June 05, 2012

What does a “Kill List” and an “Assassination Czar” say about the United States?

In her column "Waging Peace," Mickie Lynn writes: "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 29th."

"In that article and another published in The Daily Beast with excerpts from Daniel Klaidman’s new book, Kill 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…”
Read full article here