By James Bovard
How much evidence should the U.S. government be obliged to show before it kills you? None, according to the Obama administration.
And how much evidence of your wrongdoing should the government be obliged to possess before officially targeting you for killing? That’s a secret, according to the president’s team. If judges force the government to answer that question, the terrorists will win.
The Obama administration now claims a right to kill American citizens without trial, without notice, and without any chance for the marked men or women to object legally. The Bush administration’s “targeted killing” program has been radically expanded to include Americans far from any war zone. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified earlier this year that the targeting-to-kill decision depends only on “whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us.”
As former CIA agent Phil Giraldi noted in this magazine last April, “involved” is one helluva vague standard. And the list of officially designated terrorist groups has little or nothing to do with whether those organizations actually pose significant danger to the United States.
The poster boy for the targeted killing program is Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric who is reportedly in Yemen. The Obama administration touts allegations that al-Awlaki helped spark the slaughter at Ford Hood, Texas, inspired the attempt to destroy a jetliner on Christmas Day 2009, and has done other dastardly things that the government has not yet disclosed (for our own good, of course). Al-Awlaki might well be a four-star bastard, but government press releases and background briefings have not previously been sufficient to justify capital punishment.
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing to compel Uncle Sam “to disclose the legal standard it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.” The Obama administration has responded by invoking the doctrine of state secrets, effectively claiming that national security demands that these policies be kept hidden. By hiding behind state secrets, the feds don’t even have to explain why the law doesn’t apply to their actions.
In oral arguments in federal court on Nov. 9, Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter asserted that no judge has authority to be “looking over the shoulder” of the Obama administration’s targeted-killing program. Letter declared that the program involves “the very core powers of the president as commander-in-chief.” When Obama campaigned for the presidency in 2008, entitling the president to kill Americans without trial was not one of the reforms he promised.
The main difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration is that the Obama team publicly claims a right to do what Bush’s lawyers authorized behind closed doors. Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in early 2006 that Bush could order killings of suspected terrorists within the United States. When Newsweek contacted the Justice Department to verify this novel legal doctrine, spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos stressed that Bradbury’s comments occurred during an “off-the-record briefing.” Newsweek’s report generated no media stir. Apparently, unless the government disclosed that it had actually begun assassinations within the United States, it was a non-story.
An article by Charlie Savage in the New York Times in mid-September noted that “There is widespread agreement among the administration’s legal team that it is lawful for President Obama to authorize the killing of someone like Mr. Awlaki.”
It is comforting to know that top political appointees concur that some “law” gives them the right to assassinate Americans. But this is the same “legal” standard the Bush team used to justify torture. Since Bush’s lawyers told him that waterboarding wasn’t torture—despite a hundred years of U.S. court decisions to the contrary—the president was blameless, or so he recently claimed to NBC’s Matt Lauer.
There are other ominous parallels with the worst abuses of the Bush administration. When Bush decreed in November 2001 that he had the authority perpetually to detain anyone as an enemy combatant, based solely on his own assertion, administration defenders rushed to assure the media that the new policy did not apply to Americans or inside the United States. Seven months later, after José Padilla was arrested in Chicago and labeled an enemy combatant, the administration acted as if only fools would believe the president would not use his boundless power any way he could.
Similarly, Obama’s power grab has not spurred much opposition, perhaps in part because it is assumed to apply only to killing Americans abroad. (Hopefully farther away than Niagara Falls, Canada.) But the basis of the policy is that the entire world is a battlefield, thus the president has unlimited “commander in chief” powers everywhere.
Once the principle is accepted that the U.S. government can label Americans as enemies of the state and kill them without judicial nicety, the bureaucratic wish list of targets will continually expand. A similar metamorphosis occurred when the FBI decided to use illegal powers to target people who garnered official displeasure. Nixon White House aide Tom Charles Huston explained that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program continually stretched its target list “from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”
Blank checks for killing enemies of the state is the recipe for domestic tranquility that most dictatorships have used throughout history. And apparently this is a standard that many Americans might embrace. Some movement conservatives—such as columnist Jonah Goldberg—are already whooping for the U.S. government to assassinate people such as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Should the government be entitled to kill anyone who exposes its lies? Or should the standard be broader, permitting governments to kill anyone who is inconvenient?
The Obama administration’s position “would allow the executive unreviewable authority to target and kill any U.S. citizen it deems a suspect of terrorism anywhere,” according to Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Pardiss Kebriae. And the feds have a horrible batting average when it comes to accurately identifying terrorist suspects. In the six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government rounded up 1,200 people as suspected terrorists or terrorist supporters. None of the detainees proved to have links to the attacks. And as the ACLU noted earlier this year, “the government has failed to prove the lawfulness of imprisoning individual Guantanamo detainees in 34 of the 48 cases that have been reviewed by the federal courts thus far, even though the government had years to gather and analyze evidence for those cases and had itself determined that those prisoners were detainable.”
In fact, debacles over false charges against Gitmo detainees may have spurred the expansion of the targeted-killing program. Dead men file no appeals. Assassinations could be less embarrassing than trials because most of the American media will roll over and permit the government to blacken its victims however it pleases. As long as officials, speaking anonymously, assure reporters that the deceased were bad people, the story is closed.
The Food and Drug Administration recently proposed far more graphic warning labels for cigarette packages. But while the feds are demanding extraordinary measures to inform people about private risks, nothing is being done to warn people of the health risks of an unleashed Leviathan.
What sort of warning labels would be appropriate for Obama’s killing program? A picture of a sniper’s crosshairs on a mother holding a baby in her cabin door, à la Vicki Weaver? A picture of young demonstrators lying dead on the ground after a National Guard volley, à la Kent State? A picture of children lolling in the streets moments before they are obliterated, courtesy of the helicopter gun-sight video from the Wiki-Leaked “Collateral Murder” recording made by the U.S. military in Iraq?
If Obama gets away with this power-grab, the rhetoric for the 2012 race for the White House should be retuned. Instead of listening to candidates compete based on the number of new benefits they promise to lavish upon voters, prudent citizens will focus on which presidential candidate seems least likely to kill them or members or their family. We might hear campaign slogans like “Vote for Smith: he won’t have you killed unless all of his top advisers agree you deserve to die.” Unfortunately, as with other campaign promises, there will be no way for voters to compel politicians to honor their pledges.
Obama’s doctrine enabling the targeted killing of American citizens is at least as much an assassination of the Constitution as anything George W. Bush perpetrated. Yet most of the media has ignored the issue or treated it like an arcane legal dispute of interest only to people in desert hideaways 6,000 miles away. The more power the government has seized, the more craven the media has become.
Thanks to sovereign immunity and cowardly judges, it is unlikely that any Obama administration official will be held liable, regardless of whom the U.S. government slays. Americans have had plenty of warnings that the federal government is destroying the leashes the Founding Fathers created. Once it is accepted that the executive branch is entitled to kill Americans without a trial, only damn fools should expect Leviathan to limit its ravages here and abroad.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by AmericanConservative, Roy F. Moore. Roy F. Moore said: RT @amconmag: James Bovard | Assassin Nation | http://bit.ly/gz0Wqu [...]
hahahahaha….this is your tide American Conservative, Obama’s just riding it. Where were you when Bush & Co. created this mess? Cheerleading. This is not Obama’s policy, it’s Bush’s and years ago when this was first raised as an issue you folks were calling such critics traitors.
If Obama tried to loosen the efforts against Terrorism(TM) you would be calling him traitor. This article is rich with hypocrisy.
The American Conservative was an early critic of the Bush administration and the war. Don’t confuse these folks with the National Review.
[...] today from the January issue of American Conservative [...]
river c. should read The Bush Betrayal written by the author of this article.
good to see once again the Kenyan King walking in the very same foot steps of his predecessors, bashing Bush then doing likewise and more
[...] of Attention Deficit Democracy, discusses the Obama administration’s claim that they have the right to kill American citizens without a trial, without notice, and without any chance for targets to legally object; the [...]
@River C… Why don’t you ask TAC why they came out against invading Iraq while the NYTs was publishing neo-con propaganda day after day? Maybe you should ask why the refused to endorse Bush in 2004 while the NYTs was sitting on the story of Bush spying on US citizens as to not hur his chances of re-election?
Oh, I know why you don’t ask because you’re an idiot (as your comment demonstrated). In fact, you Obama supporters are exactly the same as Bush supporters. It’s uncanny how similar the Obama apologists are to the Bush apologists. Go worship the state so more.
“No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. . .” US Constitiution, 5th amendment.
What part of that don’t people understand?
If someone is actually in the act of perpetrating violence against American citizens, then the police or military have an exemption, but that’s all.
You would think that a guy who has taught constitutional law might have known about this. . .
Hasn’t anyone here seen a ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ poster?
American governments have been paying for the killing of Americans without a trial well before Obama was born (wherever that was)
Just ask John Dillinger.
Whatever the TAC has been doing all these years, Bovard has been a tireless critic of empire and chronicler of its consequences, through several administrations, and all the more energetically in recent times with Presidents GW Bush and Obama.
The “where were you when Bush was doing it” whine is getting very tiresome. It identifies clueless partisans, making it all the easier to dismiss their boiler-plate bleating. We should instead ask the kool-aid drinking duckspeakers, “where were you when courageous people like Bovard were speaking out and being called ‘unpatriotic’ and even ‘treasonous’?” The river c’s of the world come very late to the party, then criticize the host for the crowding.
Stefan, don’t be fooled. No person allowed to run for office gives a damn about the Constitution anymore. We don’t have a Constitutional Republic anymore; we have a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy. No candidate who believes that they should be governed by the Constitution will be allowed to run. They will be weeded out long before we even hear of them. Both parties are in on this. We will not see a patriot run for high office in this country again.
OK, Stefan Stackhouse knows her constitution, ‘..“No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. . .” US Constitiution, 5th amendment.
If they can authorize the killing of each of us then they can authorize the killing of our family members as other dictators have done.
Need to read this new book just out about Americans who actually take a stand against tyranny (based in part on real people & events). It’s a thriller so I recommend it.
http://www.booksbyoliver.com
This is tyranny & way beyond what the TSA is doing at airports. No one would have ever thought this could happen in America. Great article, James
Frank,
Although your other points are well taken, you are guilty of the same type of thoughtless jumping to conclusions as river c. who is obviously ignorant of what TAC is. What part of his comment led you to conclude that he is an “Obama supporter”? He may or may not be. Why is it necessary to hurl insults? River c.’s ignorance will be obvious to the vast majority who read this. Correction and guidance without insult as per Anonymous and Tom Blanton is much more helpful.
This is only possible thanks to George W Bush who rescinded habeus corpus. My pointing this out is in no way an endorsement of Obama. I am merely pointing out the historical facts. Without the Bush Junta’s idiotic reign, the excesses of the Obama plague would not have been possible, or even really imaginable.
Folks, calm down. This is salami slicing technique. It ever has been, and it will continue for as long as any parent asks a child “and what would you have to replace it?” when the child says that the government structure is unnecessary and men can live without it. As long as people want a tumor to replace the one that was just excised, cancerous cells (politician types) will always be drawn to populate that tumor.
And as with all malignant tumors, they kill their host, just as all governments invariably plunder, pulverize and utterly destroy any nation they infest.
Its not G.W.B. its not Obama, it isn’t even the history’s great evils, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. They were just faces of the same force of nature. Evil. And the only reason evil has won time and again, is because stupid men preferred the evil they knew, to the possibility that evil might be stamped out and they be faced with the unknown of freedom. Cowardly stupid men with small minds (the majority) have always chosen safety in a coffin to life in freedom. And then they whine and bitch about how “things didn’t used to be this way.”
Lack of reason, lack of integrity and lack of honesty. Lack of a lot of damn things. Few will name them. So I just did. Look around. Take a long, dispassioned, rational look around you. It suddenly makes sense after that. Don’t blame the politicos. They do as they are told. Blame those who hold them up, and do the only thing you can. Stop holding them up. Don’t fight them. Fighting something makes even those marginally against it, suddenly defend the evil they know. Fiercely, at that. So stop fighting it. Just stop strengthening it, instead. Soon enough you will find yourself fully aware that there is little they can do, besides kill you. And if they kill you, and you are productive, they lose anyways. Therein lies the truth. Governments need people to fleece. People who are productive do not need governments or their enforcers. That is the whole truth that isn’t said anywhere in any classroom in the world.
[...] author of Attention Deficit Democracy, discusses the Obama administration’s claim that they have the right to kill American citizens without a trial, without notice, and without any chance for targets to legally object; the [...]
Missing in all this are some underlying points to consider.
1.If we didn’t have birthright citizenship we wouldn’t be turning ourselves inside out over killing Al-awlaki. Our present cituation is immensely complicated by our insistence on a multi-cultural normless nation. Al-Awlaki should not be considered a citizen in the first place. Like the President himself, he is a living souvinier of our romance with the third world.
2. If the problem is Al-Awaki’s citizenship, why has there been no reported attempt to strip him of it? Clearly he does not consider himself one.
From what I can research, the process of doing so is rare and almost impossible. Why is this? Before we act on him, shouldn’t we formally ask him what he believes his status to be? If he is a real Jihadist he should have no difficulty telling us what to do with out precious citizenship.
What prevents the federal government from seeking to revoke his citizenship and putting the burden on him to appeal?
Perhaps we need to think about what constitutes citizenship. We need to think about what adhering to a foreign power or criminal non-state actors means legally.
Both the Bush and Obama administration give us good reason to fear our government. Never the less we are under attack by Muslim fanatics. This debate needs to focus on defending us from them in the context of who we are as a people.
3. If we are in a twilight struggle with the forces of militant Islam, wouldn’t it be wise to distance ourselves from these potential enemies? Is it too much to ask that we assert our identity as Western culturaly Christian nation?
4. Given the necessity of striking our enemies abroad, who are not soveriegn nations, we need to form a formal judicial review procedure. Hopefully, this would block the undue exercise of war power against individuals of dubious status.
@Khyeron – Much of the objection to the government having (and even sparingly using) the power to kill people at a whim is NOT a matter of a lot of people no longer being around, nor even the pain and inconvenience experienced by the victims and their families.
It is, instead (or additionally) the power this confers on the government and its agents to make people do or not do things. You can herd people into freight cars destined for concentration camps and an unpleasant fate by pointing guns at them and threatening to kill them right there.
I’ll quote a semi-joke told among soldiers about how 20 captured soldiers can be easily controlled by one captor with a rifle. Just pick one (any) captive out, and shoot him. All the others will thereafter always do exactly what you say, and promptly.
“There are many who would gladly climb over the corpses of half their countrymen in order to control the surviving half.”
Good article. It takes many bricks stacked together over time to create a big prison.
[...] McCrary of the American Conservative did great work on this logo for the “Assassin Nation“ [...]
[...] will be on the Ron Smith Show on Tuesday (12/14) at 10:05 am. We will be talking about “Assassin Nation,” the Obama administration entitlement to kill Americans without judicial [...]
It is really scary to see that the current Obama adminitration is trying to murder those American citizens whom the Obama administration consider as “hostile towards the state”. I completely agree with the author of the article that the criteria “hostile towards the state” can very well be extended to all those people who just happen to oppose the establishment.(either GOP or the democrats)
In the same token I feel that the invention of the drone was a pathetic thing for mankind. This need for this invention was created by the establishment to ensure a considerable physical distance between the soldier and the innocent victims of the establishment. If the solider never sees his victim (who is also a fellow human being like the soldier) then he will never feel guilty for killing the innocent in this “war on terror”. This just makes the soldier more remorseless and more pathetic in general for the humanity.
Although I am an Indian citizen but considering the sorry state of American democracy as mentioned by the author I feel fearful that whether these same technologies and legal steps will be imported or not from America to India. (considering the recent bonhomie between the establishments in both these two countries)
For those still remaining libertarians in the USA like this particular author , the libertarian people like us in India are watching your actions very carefully. You are the only hope for us. If you fail then we likely will be converted into “subjects” of the establishment instead of being citizens in a republic.
So please do not give up this fight.
[...] this article: by James Bovard in The American Conservative and then I will have a little commentary, from a poor dirt farmer’s [...]
How can you not have a tweet button? Newsvine, Slashdot, Mixx! Diigo AND nothing for Twitter?!
A Twitter button is coming soon.
I think we’re all sick of the twin parties of Empire. The only way to break them up-barring armed insurrection-is to change the voting system. We need low-threshold proportional representation for state legislatures and Approval Voting for all other offices of significance-including POTUS. This can start in one state with initiative and referendum.
Google Duverger’s Law.
Of course there’s still the permanent government of federal civil service and judiciary, big media and Harvard to deal with.
Ron Smith had high praise for TAC today. You can hear his comments at http://www.wbal.com/absolutenm/templates/smith_show.aspx?articleid=64045&zoneid=13