"Support
the war criminal: Be the drone you want to see in the world”
–
Guy
McPherson
Obama
moves to make the War on Terror permanent
Complete
with a newly coined, creepy Orwellian euphemism – 'disposition
matrix' – the administration institutionalizes the most extremist
powers a government can claim
Glenn
Greenwald
24
October, 2012
A
primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and
civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become
permanent, vested not only in current leaders one may love and trust
but also future officials who seem more menacing and less benign.
The
Washington Post has a crucial and disturbing story this morning by
Greg Miller about the concerted efforts by the Obama administration
to fully institutionalize – to make officially permanent – the
most extremist powers it has exercised in the name of the war on
terror.
Based
on interviews with "current and former officials from the White
House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism
agencies", Miller reports that as "the United States'
conventional wars are winding down", the Obama administration
"expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for
years" (the "capture" part of that list is little more
than symbolic, as the US focus is overwhelmingly on the "kill"part). Specifically, "among senior Obama administration
officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely
to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it:
"That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only
the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."
In
pursuit of this goal, "White House counterterrorism adviser John
O Brennan is seeking to codify the administration's approach to
generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide
future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that
Obama has embraced." All of this, writes Miller, demonstrates
"the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly
classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements
into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a
seemingly permanent war."
The
Post article cites numerous recent developments reflecting this Obama
effort, including the fact that "CIA Director David H Petraeus
is pushing for an expansion of the agency's fleet of armed drones",
which "reflects the agency's transformation into a paramilitary
force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone
program and return to its pre-September 11 focus on gathering
intelligence." The article also describes rapid expansion of
commando operations by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)
and, perhaps most disturbingly, the creation of a permanent
bureaucratic infrastructure to allow the president to assassinate at
will:
"JSOC
also has established a secret targeting center across the Potomac
River from Washington, current and former U.S. officials said. The
elite command's targeting cells have traditionally been located near
the front lines of its missions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But JSOC created a 'national capital region' task force that is a
15-minute commute from the White House so it could be more directly
involved in deliberations about al-Qaeda lists."
The
creepiest aspect of this development is the christening of a new
Orwellian euphemism for due-process-free presidential assassinations:
"disposition matrix". Writes Miller:
"Over
the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly
developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation
targeting list called the 'disposition matrix'.
"The
matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an
accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down,
including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. US officials
said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists,
mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of
American drones."
The
"disposition matrix" has been developed and will be
overseen by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its
purposes is "to augment" the "separate but overlapping
kill lists" maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon: to serve, in
other words, as the centralized clearinghouse for determining who
will be executed without due process based upon how one fits into the
executive branch's "matrix". As Miller describes it, it is
"a single, continually evolving database" which includes
"biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated
organizations" as well as "strategies for taking targets
down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone
patrols". This analytical system that determines people's
"disposition" will undoubtedly be kept completely secret;
Marcy Wheeler sardonically said that she was "looking forward to
the government's arguments explaining why it won't release the
disposition matrix to ACLU under FOIA".
This
was all motivated by Obama's refusal to arrest or detain terrorist
suspects, and his resulting commitment simply to killing them at will
(his will). Miller quotes "a former US counterterrorism official
involved in developing the matrix" as explaining the impetus
behind the program this way: "We had a disposition problem."
The
central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed –
"It is the keeper of the criteria," says one official to
the Post – is, by itself, rather odious. As Kade Crockford of the
ACLU of Massachusetts noted in response to this story, the ACLU has
long warned that the real purpose of the NCTC – despite its nominal
focus on terrorism - is the "massive, secretive data collection
and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the
United States".
In
particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in
which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is
systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes
"records from law enforcement investigations, health
information, employment history, travel and student records" –
"literally anything the government collects would be fair game".
In other words, the NCTC - now vested with the power to determine the
proper "disposition" of terrorist suspects - is the same
agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable
surveillance state aimed at American citizens.
Worse
still, as the ACLU's legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented
back in July in a must-read analysis, Obama officials very recently
abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the
agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing
non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more
than 180 days – a limit which "meant that NCTC was dissuaded
from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent
Americans" – it is now free to do so. Obama officials
eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC "to collect
and 'continually assess' information on innocent Americans for up to
five years".
And,
as usual, this agency engages in these incredibly powerful and
invasive processes with virtually no democratic accountability:
"All
of this is happening with very little oversight. Controls over the
NCTC are mostly internal to the DNI's office, and important oversight
bodies such as Congress and the President's Intelligence Oversight
Board aren't notified even of 'significant' failures to comply with
the Guidelines. Fundamental legal protections are being sidestepped.
For example, under the new guidelines, Privacy Act notices (legal
requirements to describe how databases are used) must be completed by
the agency that collected the information. This is in spite of the
fact that those agencies have no idea what NCTC is actually doing
with the information once it collects it.
"All
of this amounts to a reboot of the Total Information Awareness
Program that Americans rejected so vigorously right after 9/11."
It
doesn't require any conspiracy theorizing to see what's happening
here. Indeed, it takes extreme naiveté, or wilful blindness, not to
see it.
What
has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly
secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two
functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of
surveillance data about all Americans without any judicial review let
alone search warrants, and (2) creates and implements a "matrix"
that determines the "disposition" of suspects, up to and
including execution, without a whiff of due process or oversight. It
is simultaneously a surveillance state and a secretive, unaccountable
judicial body that analyzes who you are and then decrees what should
be done with you, how you should be "disposed" of, beyond
the reach of any minimal accountability or transparency.
The
Post's Miller recognizes the watershed moment this represents: "The
creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture
lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic."
As he explains, extra-judicial assassination was once deemed so
extremist that very extensive deliberations were required before Bill
Clinton could target even Osama bin Laden for death by lobbing cruise
missiles in East Africa. But:
Targeted
killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent
much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that
sustain it.
To
understand the Obama legacy, please re-read that sentence. As Murtaza
Hussain put it when reacting to the Post story: "The US agonized
over the targeted killing Bin Laden at Tarnak Farms in 1998; now it
kills people it barely suspects of anything on a regular basis."
The
pragmatic inanity of the mentality driving this is self-evident: as I
discussed yesterday (and many other times), continuous killing does
not eliminate violence aimed at the US but rather guarantees its
permanent expansion. As a result, wrote Miller, "officials said
no clear end is in sight" when it comes to the war against
"terrorists" because, said one official, "we can't
possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us" but trying is "a
necessary part of what we do". Of course, the more the US kills
and kills and kills, the more people there are who "want to harm
us". That's the logic that has resulted in a permanent war on
terror.
But
even more significant is the truly radical vision of government in
which this is all grounded. The core guarantee of western justice
since the Magna Carta was codified in the US by the fifth amendment
to the constitution: "No person shall . . . be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law." You simply
cannot have a free society, a worthwhile political system, without
that guarantee, that constraint on the ultimate abusive state power,
being honored.
And
yet what the Post is describing, what we have had for years, is a
system of government that – without hyperbole – is the very
antithesis of that liberty. It is literally impossible to imagine a
more violent repudiation of the basic blueprint of the republic than
the development of a secretive, totally unaccountable executive
branch agency that simultaneously collects information about all
citizens and then applies a "disposition matrix" to
determine what punishment should be meted out. This is classic
political dystopia brought to reality (despite how compelled such a
conclusion is by these indisputable facts, many Americans will view
such a claim as an exaggeration, paranoia, or worse because of this
psychological dynamic I described here which leads many good passive
westerners to believe that true oppression, by definition, is
something that happens only elsewhere).
In
response to the Post story, Chris Hayes asked: "If you have a
'kill list', but the list keeps growing, are you succeeding?"
The answer all depends upon what the objective is.
As
the Founders all recognized, nothing vests elites with power – and
profit – more than a state of war. That is why there were supposed
to be substantial barriers to having them start and continue - the
need for a Congressional declaration, the constitutional bar on
funding the military for more than two years at a time, the
prohibition on standing armies, etc. Here is how John Jay put it in
Federalist No 4:
"It
is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that
nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of
getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war
when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and
objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge
for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or
support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety
of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often
lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and
interests of his people."
In
sum, there are factions in many governments that crave a state of
endless war because that is when power is least constrained and
profit most abundant. What the Post is reporting is yet another
significant step toward that state, and it is undoubtedly driven, at
least on the part of some, by a self-interested desire to ensure the
continuation of endless war and the powers and benefits it vests. So
to answer Hayes' question: the endless expansion of a kill list and
the unaccountable, always-expanding powers needed to implement it
does indeed represent a great success for many. Read what John Jay
wrote in the above passage to see why that is, and why few, if any,
political developments should be regarded as more pernicious.
Detention
policies
Assuming
the Post's estimates are correct – that "among senior Obama
administration officials, there is broad consensus that such
operations are likely to be extended at least another decade" –
this means that the war on terror will last for more than 20 years,
far longer than any other American war. This is what has always made
the rationale for indefinite detention – that it is permissible to
detain people without due process until the "end of hostilities"
– so warped in this context. Those who are advocating that are
endorsing nothing less than life imprisonment - permanent
incarceration – without any charges or opportunities to contest the
accusations.
That
people are now dying at Guantanamo after almost a decade in a cage
with no charges highlights just how repressive that power is. Extend
that mentality to secret, due-process-free assassinations –
something the US government clearly intends to convert into a
permanent fixture of American political life – and it is not
difficult to see just how truly extremist and anti-democratic "war
on terror" proponents in both political parties have become.
UPDATE
As
I noted yesterday, Afghan officials reported that three Afghan
children were killed on Saturday by NATO operations. Today, reports
CNN, "missiles blew up part of a compound Wednesday in northwest
Pakistan, killing three people - including one woman" and added:
"the latest suspected U.S. drone strike also injured two
children." Meanwhile, former Obama press secretary and current
campaign adviser Robert Gibbs this week justified the US killing of16-year-old American Abdulrahaman Awlaki, killed by a US drone in
Yemen two weeks after his father was, on the ground that he "should
have a far more responsible father".
Also
yesterday, CNN profiled Abu Sufyan Said al-Shihri, alleged to be a
top al-Qaida official in Yemen. He pointed out "that U.S. drone
strikes are helping al-Qaida in Yemen because of the number of
civilian deaths they cause." Ample evidence supports his
observation.
To
summarize all this: the US does not interfere in the Muslim world and
maintain an endless war on terror because of the terrorist threat. It
has a terrorist threat because of its interference in the Muslim
world and its endless war on terror.
UPDATE
II
The
Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko, writing today about the
Post article, reports:
"Recently,
I spoke to a military official with extensive and wide-ranging
experience in the special operations world, and who has had direct
exposure to the targeted killing program. To emphasize how easy
targeted killings by special operations forces or drones has become,
this official flicked his hand back over and over, stating: 'It
really is like swatting flies. We can do it forever easily and you
feel nothing. But how often do you really think about killing a
fly?'"
That
is disturbingly consistent with prior reports that the military's
term for drone victims is "bug splat". This - this warped
power and the accompanying dehumanizing mindset - is what is being
institutionalized as a permanent fixture in American political life
by the current president.
UPDATE
III
At
Wired, Spencer Ackerman reacts to the Post article with an analysis
entitled "President Romney Can Thank Obama for His Permanent
Robotic Death List". Here is his concluding paragraph:
"Obama
did not run for president to preside over the codification of a
global war fought in secret. But that's his legacy. . . . Micah Zenko
at the Council on Foreign Relations writes that Obama's predecessors
in the Bush administration 'were actually much more conscious and
thoughtful about the long-term implications of targeted killings',
because they feared the political consequences that might come when
the U.S. embraces something at least superficially similar to
assassination. Whoever follows Obama in the Oval Office can thank him
for proving those consequences don't meaningfully exist — as he or
she reviews the backlog of names on the Disposition Matrix."
It's
worth devoting a moment to letting that sink in.
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