[D66] Institutionalized state assassinations and the November 6 election

[Antid Oto]

Institutionalized state assassinations and the November 6 election
26 October 2012

With barely a week and a half to go until the November 6 presidential 
elections, the entire spectrum of the American pseudo-left is exerting 
maximum efforts to turn out votes for Obama with the claim that the 
reelection of the incumbent Democrat would represent the “lesser of two 
evils.”

If there was any need for a further refutation of this shabby political 
argument it has been provided in the form of the exposé run by the 
Washington Post this week on the Obama administration’s 
institutionalization of assassinations orchestrated from the White House.

“Disposition Matrix,” sounding like the title of a science fiction film, 
is the term crafted by Obama’s intelligence and military advisers to 
describe a new system that is “codifying and streamlining” the 
extrajudicial killings that are being carried out on the orders of the 
US president on virtually a daily basis.

The media’s bloodless reports referring to unmanned aircraft carrying 
out strikes against “compounds” and killing unnamed “militants” serve to 
mask the reality of US drone warfare, which in Pakistan alone has torn 
to pieces and incinerated thousands of civilians, men, women, children, 
while leaving entire communities in a permanent state of terror. An 
untold number more have been killed in Yemen and Somalia and no doubt 
elsewhere.

The Post series reveals that the individual playing the presiding role 
in this program of state assassinations is John Brennan, a former 
top-ranking Central Intelligence Agency official tapped by Obama to be 
his counterterrorism adviser.

In the run-up to his inauguration, Obama had moved to name Brennan as 
the new CIA director. He was forced to back off the nomination, however, 
in the face of popular outrage over the fact that the candidate of 
“hope” and “change” was installing a holdover from the Bush years who 
was deeply implicated in the policies of torture, indefinite detention, 
extraordinary rendition and cover-up that many thought they had voted 
against.

What emerges from the Post account is that Brennan has in his role of 
White House adviser amassed more control than the CIA director himself. 
Unelected and not subject to confirmation by Congress, Brennan wields 
“enormous power in shaping decisions on ‘kill’ lists and the allocation 
of armed drones, the war’s signature weapon,” the Post reports.

Carrying out these decisions are a combination of CIA paramilitary 
operatives and military commandos of the Pentagon’s Joint Special 
Operations Command. JSOC, which operates under conditions of extreme 
secrecy and outside of the Pentagon’s chain of command, has been 
described by one military official as an “industrial-scale 
counterterrorism killing machine” and by others as the “President’s Army.”

Among the victims of this machine are American citizens, including the 
New Mexico-born cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone 
missile attack in Yemen in September 2011. His 16-year-old son, 
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was murdered in another drone strike two weeks 
later along with his 17-year-old cousin. No charges or even evidence was 
ever brought against Anwar al-Awlaki for any crimes, outside of his 
thoughts and speech. As for the 16-year-old son, there was not even that.

In a recent interview with CNN, Obama made the incredible claim that 
American citizens targeted in his assassination campaign are afforded 
“the protection of the Constitution and due process.” It did not occur 
to the reporter to ask what part of the Constitution grants the American 
president the power to order executions without presenting charges, much 
less proving them in a court of law.

What Obama means by “due process” is that he rubber-stamps decisions 
made by Brennan and the CIA spooks and military brass who gather weekly 
at the White House to prepare “kill lists” in what they cynically refer 
to as “terror Tuesdays.”

This entire criminal procedure is a repudiation in practice of the US 
Constitution and of the most elementary democratic rights dating back 
nearly 900 years to the English Magna Carta, which held that no person 
could be put to death or imprisoned “except by the lawful judgment of 
his equals or by the law of the land.”

Attorney General Eric Holder, however, has directly asserted the 
president’s right to order state killings with no need for charges or 
trials. And Obama at the end of last year signed into law the National 
Defense Authorization Act, allowing the president to throw anyone, 
including US citizens, into a military prison indefinitely without charge.

What has been put in place, on a scale that far surpasses what was done 
under George W. Bush, is the framework for an American police-military 
dictatorship.

Among the more chilling facts disclosed in the Post series is that the 
coordination of the “kill lists” has been entrusted to the National 
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which it was recently revealed is 
simultaneously mining government data bases to accumulate vast amounts 
of information on average American citizens.

The erosion of democratic rights within the United States is far more 
advanced than most people realize. The methods of “kill lists” and 
military detention without charges or trial will be used against 
opponents of American imperialism all over the world and, increasingly, 
against those perceived as enemies of the state and impediments to 
profit interests within the US itself.

These policies are not driven fundamentally by the political ideology of 
either the Democratic or Republican parties, which give them bipartisan 
support. This was evidenced in Monday night’s debate, where Obama 
bragged about bringing alleged culprits “to justice” and Romney vowed 
“to kill them, to take them out of the picture.”

Rather they are the outcome, on the one hand, of unprecedented social 
inequality within America. The gap between a corporate and financial 
aristocracy that monopolizes economic wealth and political power and the 
vast mass of working people has become so wide as to be incompatible 
with democratic forms of rule. On the other hand, they are the byproduct 
of the unchecked growth of militarism, as US imperialism seeks to offset 
its economic crisis and decline by using armed force to assert control 
over the world’s strategically vital regions and resources.

The very fact that the detailed reports of a Murder, Inc. being run out 
of the West Wing of the White House have not prompted a public outcry 
and demands for Obama’s impeachment is testimony to the collapse of 
democratic consciousness within America’s ruling political 
establishment. Just as the economic practices of Wall Street and 
corporate America have assumed an increasingly criminal character, so 
the essential functioning of the state itself is ever more bound up with 
murder, brutality and extra-constitutional repression.

The startling revelations about the institutionalization of state 
assassinations under the Obama administration should impel workers and 
youth to consider very carefully what is happening in the US today and 
to draw the necessary political conclusions.

No matter which of the two capitalist parties emerges victorious on 
November 6, the immense dangers to basic democratic rights will only 
intensify in the wake of the election. Neither these rights, nor the 
jobs and conditions of working people, can be defended outside of a 
break with the Democratic Party and the preparation of a new 
revolutionary leadership and perspective in the working class for the 
great social struggles that are to come.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/pers-o26.shtml