America’s drone sickness
There are many evils in the world, but extinguishing people’s lives with targeted, extra-judicial killings, when you don’t even know their names, based on “patterns” of behavior judged from thousands of miles away, definitely ranks high on the list. Although the Obama White House has not approved of this request from CIA Director David Petraeus, these so-called “signature strikes” that “allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior” are already robustly used in Pakistan — having been started by George Bush in 2008 and aggressively escalated by Barack Obama. There is much to say on this new report, but in order for me to focus on three discrete points, permit me to highly recommend two superb articles that highlight other vital aspects of this policy: (1) this article from my Salon colleague Jefferson Morley this morning on why this form of drone-targeting is pure American Terrorism, and (2) this essay from Chris Floyd about a recently published Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings on Obama’s love of drones and secret wars and how the military’s slang for drone victims — “bug splat” — reflects the sociopathic mindset that drive them.
Initially, it’s critical to note how removed all of these questions are from democratic debate or accountability, thanks to the Obama administration’s insistence that even the basic question of whether the CIA has a drone program is too secret to permit it to publicly acknowledge, even though everyone knows it exists — especially in the countries where it routinely kills people. Recall that Obama officials refused to tell the ACLU, in response to a FOIA request, whether any documents relating to a CIA drone program even exist because even that is too much of a secret to address, and when the ACLU then sued the Obama administration — seeking the most basic information about why the Obama administration thinks it has the power to kill people this way and how it decides who will die — the Obama DOJ again insisted in court that it cannot even acknowledge that such a program exists, let alone provide any basic disclosure or transparency about it.
So here we have this incredibly consequential policy adopted in total secrecy by the Obama administration, one that empowers the President to secretly target people, including American citizens, for instant, due-process-free death. They have placed the policy beyond the rule of law — by insisting that it’s too secret for courts to examine — and shielded it completely from democratic debate. The only time we are permitted even to hear about it is when the President, his aides and loyalists politically exploit the corpses they create by strutting around with chest-beating, tough-guy boasting about how Strong it shows Obama to be (because, really, what is more courageous, more embodying of the noble American warrior spirit, than killing people by remote-controlled video game while the killers are ensconced in secure bunkers in the U.S.?).
And the only time we are permitted glimpses of the debate over these policies is when someone decides to leak it anonymously to reporters like Greg Miller. So here’s a policy — CIA drone strikes — which anonymous administration officials are defending yet again on the front page of The Washington Post at the very same time the Obama DOJ tells courts that it cannot explain itself in a judicial proceeding because it cannot even safely confirm that such a program exists. Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton spoke at an “Open Government” conference in Brazil, and — while serving in an administration that is waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers and is fixated with self-mocking levels of secrecy — had the audacity to say things like this, apparently with a straight face:
Read more: http://www.salon.com/2012/04/19/americas_drone_sickness/singleton/
Isn't it a shame that the slaughtering of innocent people and suspected terrorists by drone strikes and the money wasted on drone strikes is still occurring with little opposition?
= new reply since forum marked as read
And it bugs the hell out of me.
From the good people at MotherJones, who also wonder: Whatever happened to that Bill of Rights thing, anyway?
Panetta: Decision to Kill Americans Suspected of Terrorism Is Obama's
—By Adam Serwer
MotherJones
Mon Jan. 30, 2012 12:13 PM PS
In an interview with CBS 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed more about the secret process the Obama administration uses to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial. According to Panetta, the president himself approves the decision based on recommendations from top national security officials.
" President of the United States, obviously reviews these cases, reviews the legal justification and in the end says, go or no go," Panetta said.
SNIP...
Panetta's explanation isn't much more complex than "when we say someone is a terrorist, then we can kill them, because they're a terrorist." The entire point of due process, however, is to determine whether or not someone is actually guilty. The defense secretary's metaphor—that you can fire back when someone "holds a gun to your head"—might justify killing an American citizen who is fighting on an actual battlefield, like Afghanistan. But it suggests violence as an appropriate response to an imminent threat, rather than the actual circumstances under which say, radical cleric and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki appears to have been killed.
President Obama just signed a bill that, if not for its many administrative loopholes, would "mandate" military detention for non-citizen terror suspects apprehended on American soil, so it's not accurate for Panetta to state that "any" suspected terrorist apprehended by the US receives due process. The vast majority of the nearly two hundred detainees at Gitmo have never been charged with anything, let alone tried and convicted. Osama bin Laden was the admitted leader of a group engaged in an armed conflict against US troops in Afghanistan; concrete evidence that al-Awlaki was more than a font for extremist propaganda has never been aired.
CONTINUED...
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/panetta-obama-signs-killings-americans-suspected-terrorism
And, from everything from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, whatever evil the government promises to keep overseas, they always end up applying to the poor schmucks at home.
