Check for web archive captures
What does a "Kill List" and an "Assassination Czar" say
about the United States?
By mickielynn on 2012-05-31 18:09:41
[caption id="attachment_3419" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Stop worrying and learn to love the drones!"]
President Strangelove «
| Learned
to
Stop
Worrying
and
ed
be
LZ aie
s Attacks
Ge |
MATSON szzoutszosz sme ~
: [/caption] There’s so much to
say about the recent revelations about our drone killing process, contained in a NY Times article published on Tuesday, May
29". In that article and another published in The Daily Beast with excerpts from Daniel Klaidman's new book, Kil// or
Capture. The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, we learned that President Obama, along with a small
group of individuals including his counter terrorism chief adviser, John Brennan, “personally oversees a kill list containing
the names and photos of individuals targeted for assassination in the secret U.S. drone war.” This current overview process
which takes place each Tuesday, is described in that long and very detailed Times article [written by Jo Becker and Scott
Shane and based on interviews with about 3 dozen of his current and former advisers.] Long story short, the President of the
United States currently signs off on every targeted killing in Yemen and Somalia and the more complex or risky, or
ambiguous strikes in Pakistan. Originally the drone targets in Pakistan were under the jurisdiction of the CIA with a
secretive but somewhat rigorous vetting process. Those strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan were under the
jurisdiction of the DOD with a very exhaustive vetting process and a 30 day review of each target. And all of the Agency
targeted drone strikes were subject to Congressional oversight. Then in April, 2012 all of that changed with a new process
labeled terrorist-attack-disruption strikes, or TADS. That was when the “Assassination Czar", John Brennan took over the
process and took it deep into the White House where he provided the recommendations for targets. At that point the process
was no longer easily subject to Congressional review. So let's stop here for a bit and look at just this first bit of information:
The President of the United States has now taken on the power to order the deaths of individuals all over the world,
including US citizens, such as Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old American citizen son, Abdulrahman, born in Denver and an
ordinary soccer playing teenager. As Constitutional lawyer and journalist, Glenn Greenwald summed up this point in a May
30th interview on Democracy Now! " ... Well we, of course don’t imply that the President of the United States believes that
he has the power to order people to be killed — assassinated — in total secrecy, without any due process, without
transparency or oversight of any kind. I really do believe it’s literally the most radical power that a government and a
President can seize, and yet the Obama administration has seized this power and exercised it aggressively with very little
controversy..." Second point about the current drone killings was the announcement, also in April, that John Brennan’s drone
program in Yemen was now employing a new kind of targeting called “Signature Strikes.” In contrast to approved strikes on
known persons these strikes have a very different set of criteria namely that unknown people could be killed simply on the
basis of observed behavior. To put this another way, The Obama administration granted approval for the launching in
Yemen of so-called “signature strikes,” previously used in Pakistan by the CIA, in which targets are chosen based on the
supposed detection of “patterns of suspicious behavior” rather than the positive identification of alleged Al Qaeda members.
Since a lot of the “on the ground human intelligence information that John Brennan is bringing to the meetings comes from
Saudi intelligence and since the Saudi’s are working with current Yemeni President , Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, against the
members of the Yemini democracy movement it’s difficult to know if we are really targeting AQ members or Houthi rebels
in the north of Yemen. A third frightening policy change, which allows for even more indiscriminate killing of large groups
of people and which gives US media a way out of reporting an accurate number of civilian deaths from our drone strikes, is
the new definition of a “militant.”’ As Mr. Greenwald said later in the interview: “...A militant in the eyes of the Obama
administration formally means any male of fighting age, presumably 18 to 40, who is in a strike zone of a missile. So, if the
U.S. shoots a missile or detonates a bomb by drone or aircraft and kills eight or a dozen or two dozen people without even
knowing whom they have killed or anything about them, they will immediately label any male of a certain age a militant by
virtue of their proximity to that scene.” How would people in the US feel if drones flying over our country were using the
same ways of targeting people for assassination? We may soon find out because there haven’t yet been clear answers to the
questions asked about killing US citizens on US soil. In March, when Attorney General Eric Holder made a statement
upholding legal justification for killing US citizens without trial if they were deemed “a threat to the US” he and FBI
director Robert Mueller were asked by members of Congress if such killings could take place here in the US. They really
didn’t answer that. Instead they said, "Well, you’ve got to ask DOJ." Ron Wyden, the senator from Oregon, has said he
doesn’t know, and he’s a member of the Intelligence Committee. Bottom line, we don’t currently know whether the
government claims they could use drones against American citizens in the United States. And to complicate things still
further, we’re now sharing armed drone technology with our allies: “The Wall Street Journal reports the Obama
administration plans to arm Italy’s fleet of Reaper drone aircraft, a move that could open the door for sales of advanced
hunter-killer drone technology to other allies. The sale will make Italy the first foreign country besides Britain to fly U.S.
drones armed with missiles and laser-guided bombs. Critics of the proposed sale include the head of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, who said, "I am concerned by the proliferation of these weapons
systems and don’t think we should be selling them." [From Democracy Now! headlines, 5/29/12.] [caption
id="attachment_3428" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="An MQ-9 Reaper takes off from Joint Base Balad, Iraq in
July 2008. The Reaper can loiter over battle fields or targets for hours at a time."]
La
[/caption]
