Excuses for Assassination Secrecy
Published on Thursday, July 12, 2012 by Salon.com - by Glenn Greenwald
In response to his widely discussed Esquire article entitled “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama,” Tom Junod received a telephone call from someone he describes as “a person with intimate knowledge of the executive counter-terrorism policies of the Obama administration.” This unnamed person called Junod specifically to defend the administration’s refusal to provide any minimal transparency or even acknowledgment about these policies, even when drone attacks ordered by the President kill innocent American teenagers such as 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. Junod summarizes the defense he was given by this source as follows:
“You seem to think that more transparency would help rectify some of the moral problems,” he said, and then told me that “the political people in the administration, including the president himself,” would probably agree with me.
And then he proceeded to explain why transparency was a goal difficult , if not impossible, to achieve, even when a simple acknowledgment would go a long way toward expiating the sin of killing an innocent American teenager in the course of a counterterrorism strike.
State secrecy, the man on the phone said, exists for a reason, and it’s generally not the reason that the Glenn Greenwalds of the world think it is — it’s not to cover up wrongdoing. It’s to protect two essential things: the sources and methods of the intelligence community, and something called “the requirement of non-acknowledgement”. . . .
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/12-6
= new reply since forum marked as read
...Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list. Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone "operational," as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests.
He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.
Now, there will be some who read what I just wrote and say that the death of the son of an avowed enemy of America — the death of another al-Awlaki — is more an inevitability than a tragedy, and perhaps even a boon: a case of a son reaping what his father sowed. There will be some who will shrug and say that we're at war with Al Qaeda and bad things happen in wars, and there will be some who will believe Nasser al-Awlaki — father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman — when he says that "We can prove that Abdulrahman was not collateral damage at all, that he was intended to be killed."
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/abdulrahman-al-awlaki-death-10470891#ixzz20Sxq6yev
