Chicago’s Very Own
From Steve Coll’s “Drone Delusion” in the New Yorker:
“The Way of the Knife (the title comes from a national-security adviser’s remark that the United States needed to fight terrorism with ‘a scalpel not a hammer’) offers the brisk pace, inside-the-White House scenes, and opaque sourcing of a Bob Woodward procedural.
“In one Situation Room meeting early in Obama’s first term, General James Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to have asked why the United States was ‘building a second Air Force’ in the form of the C.I.A.’s swelling armed-drone fleet. [Author Mark] Mazzetti quotes Obama’s reply: ‘The C.I.A. gets what it wants.’
“By 2010, according to Mazzetti, Obama’s own Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, ‘wondered whether the pace of the drone war might be undercutting relations with an important ally for the quick fix of killing midlevel terrorists.’ Munter soon discovered that, under President Obama, ‘it was what the C.I.A. believed that really counted.'”
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“[Dirty Wars author Jeremy] Scahill weaves into his larger narrative the most detailed biography of Anwar Awlaki yet published. It is a riveting account. Awlaki, who was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971, was certainly the most enigmatic radical the C.I.A. has killed since its operatives helped Bolivian forces finish off Che Guevara, in 1967.
“Awlaki preached for nearly a decade at mosques in San Diego and northern Virginia. After the September 11th attacks, he initially condemned the hijackers.
“Later, he returned to Yemen to live with his extended family, was imprisoned, and, outraged by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, spoke in favor of suicide bombing.
“A 2009 shooting rampage by a U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Hasan, who had corresponded with Awlaki, and the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day that year by a Nigerian youth, who had trained in Yemen among jihadists linked to Awlaki, seemed to connect Awlaki’s hate speech with specific acts of terrorism.
“Awlaki’s e-mail exchanges with Hasan do not indicate that he was aware of the Major’s plans, but after the shootings he called Hasan ‘a hero’ and ‘a man of conscience.’
“Around this time, the Justice Department composed a memo in which it argued that President Obama had the right to kill Awlaki.”
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“The document has never been published, but it reportedly contains intelligence that Awlaki had gone operational in Yemen, and had been involved in multiple plots to kill Americans.
“The Obama Administration’s position, explicated mainly through anonymous leaks to journalists, is that, because this secret information showed that Awlaki had betrayed the United States and had become a leader in an enemy force, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Justice Department memo was enough to justify his assassination.
“The Fifth Amendment asserts that no ‘person’ shall be ‘deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,’ a statement that the Supreme Court has usually interpreted as requiring, among other things, that American citizens receive a fair trial and the right of appeal.
“The Obama Administration has never made clear why it thought that capturing Awlaki and bringing him to trial was infeasible. Nor has it described the specific standards it used to approve Awlaki’s execution.
“As things stand, Obama will bequeath to his successors a worrisome precedent: without trial, the President has the right to kill any U.S. citizen who is judged, on the basis of unpublished criteria, to have become an enemy combatant.”
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“But Awlaki’s case, troubling as it may be, raises a broader issue: the Administration’s refusal to disclose the criteria by which it condemns anyone, American or otherwise, to death. The information used in such cases is intelligence data rather than evidence; it is not subject to cross-examination or judicial review.”
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“Without judicial review or informed public debate, the potential for abuse and overreach is vast. In one of the most disquieting passages in his book, Mazzetti notes that, as the death toll in Pakistan mounted, Obama Administration officials at one point claimed that the increased drone strikes in Pakistan had not led to any civilian deaths.
“‘It was something of a trick of logic,’ Mazzetti writes. ‘In an area of known militant activity, all military-age males were considered to be enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant.'”
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Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama’s Assassination Of Two Americans In Yemen.
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Scahill: Obama’s Global Battlefield.
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Mazetti: Obama’s Assassination Squads.
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Mazetti: NPR Interview Transcript.
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See also:
* Drones Not Just For Threats Against America Anymore.
* Why Obama Says He Won’t Release Drone Documents.
* Obama’s Drone Death Figures Don’t Add Up.
* Dissecting Obama’s Standards On Drone Strike Deaths.
* The Best Watchdog Journalism On Obama’s National Security Policies.
* Everything You Wanted To Know About Drones But Were Afraid To Ask.
* Obama Claims Right To Kill Anyone Anytime.
* The Drone War Doctrine We Still Know Nothing About.
* How Does The U.S. Mark Unidentified Men In Pakistan And Yemen As Drone Targets?
* Hearts, Minds & Dollars: Condolence Payments In The Drone Age.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on April 30, 2013