We have previously discussed the President’s “kill list” policy under which Obama claims the right to be able to kill any American based on his sole judgment and discretion. A confidential Justice Department memo now sheds more light on that policy and states a broader basis for such killings than previously suggested by the Administration. It is also not clear why this memo was kept secret by the Administration since it deals only with legal interpretations — not classified operational information.
Last March, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared at the Northwestern University Law School to present the new policy, claiming that the President did not need any conviction or even a charge to kill an American citizen. While he stressed that this was based on a rationale that the citizen posed “an imminent threat of violent attack,” I noted at the time that any such limitation was purely discretionary under the theory of executive power being advanced by the Obama Administration.
It now appears that the Administration lawyers reached the same conclusion. The memo notes that there does not need to be an imminent attack in terms of an unfolding plan or operation: “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
In plain language, that means that the President considers the citizens to be a threat in the future. Moreover, the memo allows killings when an attempt to capture the person would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel. That undue risk is left undefined.
The memo, entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force,” is a tour de force of an imperial presidency. It was provided previously to both Democratic and Republican members of Congress on the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees. However, those members did nothing to stop such an extreme assertion of unilateral presidential power or to alert the public that the president was claiming far greater latitude in ordering the killings of citizens.
In an Orwellian twist, the memo insists “A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination.” It is more like a very pointed expression of presidential displeasure.
Here is the memo: 020413_DOJ_White_Paper
Source: NBC
It strikes me as a given that it is exactly in those areas where, when pushed for openness, the government asserts and prosecute putative violations of secrecy, that skepticism is called for. No wonder whistle blowers are so reviled and feared; they eliminate the factor of chance. They level the playing field on which the rule is that the government gets to classify material, even from Congressional committees it is suppose to inform. They pull back the curtain that protects, not predominantly matters of vital national security ( if I may be permitted to extrapolate from what we’ve seen), but lying, deceit, corruption, and strategic failure miscalculation.
DonS:
You are exactly right about being skeptical of government activities and gullibility is never desirable. Neither is a reflexive belief that everything the government does is done to usurp the rights of its citizens. Taken to one extreme, it makes a population subservient; to the other,ungovernable.
Like everything it is a balance.
“It is our duty as citizens not to swallow everything the government feeds us. With this ‘war on terror’, and the MIC supporting it, we have the added caution that huge sums of money and influence are involved.”
-DonS
Yep. In a nutshell.
What is killing more people than drones:
(apologies to Eric Clapton).
We have a planetary emergency says a man who understands “we.”
“Who are we?” and “who are the rest?” is the answer:
You know, it strikes me that much of this back and forth, pro/con secrecy, etc. is really about the extent to which one trusts our government in particular matters. I could give the government every benefit of the doubt, including good faith, competence, hard work, and still not be comfortable with the level of secrecy and readiness to prosecute those who even seem a remote possibility to crack the secrecy code that is becoming standard.
It is our duty as citizens not to swallow everything the government feeds us. With this ‘war on terror’, and the MIC supporting it, we have the added caution that huge sums of money and influence are involved.
Far-off foreigners do not frighten me. The bungling psychopathic lunatics in my own government do. -Michael Murray
I prefer to keep my eye on the real threats — the omnivorous corporate/mercenary oligarchy — not the imaginary ones growing poppies or begging on a street corner half-a-world away.
-Michael Murray
Bears repeating.
MM:
“But straw-men non-sequiturs about “adversaries” aside, ”
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I know about 3,000 dead New Yorkers who would disagree with your characterization and would have welcomed a discrete and secret special operation to take out the 15 hijackers anytime before 9/11/2001. Not much hue and cry over their lethal denial of civil rights.
In your zeal to show us how much you despise all things American (political leaders, military leaders, etc), you’re awfully generous with the lives of your fellow citizens. Like I said, none of the founders would share your overwhelming concern to preserve the right of citizens to know at the expense of their lives.
In a similar vein, I wonder what the parents of that 5-year-old Alabama kid pulled from a dirt bunker just as a madman was training a handgun at his head think about the right of the media to publish the goings on at a hostage site. I bet they’d waive that right to know every time to see their kid alive.
Maybe you wouldn’t, but they would.
“War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” by Norman Solomon
http://youtu.be/H5CF5pfVzLI
“Let me—let me describe that bubble to you, for what I perceive to be the bubble around President Obama right now and the man he has nominated to be CIA director, John Brennan. What’s happening with drone strikes around the world right now is, in my opinion, as bad a development as many of the things we now condemn so readily, with 20/20 hindsight, in the George W. Bush administration. We are creating more enemies than we’re killing. We are doing things that violate international law. We are even killing American citizens without due process and have an attorney general who has said that due process does not necessarily include the legal process. Those are really scary words.” -Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
“Decade After Iraq WMD Speech at UN, Ex-Powell Aide Lawrence Wilkerson Debates Author Norman Solomon”
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/6/decade_after_iraq_wmd_speech_at
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Let me—let me describe that bubble to you, for what I perceive to be the bubble around President Obama right now and the man he has nominated to be CIA director, John Brennan. What’s happening with drone strikes around the world right now is, in my opinion, as bad a development as many of the things we now condemn so readily, with 20/20 hindsight, in the George W. Bush administration. We are creating more enemies than we’re killing. We are doing things that violate international law. We are even killing American citizens without due process and have an attorney general who has said that due process does not necessarily include the legal process. Those are really scary words.
These things are happening because of that bubble that you just described. You can’t get through that bubble. You can’t get through the Brennans. You can’t get through the Clappers. You can’t get through the Hillary Clintons. You can’t get through the Bob Gates and the Leon Panettas and penetrate that bubble and say, “Do you understand what you’re doing, both to American civil liberties and to the rest of the world’s appreciation of America, with these increased drone strikes that seem to have an endless vista for future?” This is incredible. And yet, I know how these things happen. I know how these bubbles create themselves around the president and cease and stop any kind of information getting through that would alleviate or change the situation, make the discussion more fundamental about what we’re doing in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, you’re against the confirmation of John Brennan as director of Central Intelligence.
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I think we ought to have a really, really hard discussion about what he represents and what he, because he represents it, will probably take to the directorship of the CIA.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. We want to—
NORMAN SOLOMON: Well, I’d like to invite Colonel Wilkerson to go to RootsAction.org, sign up for our action alerts today to challenge the nomination of John Brennan to run the CIA, and just to mention that the impunity of the past is prefigurative for impunity of the present and the future. And I hope you’ll join with so many millions of other Americans to actively and vocally oppose not only this nomination of Brennan, but also the entire so-called war on terror, which is impunity for war that is aggressive around the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, could you see yourself doing that?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I’m already doing it.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. Norman Solomon, founding director of Institute for Policy—Public Accuracy, co-founder of RootsAction.org; among his books, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
I, for one, have no intention of abandoning my Democratic Republic simply because some foreigners might read or hear about my practicing democracy in order to keep it. My own government wants me to live in fear, and has tried to terrify me with lurid tales of evil “communists” and “terrorists” for nearly my whole life. I’ve long since had enough of it. As the Greek poet Homer wrote thousands of years ago:
“The distant Trojans never injured me.”
That goes in spades for the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and Afghans, too.
Far-off foreigners do not frighten me. The bungling psychopathic lunatics in my own government do. I prefer to keep my eye on the real threats — the omnivorous corporate/mercenary oligarchy — not the imaginary ones growing poppies or begging on a street corner half-a-world away.
“If the Post got a story that Seal Team 6 was hovering over a compound where OBL was suspected of hiding would any of the founders have believed that the First Amendment must be honored by broadcasting that news to our adversaries?” -mespo727272
Change “Seal Team 6” to “an Army Special Ops team” and “a compound where OBL was suspected of hiding” to “a baby-naming ceremony in an Afghan hovel” and the answer becomes an obvious and resounding “yes.”
Change “Seal Team 6” to “CIA Cuban exile rabble” and “a compound where OBL was suspected of hiding” to “the Bay of Pigs” and the answer — again — becomes an obvious and resounding “yes.”
Change “Seal Team 6” to “CIA directed air force bomber” and “a compound where OBL was suspected of hiding” to “Chinese embassy in Belgrade” and the answer — again — becomes an obvious and resounding “yes.”
American foreign policy disasters do not happen in the light of day. They happen in the dark of night. So, naturally, U.S. civilian and military “leaders” prefer to operate in the dark of night and so move heaven and earth to keep the American people ignorant of their deranged and venal misadventures. Our so-called “adversaries” have no such power to enslave us.
If the decades of stupendous C.I.A./U.S. military bungles in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, South America, and elsewhere do not convince you that taking official U.S. government “suspicions” as a sure sign of past, continuing, or impending disaster, then you have far too little empirical information informing your conclusions.
But straw-men non-sequiturs about “adversaries” aside, the publishing of news reports in the United States has the purpose of informing the American electorate about the activities of the American government. Whether illiterate foreigners living in rock huts somewhere in the Hindu Kush also avidly read English language newspapers on a minute-by-minute basis has no bearing whatsoever on what Americans need to know about their government in order to maintain their democratic freedoms. The American bureaucracy — especially the bloated and largely inept military brass — only fears one “adversary” — namely, the American people who can cut their lavish funding and career perks and send them back to the “free market” where they can try to find gainful employment for a change.
The problem is our adversaries do too. -mespo72727
Correct but, knowing what I know, I’ll take the sunlight. We know where “democracies go to die” and, given some of the things taking place on U.S. soil, it’s a safe bet that we should go with the warmth of the sun.
And we can’t ignore “radicalization”, which isn’t easy to gauge. How many American lives will be lost because of it? How many terrorists have we created by our policies, including torture and rendition?
AP:
“Personally, I prefer the “sunlight”, even if someone’s trying to control it. We need a lot more of it.”
***************************
The problem is our adversaries do too.
DonS,
It’s hard to know…, but wouldn’t be surprising. (I read the emptywheel piece earlier.) Having said this, it’s sometimes hard to control these things, once they’re out of the bag. There are unintended consequences, twists and turns…
Personally, I prefer the “sunlight”, even if someone’s trying to control it… We need a lot more of it.
Glenn Greenwald, as usual, nails the crucial issue here:
In other words, secret beliefs, suspicions, accusations, and opinions by unnamed bureaucratic minions do not constitute legal “standards” — unless the United States Government, as presently staffed and administered, has become as a lunatic asylum. And if such legal “standards” do indeed prevail in America, then all citizens have the equal right to summarily dismiss any charges brought against them by their government, claiming that they have a secret opinion from unnamed council stating that whatever they have done or not done falls within the acceptably elastic and nebulous boundaries of the “law” — by which term they mean “their own individual personal interest.”
“A new CIA Director’s confirmation is hardly a reason to reveal government secrets he may have been involved with. I saw no news stories about military projects that Hagel may have been involved with during his time as a senator when he was questioned as part of his confirmation.” -mespo727272
If one is trying to derail his confirmation (Brennan’s), it might be… especially if he can be tied to the domestic activities of which I’m aware.
“One wonders how revealing secret military methods and means furthers the nation’s interests in its struggle with terrorists or is even protected free speech.” -mespo727272
Similar questions were probably asked about the release of the Pentagon papers.
“If the Post got a story that Seal Team 6 was hovering over a compound where OBL was suspected of hiding would any of the founders have believed that the First Amendment must be honored by broadcasting that news to our adversaries?” -mespo727272
It’s an ongoing dance with the media — stories are “held” and not revealed to the general public and/or our adversaries all the time.
From Emptywheel, which lines up with my argument above that the white paper release amounts to an information sink designed to facilitate continued secrecy at a level favored by WH:
“Shorter Dianne Feinstein: “Well, the magical release of that white paper sure eliminates any need to release the Office of Legal Council memos that depict far worse legal theories, even to the grunt members of my committee who have are legally entitled to read it.””
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/02/06/dianne-feinsteins-limited-hang-out/#more-33046