[D66] Obama institutionalizes state assassinations

[Antid Oto]

Obama institutionalizes state assassinations
By Bill Van Auken
25 October 2012

The Obama administration has created a new extra-legal system known as 
the “disposition matrix” to institutionalize the selection and targeting 
of enemies of the US state for assassination, according to an article 
published Wednesday in the Washington Post.

The Post reports that the system is “designed to go beyond existing kill 
lists,” creating a centralized data base that 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.”

The data base joins “biographies, locations, known associates and 
affiliated organizations” with “strategies for taking targets down.” 
While the article includes among these strategies “extradition requests, 
capture operations and drone patrols,” the reality is that overwhelming 
preference has been given to assassination by drone strikes.

On the day the article appeared, another drone strike was reported in 
Pakistan. One of the pilotless aircraft fired two missiles into a house 
in North Waziristan near the Afghan border, killing a woman and two men 
and severely wounding two children. Last week, Pakistan’s interior 
minister, Rehman Malik, reported that there have been 336 drone attacks 
on Pakistan over the last eight years, claiming 2,300 victims. Fully 80 
percent of those killed, he said, were innocent civilians.

On October 21, another drone strike was reported in Yemen in the 
country’s eastern Ma’rib Province. A missile was fired into a car, 
killing four occupants. This brings to 34 the number of known drone 
attacks in Yemen.

Citing Yemeni military sources, the Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat 
reported that Washington is preparing a dramatic escalation of the drone 
war in Yemen. It reported that a US C-17 military cargo plane landed in 
the capital of Sanaa on Monday, bringing in a load of drones and missiles.

As the Post article notes, the Central Intelligence Agency has put 
forward a proposal to substantially expand its own armed drone fleet, 
solidifying its role as the US government’s paramilitary “Murder, Inc.”

It also reports that the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command 
has sent commando teams into Africa and transformed its base in Djibouti 
into a “launching pad for counterterrorism operations across the Horn of 
Africa and the Middle East.” At the same time it has set up “a secret 
targeting center across the Potomac River from Washington,” putting it 
within “a 15-minute commute from the White House so it could be more 
directly involved in deliberations” on the drawing up of kill lists.

All of these actions reflect a consensus within US ruling circles that 
the “global war on terrorism” launched under the administration of 
George W. Bush will continue for at least another decade.

As one unnamed senior administration official told the Post: “We can’t 
possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us. It’s a necessary part of 
what we do… We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of 
everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America’.”

Indeed not. Another decade of US assassinations and massacres by drones 
spreading across South Asia, the Middle East and Africa will no doubt 
create millions of bitter enemies of US imperialism, leading to ever 
longer “kill lists” and continuously expanding wars.

While the administration and its apologists routinely justify the drone 
assassinations as necessary to defend the US from terrorist attacks, in 
reality, the great majority of those killed in Pakistan are targeted for 
resisting the US occupation of neighboring Afghanistan, while in Yemen 
they are killed for opposing the US-backed regime there.

In both countries, the US military and the CIA increasingly carry out 
what are known as “signature strikes,” in which the identity of those to 
be killed is not known—much less whether they are plotting against the 
US. Rather, they are targeted for patterns of activity that supposedly 
make them suspect.

The Post article stresses “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.”

Last May, the New York Times published a lengthy article describing how 
Obama held weekly meetings at the White House with military and 
intelligence officials—so-called “terror Tuesdays”—to pore over 
biographies and mug shots of potential victims and decide which ones to 
place on the “kill list.” It established that Obama personally approved 
every strike in Yemen and Somalia, as well as at least a third of those 
carried out in Pakistan. A top security official described the US 
president as “quite comfortable” with deciding who should die.

But, as the Post article points out, “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.” Today, it adds, “the 
system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen 
agencies and narrowing through layers of review” before the names of 
proposed assassination targets reach the White House.

Significantly, the “disposition matrix” has been developed by the 
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), an agency created in 2004, 
operating under the direction of the US president, the National Security 
Council and the Homeland Security Council. In all three of these 
executive agencies, John Brennan, Obama’s homeland security adviser and 
the founding director of the NCTC, plays a leading role. As a former top 
aide to Bush’s CIA director George Tenet, Brennan defended the practices 
of torture and extraordinary rendition.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder approved sweeping new 
guidelines allowing the NCTC to access, search and retain data collected 
by all US government agencies, giving it a vast store of information on 
every US citizen, culled from tax records, travel documents, federal 
benefits and many other sources. That a secretive executive branch 
agency which collects massive amounts of data on US citizens is also in 
charge of developing the criteria for state assassinations abroad has 
the most chilling implications.

The administration has already targeted and killed several US citizens, 
including the New Mexico-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who 
died in a September 2011 drone strike in Yemen, and Awlaki’s 16-year-old 
son, who was killed in another strike two weeks later.

The Obama administration has arrogated to itself the most extreme power 
that can be asserted by any dictatorship—that of ordering citizens put 
to death without presenting charges against them, much less proving them 
in a court of law. Instead, an un-elected and unanswerable “kill 
committee” places their names on a list, the president approves them, 
and airborne robots are sent to execute them.

In an interview last month with CNN, Obama made the absurd claim that 
American citizens placed on kill lists are afforded “the protections of 
the Constitution and due process.” The “due process” that the former 
constitutional law professor has in mind is the workings of the 
“disposition matrix” and the kill lists, in which the president and his 
intelligence and military aides act as judge, jury and executioner.

In Monday’s presidential debate, Obama and his Republican challenger 
Mitt Romney were equally enthusiastic in their support for such 
extra-judicial executions by means of drone strikes. No matter which of 
the two candidates wins the November 6 election, the drone wars will 
escalate and the wholesale assault on core constitutional and democratic 
rights will deepen.

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/dron-o25.shtml