The President, in wanting to keep the nation “safe” from terrorists, asks a few select members of his staff to put together a list of people to be targeted for death. Once the list is compiled, the President and his staff meet secretly in the White House where the President goes through the list, listens to suggestions then decides who will be assassinated. To make his acts legal, the President has his lawyers draw up a secret memorandum justifying his decisions. That would be an excellent plot for a Robert Ludlum-like novel or movie – if it were not so true.
President Barack Obama’s drone war has taken us beyond the point in which art imitates life and dropped us squarely in that realm where life imitates art. Using drone strikes, the Obama administration – through the Central Intelligence Agency and the military – has made assassination a regular part of the presidential routine. Members of the President’s national security team meet to discuss the administration’s kill list.
We have known about this for some time. (The New York Times and The Washington Post have written news articles as far back as 2010 detailing different aspects of the international drone war.) But many of us have been too obtuse to its particulars. That is until 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awalki was killed in a drone attack in Yemen several weeks after his father, Anwar al-Awalki, was killed.
The al-Awalkis were United States citizens. The father had been identified as a senior al-Qa’ida operative, a man plotting to kill Americans. The son seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of the secrecy of the drone program and the mystery of his death we cannot be sure.
Since January 2009, the Obama administration has conducted six times the number of drone attacks as the Bush administration. Most of the Obama administration attacks – 283 as of September 2012 – have been CIA operations in remote parts of Pakistan. There have also been attacks in Yemen and Somalia. Most Americans – liberals, conservatives, and moderates – support the drone strikes, according to several national polls. (A Washington Post-ABC poll from February 2012 found that 83 percent of Americans approved of the Obama administration's use of unmanned drones against suspected terrorists overseas. Two-thirds of those surveyed even agreed with strikes against U.S. citizens.)
And there lies the rub.
After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush sought, and received, from Congress a naked declaration of war. According to that declaration:
The “President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent future acts on international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”
That declaration — as well as other events – led this nation into armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The declaration was also used to redefine a battlefield and war, and what the United States could do to protect its people – warrantless wiretaps, rendition and torture. To rationalize its actions, Bush had his own lawyers draw up the legal precedent under which he could act. Much of the public was rightly outraged.
Since then, President Obama has not only embraced the very same tactics and definitions the Bush administration used to justify its actions, he has expanded those tactics and definitions to make White House ordered assassinations legal – even on U.S. citizens – without any outside oversight. The President – to borrow from conservative author and professor, George W. Carey – has ratcheted up his presidential powers.
“An incoming president will assume whatever advances in presidential power were made by his predecessor,” Carey wrote recently in The Imaginative Conservative. “In turn, an incumbent will strive to accrue new powers that can be passed on.”
And that is what makes this so scary. Who or what will stop the next president from going even further. Bush pushed the envelope when he had John Yoo, a lawyer at the Office of Legal Counsel, draw up a legal opinion justifying “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Obama, even while drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, has embraced too much of the Bush doctrine on what constitutes a battlefield and what is a war in explaining how and where the Federal government gets the authority to target people for death.
A white paper explaining the Obama administration’s reasoning states that the “United States retains its authority to use force against al-Qa’ida and associated forces outside the area of hostilities that targets a senior operational leader of the enemy forces who is actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans. The United States is currently in a non-international armed conflict with al-Qa’ida and its associated forces. Any U.S. operation would be part of this non-international armed conflict, even if it were to take place away from the zone of active hostilities.”
And who identifies who is a “senior operational leader” of a terrorist group?
It only takes “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government,” according to the white paper. It does not matter if the accused is a United States citizen or not. The discussion of who will be targeted in a drone strike can be initiated by a “high-level official” in the secrecy of the White House, without outside oversight, without what we in this nation have come to know as due process. Under this policy, the accuser, jury, judge, and executioner are one in the same.
When the Bush administration created its own legal opinions to justify its questionable actions, Democrats were up in arms. Several leading Democratic lawyers, such as Dawn Johnsen who Obama considered for his Office of Legal Counsel, declared that the “Bush administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public the legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the systems of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government,” according to an article by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian last week.
For years, many of us ignored the events unfolding around us, leaving the questions about the drone war to a few. It left us not knowing who we were as a nation. Then three American citizens – Anwar al-Awalki, Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awalki – were killed, and some of us recoiled at what our President was doing in our names. According to the White House, Anwar al-Awalki was a senior al-Qa’ida operative. What was his son’s alleged crime? As far as we know it simply may have been that he was the son of a man who the President and his committee of secrecy had declared a terrorist.
Considering our government’s track record on getting things right in this post-9/11 world, that may be the scariest scenario of all.
President Barack Obama’s drone war has taken us beyond the point in which art imitates life and dropped us squarely in that realm where life imitates art. Using drone strikes, the Obama administration – through the Central Intelligence Agency and the military – has made assassination a regular part of the presidential routine. Members of the President’s national security team meet to discuss the administration’s kill list.
We have known about this for some time. (The New York Times and The Washington Post have written news articles as far back as 2010 detailing different aspects of the international drone war.) But many of us have been too obtuse to its particulars. That is until 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awalki was killed in a drone attack in Yemen several weeks after his father, Anwar al-Awalki, was killed.
The al-Awalkis were United States citizens. The father had been identified as a senior al-Qa’ida operative, a man plotting to kill Americans. The son seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of the secrecy of the drone program and the mystery of his death we cannot be sure.
Since January 2009, the Obama administration has conducted six times the number of drone attacks as the Bush administration. Most of the Obama administration attacks – 283 as of September 2012 – have been CIA operations in remote parts of Pakistan. There have also been attacks in Yemen and Somalia. Most Americans – liberals, conservatives, and moderates – support the drone strikes, according to several national polls. (A Washington Post-ABC poll from February 2012 found that 83 percent of Americans approved of the Obama administration's use of unmanned drones against suspected terrorists overseas. Two-thirds of those surveyed even agreed with strikes against U.S. citizens.)
And there lies the rub.
After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush sought, and received, from Congress a naked declaration of war. According to that declaration:
The “President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent future acts on international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”
That declaration — as well as other events – led this nation into armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The declaration was also used to redefine a battlefield and war, and what the United States could do to protect its people – warrantless wiretaps, rendition and torture. To rationalize its actions, Bush had his own lawyers draw up the legal precedent under which he could act. Much of the public was rightly outraged.
Since then, President Obama has not only embraced the very same tactics and definitions the Bush administration used to justify its actions, he has expanded those tactics and definitions to make White House ordered assassinations legal – even on U.S. citizens – without any outside oversight. The President – to borrow from conservative author and professor, George W. Carey – has ratcheted up his presidential powers.
“An incoming president will assume whatever advances in presidential power were made by his predecessor,” Carey wrote recently in The Imaginative Conservative. “In turn, an incumbent will strive to accrue new powers that can be passed on.”
And that is what makes this so scary. Who or what will stop the next president from going even further. Bush pushed the envelope when he had John Yoo, a lawyer at the Office of Legal Counsel, draw up a legal opinion justifying “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Obama, even while drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, has embraced too much of the Bush doctrine on what constitutes a battlefield and what is a war in explaining how and where the Federal government gets the authority to target people for death.
A white paper explaining the Obama administration’s reasoning states that the “United States retains its authority to use force against al-Qa’ida and associated forces outside the area of hostilities that targets a senior operational leader of the enemy forces who is actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans. The United States is currently in a non-international armed conflict with al-Qa’ida and its associated forces. Any U.S. operation would be part of this non-international armed conflict, even if it were to take place away from the zone of active hostilities.”
And who identifies who is a “senior operational leader” of a terrorist group?
It only takes “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government,” according to the white paper. It does not matter if the accused is a United States citizen or not. The discussion of who will be targeted in a drone strike can be initiated by a “high-level official” in the secrecy of the White House, without outside oversight, without what we in this nation have come to know as due process. Under this policy, the accuser, jury, judge, and executioner are one in the same.
When the Bush administration created its own legal opinions to justify its questionable actions, Democrats were up in arms. Several leading Democratic lawyers, such as Dawn Johnsen who Obama considered for his Office of Legal Counsel, declared that the “Bush administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public the legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the systems of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government,” according to an article by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian last week.
For years, many of us ignored the events unfolding around us, leaving the questions about the drone war to a few. It left us not knowing who we were as a nation. Then three American citizens – Anwar al-Awalki, Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awalki – were killed, and some of us recoiled at what our President was doing in our names. According to the White House, Anwar al-Awalki was a senior al-Qa’ida operative. What was his son’s alleged crime? As far as we know it simply may have been that he was the son of a man who the President and his committee of secrecy had declared a terrorist.
Considering our government’s track record on getting things right in this post-9/11 world, that may be the scariest scenario of all.
1 comment:
I understand your point. However, soldiers in combat have the authority to use deadly force without a judge signed warrant. This is the soldiers right in armed combat so as combat evolves into its current form isnt the same authority to drone operators?
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