactics,
yet the one American up to no good somewhere in the terrorist world
apparently has not done so in response to the leak about his potential
fate, and will remain locatable whenever needed as a target. And yet
giving notice of a possible attack in advance in the media would, on the
face of it, seem both counterproductive and an invitation to the very
barrage of criticisms leveled by key officials at Snowden. After all,
under the circumstances, an American connected with al-Qaeda wouldn’t
exactly have to be a Bond villain to decide to change his behavior and
his location, stay indoors or outdoors more, keep off his phone for a
while or trade it in for another.
Could the administration leak
have been a trick to flush the bad guy out, causing him to panic and
run? Was it an elaborate ruse designed to induce widespread concern in
al-Qaeda about the liabilities of having American compatriots? Was it a
bone thrown to Republicans otherwise
eager
to paint the president as weak? Could it have been some kind of
geopolitical muscle tussle with once compliant but now more assertively
anti-drone Pakistan? Or could the leak have been a
PSYOP
on the American people, an attempt to manipulate us into feeling better
about government decisions to kill American citizens by revealing the
deliberative and
heart-wrenching process
Obama goes through? Or could it simply have been an attempt to
normalize such acts for us, to make them part of the understandable
everyday background noise of a dangerous world?
The answer is: we don’t know. Not yet anyway.
Not the First Time
The Obama administration admits to killing
four Americans
as part of its war on (or is it “war of”?) terror. We'll pause here a
moment for you to contemplate whether there could have been other,
undocumented killings of the same sort awaiting the revelations of some
future Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning.
On May 7, 2011, a U.S.
drone fired a missile in Yemen aimed at American citizen and key terror
suspect Anwar al-Awlaki. The missile blew up a car with two other people
in it, quickly labeled “al-Qaeda operatives” after we killed them.
Such collateral killings should be no surprise. The
inaugural article
by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill at their new media venture notes
that the National Security Agency regularly identifies targets for CIA
assassinations based on metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking.
Rather than confirming that target’s identity, the CIA is evidently
ready and willing to blow a suspect away based on the location of a
mobile phone he assumedly is using. In other words, people can be killed
because they borrowed the wrong cell phone. (So much for a deliberative
process.)
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