DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Praying at the Church of St
Drone By Tom Engelhardt
Be assured of one thing: whichever
candidate you choose at the polls in November, you
aren't just electing a president of the United
States; you are also electing an
assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not
have been emperors or kings, but they - and the
vast national-security structure that continues to
be built-up and institutionalized around the
presidential self - are certainly one of the
nightmares the founding fathers of this country
warned us against. They are one of the reasons
those founders put significant war powers in the
hands of congress, which they knew would be a
slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.
Thanks to a long New York Times piece by
Jo Becker and Scott Shane, "Secret 'Kill List'
Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will", we
now know that the president has spent startling
amounts of time overseeing the "nomination" of
terrorist suspects for assassination via the
remotely piloted drone program he
inherited from President
George W Bush and which he has expanded
exponentially.
Moreover, that article was
based largely on interviews with "three dozen of
his current and former advisers." In other words,
it was essentially an administration-inspired
piece - columnist Robert Scheer calls it "planted"
- on a "secret" program the president and those
closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag
about in an election year.
The language of
the piece about our warrior president was
generally sympathetic, even in places soaring. It
focused on the moral dilemmas of a man who - we
now know - has personally approved and overseen
the growth of a remarkably robust assassination
program in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan based on a
"kill list." Moreover, he's regularly done so
target by target, name by name. (The Times did not
mention a recent US drone strike in the
Philippines that killed 15.) According to Becker
and Shane, President Obama has also been involved
in the use of a fraudulent method of counting
drone kills, one that unrealistically
de-emphasizes civilian deaths.
Historically speaking, this is all passing
strange. The Times calls Obama's role in the drone
killing machine "without precedent in presidential
history". And that's accurate.
It's not,
however, that American presidents have never had
anything to do with or been in any way involved in
assassination programs. The state as assassin is
hardly unknown in our history. How could President
John F Kennedy, for example, not know about
CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots
against Cuba's Fidel Castro, the Congo's Patrice
Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat (and
ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem
were successfully murdered.) Similarly, during
Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the CIA carried out a
massive assassination campaign in Vietnam,
Operation Phoenix. It proved to be a staggeringly
profligate program for killing tens of thousands
of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those
simply swept up in the process.
In
previous eras, however, presidents either stayed
above the assassination fray or practiced a kind
of plausible deniability about the acts. We are
surely at a new stage in the history of the
imperial presidency when a president (or his
election team) assembles his aides, advisors, and
associates to foster a story that's meant to
broadcast the group's collective pride in the new
position of assassin-in-chief.
Religious cult or Mafia hit
squad? Here's a believe-it-or-not footnote
to our American age. Who now remembers that, in
the early years of his presidency, George W Bush
kept what the Washington Post's Bob Woodward
called "his own personal scorecard for the war" on
terror? It took the form of photographs with brief
biographies and personality sketches of those
judged to be the world's most dangerous
terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by Bush
once captured or killed. That scorecard was,
Woodward added, always available in a desk drawer
in the Oval Office.
Such private
presidential recordkeeping now seems penny-ante
indeed. The distance we've traveled in a decade
can be measured by the Times' description of the
equivalent of that "personal scorecard" today (and
no desk drawer could hold it):
It is the strangest of bureaucratic
rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members
of the government's sprawling national security
apparatus gather, by secure video
teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects'
biographies and recommend to the president who
should be the next to die. This secret
'nominations' process is an invention of the
Obama administration, a grim debating society
that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the
names, aliases, and life stories of suspected
members of Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen or its
allies in Somalia's Shabab militia. The
nominations go to the White House, where by his
own insistence and guided by [counter-terrorism
"tsar" John O] Brennan, Mr Obama must approve
any name.
In other words, thanks to
such meetings - on what insiders have labeled
"terror Tuesday" - assassination has been
thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and
bureaucratized around the figure of the president.
Without the help of or any oversight from the
American people or their elected representatives,
he alone is now responsible for regular killings
thousands of miles away, including those of
civilians and even children. He is, in other
words, if not a king, at least the king of
American assassinations. On that score, his power
is total and completely unchecked. He can
prescribe death for anyone "nominated," choosing
any of the "baseball cards" (PowerPoint bios) on
that kill list and then order the drones to take
them (or others in the neighborhood) out.
He and he alone can decide that
assassinating known individuals isn't enough and
that the CIA's drones can instead strike at
suspicious "patterns of behavior" on the ground in
Yemen or Pakistan. He can stop any attack, any
killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism
that can stop him. An American global killing
machine (quite literally so, given that growing
force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a
single, unaccountable individual. This is the
nightmare the founding fathers tried to protect us
from.
In the process, as Salon's Glenn
Greenwald has pointed out, the president has
shredded the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing
Americans that they will not "be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law".
The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel
produced a secret memo claiming that, while the
Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee does apply
to the drone assassination of an American citizen
in a land with which we are not at war, "it could
be satisfied by internal deliberations in the
executive branch." (That, writes Greenwald, is
"the most extremist government interpretation of
the Bill of Rights I've heard in my lifetime". )
In other words, the former constitutional law
professor has been freed from the law of the land
in cases in which he "nominates", as he has, US
citizens for robotic death.
There is,
however, another aspect to the institutionalizing
of those "kill lists" and assassination as
presidential prerogatives that has gone
unmentioned. If the Times article - which largely
reflects how the Obama administration cares to see
itself and its actions - is to be believed, the
drone program is also in the process of being
sanctified and sacralized.
You get a sense
of this from the language of the piece itself. ("A
parallel, more cloistered selection process at the
CIA focuses largely on Pakistan ... ") The
president is presented as a particularly moral
man, who devotes himself to the "just war"
writings of religious figures like Thomas Aquinas
and St Augustine, and takes every death as his own
moral burden. His leading counter-terrorism
adviser Brennan, a man who, while still in the
CIA, was knee-deep in torture controversy, is
presented, quite literally, as a priest of death,
not once but twice in the piece. He is described
by the Times reporters as "a priest whose blessing
has become indispensable to Mr Obama". They then
quote the State Department's top lawyer, Harold H
Koh, saying, "It's as though you had a priest with
extremely strong moral values who was suddenly
charged with leading a war."
In the Times
telling, the organization of robotic killing had
become the administration's id้e fixe, a
kind of cult of death within the Oval Office, with
those involved in it being so many religious
devotees. We may be, that is, at the edge of a new
state-directed, national-security-based religion
of killing grounded in the fact that we are in a
"dangerous" world and the "safety" of Americans is
our preeminent value. In other words, the
president, his apostles, and his campaign acolytes
are all, it seems, praying at the Church of St
Drone.
Of course, thought about another
way, that "terror Tuesday" scene might not be from
a monastery or a church synod, but from a Mafia
council directly out of a Mario Puzo novel, with
the president as the Godfather, designating "hits"
in a rough-and-tumble world.
How far we've
come in just two presidencies! Assassination as a
way of life has been institutionalized in the Oval
Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being
offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution
to American global problems and an issue on which
to run a presidential campaign.
Downhill all the way on Blowback
Planet After 5,719 inside-the-Beltway
(largely inside-the-Oval-Office) words, the Times
piece finally gets to this single
outside-the-Beltway sentence: "Both Pakistan and
Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to
the United States than when Mr Obama became
president."
Arguably, indeed! For the few
who made it that far, it was a brief reminder of
just how narrow, how confining the experience of
worshiping at St Drone actually is. All those
endless meetings, all those presidential hours
that might otherwise have been spent raising yet
more money for campaign 2012, and the two
countries that have taken the brunt of the drone
raids are more hostile, more dangerous, and in
worse shape than in 2009. (And one of them, keep
in mind, is a nuclear power.) News articles since
have only emphasized how powerfully those drones
have radicalized local populations - however many
"bad guys" (and children) they may also have wiped
off the face of the Earth.
And though the
Times doesn't mention this, it's not just bad news
for Yemen or Pakistan. American democracy, already
on the ropes, is worse off, too.
What
should astound Americans - but seldom seems to be
noticed - is just how into the shadows, how
thoroughly military-centric, and how unproductive
has become Washington's thinking at the altar of
St Drone and its equivalents (including special
operations forces, increasingly the president's
secret military within the military). Yes, the
world is always a dangerous place, even if far
less so now than when, in the Cold War era, two
superpowers were a heartbeat away from nuclear
war. But - though it's increasingly heretical to
say this - the perils facing Americans, including
relatively modest dangers from terrorism, aren't
the worst things on our planet.
Electing
an assassin-in-chief, no matter who you vote for,
is worse. Pretending that the Church of St Drone
offers any kind of reasonable or even practical
solutions on this planet of ours, is worse yet.
And even worse, once such a process begins, it's
bound to be downhill all the way. As we learned
last week, again in the Times, we not only have an
assassin-in-chief in the Oval Office, but a
cyber-warrior, perfectly willing to release a new
form of weaponry, the most sophisticated computer
"worm" ever developed, against another country
with which we are not at war.
This
represents a breathtaking kind of rashness,
especially from the leader of a country that,
perhaps more than any other, is dependent on
computer systems, opening the US to potentially
debilitating kinds of future blowback. Once again,
as with drones, the White House is setting the
global rules of the road for every country (and
group) able to get its hands on such weaponry and
it's hit the highway at 140 miles per hour without
a cop in sight.
James Madison, Thomas
Jefferson, George Washington, and the rest of them
knew war, and yet were not acolytes of the
eighteenth century equivalents of St Drone, nor of
presidents who might be left free to choose to
turn the world into a killing zone. They knew at
least as well as anyone in our national security
state today that the world is always a dangerous
place - and that that's no excuse for investing
war powers in a single individual. They didn't
think that a state of permanent war, a state of
permanent killing, or a president free to plunge
Americans into such states was a reasonable way
for their new republic to go. To them, it was by
far the more dangerous way to exist in our world.
The founding fathers would surely have
chosen republican democracy over safety. They
would never have believed that a man surrounded by
advisers and lawyers, left to his own devices,
could protect them from what truly mattered. They
tried to guard against it. Now, we have a
government and a presidency dedicated to it, no
matter who is elected in November.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of
the American Empire Project and author of The
United States of Fear as well as The End of
Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with
Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First
History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
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