New DHS Nominee Spent Years Justifying War on Terror’s Excesses

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/176726/new-dhs-nominee-spent-years-justifying-war-terrors-excesses#


President Barack Obama has chosen former Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson as the new secretary of the Homeland Security Department. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

Back in 2012, just before he stepped down as general counsel for the Department of Defense, Jeh (“Jay”) Johnson delivered a speech at Oxford University titled: “The Conflict Against Al Qaeda and its Affiliates: How Will It End?” The very title carries an optimistic ring, since it often seems that the war on terror will never, ever end—as evidenced, perhaps, by the simultaneous raids last week into Libya and Somalia that captured a former Al Qaeda big wig and sought, without success, to take down an Al Shabab leader. The two actions, coming amid a steady stream of statements from top Obama administration officials that Al Qaeda has been decimated, followed an extraordinary sign earlier this year that Al Qaeda—or at least the threat of Al Qaeda as bogeyman—is still alive and kicking: that, you’ll remember, was the reported intercept of an e-mail from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chieftain in Pakistan, to the head of Al Qaeda’s Yemen franchise, containing an unspecified threat against the United States that led to dozens of American embassies shutting down from North Africa to the Middle East and deep into South Asia. No attack was forthcoming.

Now, Johnson has been tabbed by Obama to be the new Secretary of Homeland Security. Which makes his speech at Oxford relevant again. To be sure, in his post at the Department of Homeland Security, as opposed to DOD, Johnson won’t have responsibility for the war on terror, if we’re still calling it that. (Obama, at least, isn’t.) But Johnson’s speech was widely cited as important back in December 2012 because he had the temerity to suggest that there would come a day when the conflict with Al Qaeda will “end.” In the speech, Johnson said:

I do believe that on the present course, there will come a tipping point—a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.

At that point, we must be able to say to ourselves that our efforts should no longer be considered an “armed conflict” against al Qaeda and its associated forces; rather, a counterterrorism effort against individuals who are the scattered remnants of al Qaeda, or are parts of groups unaffiliated with al Qaeda, for which the law enforcement and intelligence resources of our government are principally responsible, in cooperation with the international community—with our military assets available in reserve to address continuing and imminent terrorist threats.