Obama’s Kill List Comes to Northern Africa
10
February, 2013
The
Obama Administration’s kill list, a secret document which lists an
array of people to be killed at the first opportunity, is the source
of a lot of speculation, and who is on the list is not a matter of
public record.
But
the list’s existence is no secret anymore, nor is the ambition of
many in the administration to see
it greatly expanded,
with designs on setting the goal of killing a number of “Islamist
militants” across Northern Africa and then creating the US military
and/or CIA infrastructure to start getting those killings done.
The
man to get this escalation done is Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the Algerian
militant behind last month’s hostage siege at a BP gas plant along
the Libyan border. His addition would set a precedent that would mean
a precipitous increase in US ambitions across northern Africa.
Belmokhtar
is not believed to be on the list yet because there’s simply no one
to kill him. The CIA’s drone campaign is restricted to Yemen and
Pakistan, and the Pentagon isn’t occupying Algeria.
This
means getting him on the list, on the surface something most
officials will feel is non-controversial, will mean putting something
in Northern Africa to kill him. A drone base for the CIA is a
possibility, and would need to include spies to track him down. A
special forces invasion is another possibility, and a combination
thereof might also happen.
But
much as the death of Osama bin Laden didn’t end the strikes in
Pakistan, and much as the death of US citizen Anwar Awlaki didn’t
end the campaign against Yemen, the creation of the anti-Belmokhtar
front in the global war on terror means creating a protracted
assassination campaign in and around Algeria, one that will quickly
expand well beyond the immediate target.
While
most of the victims of the assassination campaign die anonymously and
are forever labeled “suspects,” the reality is that once a new
base of operations for killing people is set up, they never seem to
have a shortage of potential targets, and adding a single man to the
“kill list” in a new theater of operations is really setting the
stage for killing hundreds, if not thousands, over the years to come.
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