Kirsty Wigglesworth / Associated Press

Two weeks into the aftermath of the latest breach of Homeland Security, I think I’m beginning to notice an unsettling pattern in our national response to such events.  Paradoxically, that response spells good news for terrorists and, unfortunately bad news for American citizens.  We have been told frequently since 9/11, often in quite melodramatic terms, that some “radicalized” Muslims become terrorists, driven to an irrational homicidal frenzy because they “hate our freedoms” so much.  Wow . . .

As a lay person, with no foreign policy experience, I would have guessed something less ideological, more mundane, was driving that runaway train.  Things like: having my country invaded and occupied; or having my wedding party shredded by machine gun fire; or having my brother Hamid disappear without a trace leaving a wife and eight children; or having to try to reassemble my child’s body for a proper burial – those are the kinds of gut-wrenching events I would have bet on.  If the experts are right, though, there’s good news for terrorists in that our government is well on its way to obliterating many of those revolting “freedoms” that drive you to distraction.  Give them a while longer and a few more bomb scares and the tables will turn — and Americans will have to hate you for your freedoms.

Glenn Greenwald did a great job of encapsulating our current trend away from citizen’s rights in a recent article at Salon:

“The most recent liberty-abridging, Terrorism-justified controversies have focused on diluting the legal rights of American citizens (in part because the rights of non-citizens are largely gone already and there are none left to attack).  A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations.  Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind.  The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning long-standing Miranda protections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow “public safety” exception, and now Eric Holder explicitly advocates legislation to codify that erosion.  John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation to bar all Terrorism suspects, including Americans arrested on U.S. soil, from being tried in civilian courts, and former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino — while noting (correctly) that Holder’s Miranda proposal constitutes a concession to the right-wing claim that Miranda is too restrictive — today demand that U.S. citizens accused of Terrorism and arrested on U.S. soil be treated as enemy combatants and thus denied even the most basic legal protections (including the right to be charged and have access to a lawyer).”

So.  Somewhere along the line, our government has decided that it is better (easier?) to abridge human rights rather than defend them . . .  and we, the citizens that our government are supposed to represent and defend, seem to be relatively unphased by it all,  to the point of tacit agreement (or plain indifference).

Greenwald continues with this:

 “There is, of course, no moral difference between subjecting citizens and non-citizens to abusive or tyrannical treatment.  But as a practical matter, the dangers intensify when the denial of rights is aimed at a government’s own population.  The ultimate check on any government is its own citizenry; vesting political leaders with oppressive domestic authority uniquely empowers them to avoid accountability and deter dissent.  It’s one thing for a government to spy on other countries (as virtually every nation does); it’s another thing entirely for them to direct its surveillance apparatus inward and spy on its own citizens.  Alarming assaults on basic rights become all the more alarming when the focus shifts to the domestic arena.”  

As Greenwald points out, our relative calm about the abridgement of rights probably devolves on the notion that these abridgements will never affect us just the bad guys among us; and that limiting the rights of everyone will serve to keep the righteous safer.  That mindset, however, depends on a tremendous (unwarranted) amount of trust in the powers that be to make just determinations.  For example, today, if President Obama (or his successors later on) decide that you or I are behaving in a “terroristic” way, with a stroke of the pen the President can add you to “the List” to be assassinated, anywhere in the world.  You will be Presumed Guilty – making the President, in such cases, the judge, jury and executioner. 

If you believe that can’t happen to a US citizen, I refer you to the case of an American-born US citizen from New Mexico, Anwar al-Awlaki, who happens also to be a Muslim cleric who has produced prodigious amounts of writings, lectures and sermons which he distributes via the Internet.   fingered by several suspected terrorists, during interrogation, of inspiring terrorist acts — in speech.  Some have breathlessly  referred to al Awlaki as “the bin Laden of the Internet” referring, I suppose to his Facebook page, blog and YouTube Account.  Hardly “deep cover” but enough terrorist suspects found their way to his websites and cited him as their “inspiration” that he attracted the attention of national security types.  As a result, President Obama has reviewed the allegations against al Awlaki, and signed his Death Warrant, bestowing the dubious honor on al Awlaki of being the first US citizen to land on the Chief Executives Targeted Assassination list.  For his part, al Awlaki has prudently repaired to Yemen, his other home, but his days are probably numbered.

I, for one, don’t rest easier at night knowing that my government can execute a citizen, like me, based on secret intelligence, without formal charges and completely foregoing due process no matter where in the world I happen to be.

An interesting point about the current rather ad hoc nature of US justice is the interesting and irrational fact that, if the government wants to listen in on al Awlaki’s cell phone conversations, they have to persuade a court to issue a warrant; if, on the other hand, they want to murder him on a street in Yemen, they can have at it – no judicial review required.

Now That’s What I Call Terrorism

Campaign promises to the contrary, President Obama definitely seems to be warming to the Executioner role, particularly as practiced in the Drone Program which allows a Chief Executive to have his way without getting his suit or his conscience soiled and without getting constituents’ children killed by anti-aircraft fire.  Evidently drones are the perfect weapon for the budding “targeted assassin” especially for those “hard to reach” non-combat zones where our military presence is not particularly welcomed.  For example, Pakistan is one of the few countries left on Earth that isn’t host to a colony of US military bases and, as luck would have it, that’s exactly where the bad guys hideout – we think..

The initial permission to broaden the drone campaign, from a surveillance to an attack role, came during the last year of the Bush administration, but has been continued and expanded under the presidency of Barack Obama.  

The drone program was initially sold to the American public as part of a carefully prepared exercise in “targeted killings” aimed against high-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  The supposed appeal was that these were “surgical” operations that allow us to take out bad guys without harming civilians.  Drones had the added attraction of being remote-controlled and unmanned which kept our own pilots out of harm’s way.  What could be better?

Obama has exponentially increased the use of Predator Drone attacks in Pakistan (to questionable effect) and, simultaneously, loosened restrictions on their use. 

According to a recent LA Times article:

“Instead of just a few dozen attacks per year, CIA operated unmanned aircraft now carry out multiple missile strikes each week against safe houses, training camps and other hiding places used by militants in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.”

“There have been 34 missile strikes so far this year, at least two every week, according to figures compiled by the New America Foundation. This compares to 53 for all of last year and 30 during the last year of the Bush administration.”

“Intelligence officials report that the size of the drone fleet being deployed over Pakistan has doubled since Obama took office in January 2009.”

Reports have recently surfaced in Wired and again, the LA Times, that to expedite the Drone Program even further the CIA is now operating under new rules that allow it to target suspected “militants” in Pakistan based upon “pattern of life” analyses, without even ascertaining their identity. The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S.  For the most part, these days, they acknowledge, the names of those assassinated with Hellfire missiles fired from Predator and the larger Reaper drones are never known.  Which sounds to me to be more “wholesale killing” and far less targeted than we were led to believe.

“Pattern of Life” analysis, for the uninitiated, is a fancy name for “if it looks like an insurgent, walks like an insurgent, and shows up in an insurgent neighborhood” — bombs away.  If these analyses actually find valid targets that’s quite a feat from a few days sky surveillance, maybe some local “hot tips” and probably more than a little “gut feelings” on the part of the remote controllers.  It would be interesting to quiz these same drone operators about what a “normal” Pattern of Life for a resident of Waziristan looks like.

As with any new technology, the Drone Program is not without its critics which make it a little difficult to gauge its success, as yet.  For example, Pakistan the country playing host to our current “targets” is a little conflicted and has, on occasion, raised quite a stink about the loss of life involved in the program.  You might have noticed that most articles written about drone strikes in Pakistan include this curious disclaimer (word-for-word):

“Pakistan officially protests the missile strikes on its territory as violations of its sovereignty, but it is believed to aid them. The U.S. rarely discusses the unmanned-drone-fired strikes, which are part of a covert CIA program.”

And then, too, there’s the allegation that Pakistan has made rather frequently that drone strikes are killing far more civilians than militants.  Pakistani officials have charged that the overwhelming majority of the victims of the CIA missile attacks are civilians, most of them women and children. Pakistan has placed the number of civilians killed at over 700 last year alone.  And, technically, that’s not in a combat zone . . .

Of course the far more detached reports coming out of the CIA claim that only a handful of civilians have been slain in the missile attacks, despite admitting to not knowing the names of the more than 500 people it admits to having killed.

According to the New America Foundation, of the up to 247 people reported killed in attacks carried out so far in 2010 only seven have been publicly identified as “militants.”

Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

Ironically, all of this drone program revelation hit the press only a few days after Congress hosted hearings on the legality of drone attacks, in general, where legal experts warned Congress in their testimony that both those who order these attacks and those who actually execute them could be prosecuted for war crimes.

“Only a combatant—a lawful combatant—may carry out the use of killing with combat drones,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor from the University of Notre Dame law school, testified at the April 28 hearing held by the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.”

“The CIA and civilian contractors have no right to do so,” she continued. “They do not wear uniforms, and they are not in the chain of command. And most importantly, they are not trained in the law of armed conflict.”

“David Glazier, a professor from Loyola law school in Los Angeles, California, concurred with this opinion, stating that CIA personnel are “clearly not lawful combatants, [and] if you are not a privileged combatant, you simply don’t have immunity from domestic law for participating in hostilities.”

“The American Civil Liberties Union issued a letter to President Obama in conjunction with the congressional hearing, noting recent reports that this administration had targeted a US citizen living in Yemen—the American-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki—for assassination by means of a drone attack.”

“The letter expressed “profound concern about recent reports indicating that you have authorized a program that contemplates the killing of suspected terrorists—including US citizens—located far away from zones of actual armed conflict. If accurately described, this program violates international law and, at least insofar as it affects US citizens, it is also unconstitutional.”

* * *

Frankly, my country’s War on Terror scares me to death . . .

Technorati Tags: Predator Drone, Reaper, Pakistan, Waziristan, Anwar al-Awlaki, al Qaeda, war crimes, due process, targeted assassination