Thanks for the added value as usual. I patiently look forward to my
copy of your book. Have a good day.
Buharry.
----Original Message----
From: [log in to unmask]
Date: 2012-07-11 0:24
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subj: Re: [G_L] The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama - Forward from
Esquire Magazine
Thank you once again Buharry for value-community. I thank Tom for the
treatise in the moral dilemma that has consumed mankind for the
centuries of his existence here on earth. And I am saddened by
Abdulrahman's assassination. I share my condolences.
As to the larger question of what is enough due-diligence or
exhaustive enough due-process, there is never a discrete limit for due-
diligence or due-process. This is because the two endeavors are dynamic
in and of themselves. As it is the case with dynamic processes, the
constituent discrete stations are recognizable for only an
imperceptible, thus fleeting moment. This has been the quandary for
mankind. The bane of his sufferings since he appeared on earth.
I understand and appreciate Tom's caution to the lethal president.
However, the possibility of criminality or inadequate due-diligence/due-
process in the latter's wake, is mutually-exclusive of Obama's
experiences and deliberations in as much as any American can occupy the
post of president. A president's decision is never and can never be
constrained by the potential character of future presidents. And if the
virtue of precedence is Tom's concern, President Obama's extraordinary
due-diligence and due-process should serve as great consolation and
inspiration for both Tom and future presidents. For good measure, Tom
himself could be president after Obama and the onus will be on Tom to
improve on due-diligence and due-process for greyscales of decision
matrices. He will have had the education and inspiration of Obama's
optimal interrogation and sufism.
I appreciate Tom's anxieties. They are real and worth interrogating.
They should perhaps serve as encouragement for greater due-diligence
and due-process. I think greater effort should be deployed in actively
isolating persons on a profusely-vetted kill-list rather than just
sending bombs whenever intelligence reveals their presence in a certain
endroit. That is the first step of the process not the terminal step.
And for other presidents of other nations who will use drone
technology to engage in listless killing, I declare just like president
Obama cannot determine the content of the character of the next
American president, it is anybody's guess who else might be a criminal.
One thing I believe though is that wanton assassinations, whether by
drone, manned-aircraft, missile, shoulder fired grenade, warship,
bradley armored vehicle, spring-loaded canon, or other, are a suicidal
game for the criminal. And criminals have never been and will never be
constrained by the lack of drone technology to complete crimes. Perhaps
it will be consolation for Tom that future presidents of the US, or
indeed his fellow citizens, do not really need drone technology to
commit crimes if they are so pre-disposed. And going by the damage
caused by a drone strike, it will hardly gain primal consideration
status in the criminal's repertoire.
The moral judgement therefore for President Obama to consider, is not
the character or crimes of the next president. Rather it is
consideration for greater synthesis of the president's own decision-
matrices. And that involves greater iteration by the 100 or so folk who
feature in the matrix.
I cover this subject of matrices and combinatorics profusely in my
book - coming soon (slowly) - Buharry for I believe mankind is missing
great opportunity in value life for sheer negligence and wayfaring in
parallax. I'll be sure to make the book available to you when complete.
Tom makes an impassioned case for the Al-Awlaki family and I believe
his aim is to encourage greater due-diligence and due-process in
President Obama and his Team in the drone program given the fact that
they have attained such extraordinary moral privilege and latitude. It
goes back to the old adage: To whom much is given, much is expected. I
hope President Obama and his drone team are within earshot of this, if
long, caution from Tom.
Haruna. Thank you again Buharry for sharing.
-----Original Message-----
From: M. Gassama <[log in to unmask]>
To: GAMBIA-L <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tue, Jul 10, 2012 4:11 pm
Subject: [G_L] The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama - Forward from
Esquire Magazine
The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama
By Tom Junod
Published in the August 2012 issue
Sure, we as a nation have always killed people. A lot of people. But
no president has ever waged war by killing enemies one by one,
targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are. The
Obama
administration has taken pains to tell us, over and over again, that
they are careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid
the
loss of collateral, innocent lives. They're careful because when it
comes to waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and
murder becomes a fine one. Especially when, on occasion, the
individuals we target are Americans and when, in one instance, the
collateral damage was an American boy.
You are a good man. You are an honorable man. You are both president
of the United States and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You
are
both the most powerful man in the world and an unimpeachably
upstanding
citizen. You place a large premium on being beyond reproach. You
have
become your own deliberative body, standing not so much by your
decisions as by the process by which you make them. You are not only
rational; you are a rationalist. You think everything through, as
though it is within your power to find the point where what is moral
meets what is necessary.
You love two things, your family and the law, and you have
surrounded
yourself with those who are similarly inclined. To make sure that
you
obey the law, you have hired lawyers prominent for accusing your
predecessor of flouting it; to make sure that you don't fall prey to
the inevitable corruption of secrecy, you have hired lawyers on
record
for being committed to transparency. Unlike George W. Bush, you have
never held yourself above the law by virtue of being commander in
chief; indeed, you have spent part of your political capital trying
to
prove civilian justice adequate to our security needs. You prize
both
discipline and deliberation; you insist that those around you possess
a
personal integrity that matches their political ideals and your own;
and it is out of these unlikely ingredients that you have created
the
Lethal Presidency.
You are a historic figure, Mr. President. You are not only the first
African-American president; you are the first who has made use of
your
power to target and kill individuals identified as a threat to the
United States throughout your entire term. You are the first
president
to make the killing of targeted individuals the focus of our
military
operations, of our intelligence, of our national-security strategy,
and, some argue, of our foreign policy. You have authorized kill
teams
comprised of both soldiers from Special Forces and civilians from
the
CIA, and you have coordinated their efforts through the Departments
of
Justice and State. You have gradually withdrawn from the nation
building required by "counterinsurgency" and poured resources into
the
covert operations that form the basis of "counter-terrorism." More
than
any other president you have made the killing rather than the
capture
of individuals the option of first resort, and have killed them both
from the sky, with drones, and on the ground, with "nighttime" raids
not dissimilar to the one that killed Osama bin Laden. You have
killed
individuals in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and
Libya,
and are making provisions to expand the presence of American Special
Forces in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Pakistan and other
places
where the United States has not committed troops, you are estimated
to
have killed at least two thousand by drone. You have formalized what
is
known as "the program," and at the height of its activity it was
reported to be launching drone strikes in Pakistan every three days.
Your lethality is expansive in both practice and principle; you are
fighting terrorism with a policy of preemptive execution, and
claiming
not just the legal right to do so but the legal right to do so in
secret. The American people, for the most part, have no idea who has
been killed, and why; the American people ? and for that matter,
most
of their representatives in Congress ? have no idea what crimes
those
killed in their name are supposed to have committed, and have been
told
that they are not entitled to know.
This is not to say that the American people don't know about the
Lethal Presidency, and that they don't support its aims. They do.
They
know about the killing because you have celebrated ? with
appropriate
sobriety ? the most notable kills, specifically those of Osama bin
Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; they support it because you have asked
for
their trust as a good and honorable man surrounded by good and
honorable men and women and they have given it to you. In so doing,
you
have changed a technological capability into a moral imperative and
have convinced your countrymen to see the necessity without seeing
the
downside. Politically, there is no downside. Historically, there is
only the irony of the upside ? that you, of all presidents, have
become
the lethal one; that you, of all people, have turned out to be a man
of
proven integrity whose foreign and domestic policies are less
popular
than your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country,
even
your own countrymen ... indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old
American boy accused of no crime at all.
(ON THE POLITICS BLOG: Tom Junod Considers the Implications)
It's an American story. A promising student from a poor country is
selected to go to America on a Fulbright scholarship. His country is
an
agricultural one ? an agricultural country simmering in the desert ?
so
he goes off to study agricultural economics. He enters New Mexico
State
University in 1966, gets his business degree three years later, and
he's studying for his master's when his first son is born. "I
remember
the name of the gynecologist!" he says. "I remember the name of the
hospital ? Las Cruces General! The next day I went to school and was
very pleased. At the time in America, they distributed cigars if it
was
a boy. So that's what I did ? I distributed cigars. It was a
fantastic
thing, to have my firstborn son be born in the United States."
It was 1971, and Nasser al-Awlaki named his American son Anwar. He
got
his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln ? "The year I got
there, they took the national college football championship! They
beat
Oklahoma in the Game of the Century!" ? and then got an offer to
teach
at the University of Minnesota. "We took Anwar to nursery school
there.
He was a very brilliant boy. His nursery-school teacher wrote him
every
year, even when he came back to Yemen. I joined the University of
Sanaa
and took Anwar to bilingual school. In three months he was speaking
and
writing Arabic!"
Anwar al-Awlaki, firstborn son of Nasser, never lost his American
citizenship, though he eventually gained his Yemeni one. In 1991, he
got his own scholarship to Colorado State University, and the
American
story ? the story of the American al-Awlakis ? was told a second
time.
"He studied civil engineering," his father says. "After he got his
degree, he came back to Yemen in 1994 in order to get married. He
married his second cousin and then took his wife back to America, to
Denver. His first son was born in August 1995, in Denver, Colorado.
My
wife and my mother went to Colorado for the birth and stayed six
months. He was a beautiful, lovable little boy ? and of course we
were
all very happy that he was born in America."
You must know the boy, Mr. President. Though you've never spoken a
word about him, you must know his name, who and what he was. He was,
after all, one of yours. He was a citizen. He had certain
inalienable
rights. He moved away when he was seven, but in that way he was not
so
different from you. He moved around a lot when he was growing up,
because his father did. He went from Denver to San Diego, and from
San
Diego to a suburb of Washington, D. C. Then he went to Yemen. He was
an
American boy, but his father came to feel that America was attacking
him, and he took his wife and son back to Yemen and began preaching
hatred against Americans. Anwar al-Awlaki took it as his
constitutionally guaranteed right to do so. When you decided that
you
had to do something about him, you also had to decide whether his
citizenship stood in the way. You decided that it didn't.
Anwar al-Awlaki fled into the mountains of Yemen. The boy lived with
his grandfather Nasser in the capital city of Sanaa. He didn't see
his
father for two years. He loved his father and missed him. He was
sixteen. One morning last September, he didn't show up for
breakfast.
His mother went to find him and instead she found a note. He had
climbed out the window of the apartment building where he lived. He
had
gone in search of his father. You might not have known him then ?
you
might not have had cause to know his name. But his name was
Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki, and he knew you as both the president of the United
States
and as the man trying to kill his father.
You have never spoken directly about the Lethal Presidency. You have
never given a speech about its prerogatives, obligations, and
responsibilities, and how you feel about living up to them. You have
never told your side of a historic story.
You have let others do that.
As soon as the killing started ? and the killing started as soon as
you took office ? you struggled with how to tell the American people
about it. You struggled with its secrecy, and you struggled no less
with its popularity. You struggled with how you could reconcile your
commitment to transparency with your commitment to carrying out
classified lethal operations based on secret kill lists, and you
struggled with how to promulgate a narrative that has proven
remarkably
effective at combating Republican charges that you are "soft on
terror." How do you tell a story that is not meant to be told?
At first, you resorted to leaks. Your administration is famously
disciplined, but it has leaked so much advantageous information
about
the drone program that the leaks form the basis of the ACLU's
lawsuit
challenging your right to keep the program secret.
Of course, you are known to be on the side of transparency, and so
in
March 2010 you allowed the State Department's Harold Koh to defend,
in
a speech, what he called "U. S. targeting practices, including
lethal
operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles."
The speech was the final product of what one former administration
lawyer calls an "unbelievably excruciating process of crafting a
public
statement that all the agencies can agree on." But Koh gained
special
authority to speak because he became the State Department's legal
advisor after serving as the dean of Yale Law and earning renown as
a
principled critic of the Bush administration's legal positions. His
speech would establish a pattern: Periodically, you dispatch men of
proven integrity to put their integrity on the line in defense of
the
Lethal Presidency. They make speeches at prominent venues, usually
at
the law schools and public-policy arms of prominent universities,
and
they speak for you by proxy.
These speeches are remarkably consistent. They stress that the
United
States is at war with Al Qaeda and its "associated forces." They
stress
that the United States has a legal right to defend itself and thus
to
kill those plotting to kill innocent Americans. They stress that the
program and the practice the United States has developed in response
to
the threat of Al Qaeda ? what has become known as "targeted killing"
?
is consistent with the laws of war, is consistent with the
"principles
of international law" (if not with international law itself), and is
consistent with the laws of the United States. They stress that
every
effort is made to minimize civilian casualties and that no man is
put
to death by the United States without the United States first
affording
him every consideration. They stress that a process of review is in
place, and although the process is secret ? although the object of
the
review of course never knows that he is being reviewed ? the
decision
to target and kill an individual living in another country is never
taken lightly, particularly if he is an American citizen.
There have been six of these speeches since Harold Koh delivered the
first in 2010; there have been four in 2012 alone, and each has
shown,
according to the administration lawyer, "a little more leg." Indeed,
they have evolved past the point of articulating legal principles
and
in this election year amount to a public-relations campaign for the
administration's right to hold the power of life and death. The
"leg"
that the lawyer refers to is not only a glimpse into the decision-
making process but also a glimpse into the hearts of the decision
makers. The Lethal Presidency has decided to tell its story, and it
turns out to be something like a plea for sympathy.
From Harold Koh to CIA general counsel Stephen Preston, from
Attorney
General Eric Holder to your chief counterterrorism advisor, John
Brennan, the men who have spoken on your behalf are men of deep
principle who have gone public with assurances that they are deeply
principled. They are men who defend the decisions they have made by
the
fact that they were the ones who made them ? and that the decisions
were difficult. They are at pains to communicate that they struggle
with killing ... and so it was inevitable that the Lethal
Presidency's
spring campaign climaxed with a front-page New York Times story that
revealed that you do, too. You not only make the final decisions
over
who lives and who dies; you also want the American public to know
that
you make the final decisions over who lives and who dies, and that
your
judicious exercise of this awesome responsibility weighs on you
heavily.
"The [Times] story is consistent with the administration's approach,
which is that since there can be no external oversight over the
program, the greatest internal oversight that you can have is for
this
to be the personal responsibility of the president himself," says
the
lawyer.
The New York Times story is in fact consistent with all the stories
and with all the speeches. In every single utterance of the Lethal
Presidency on the subject of its own lethality, it has offered the
same
narrative: that although it claims the power to kill, its
combination
of legal restraint and personal scruple makes the exercise of this
power extremely difficult. The Lethal Presidency ? and the Lethal
President ? wants us to know that killing is hard. It has spent
months
telling us this story because there is another story, a counterstory
voiced off the record by administration members and confirmed by
everything human beings have learned about killing in their bloody
history:
That killing individuals identified as our enemies isn't hard at
all.
That it's the easiest thing humans ? particularly humans in power ?
can do.
[ON THE POLITICS BLOG: Tom Junod Considers the Implications]
Anwar al-Awlaki was an American father to his American son. When he
moved his family from Colorado to California, he spent a lot of time
with the boy. "He used to take Abdulrahman ocean fishing," says
Nasser
al-Awlaki. "He was a very practical man and very good at fishing.
They
used to catch all kinds of fish. They used to go hiking in the
mountains. They did a lot of activities, and Abdulrahman was very
attached to his father."
But Anwar al-Awlaki did not go to San Diego simply to get his
master's
degree at San Diego State University and go fishing. He had begun
the
serious study of Islam during his college days in Colorado, and he
became the imam of a large San Diego mosque. What his father had
always
noticed about him ? his easy fluency in both En-glish and Arabic ?
attracted followers, especially among the young. He recorded a
series
of popular lectures explicating the life of the Prophet; he also
preached to two of the men who became 9/11 hijackers and was twice
arrested for soliciting prostitutes.
He took everything with him when he moved in 2001 to the nationally
prominent Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia ? both his
fluency and his baggage. He was an American whose birthright
expressed
itself even when he extolled the Prophet, and as imam he was
expected
to become an ambassador for Islam at a time when Islam was both
expansionary and vulnerable. After his move to Virginia, Al Qaeda
attacked America, and although al-Awlaki tried to fulfill his
obligation as an ambassador ? working as a chaplain at George
Washington University; very publicly condemning the 9/11 attacks;
explaining Ramadan in a good-natured video interview on the
Washington
Post Web site; even giving an invocation at the Capitol one day in
2001
? the FBI discovered that one of the 9/11 hijackers had followed him
from California to Virginia. He was questioned at least four times,
and
he complained to his father that he was under surveillance. When he
resigned from the mosque, a young associate named Johari Abdul-Malik
tried to prevail upon him to stay. In Abdul-Malik's recollection, al-
Awlaki said that he "could do more for Islam in another country" and
had three job offers overseas.
"It didn't wash with me," Abdul-Malik says. "I was like, 'You speak
English, dude. You're an American. You're going to do more for Islam
in
Yemen?' But I didn't know then that he'd been busted for soliciting.
When I found out, I thought, Okay, he's afraid of being exposed. He
was
afraid the FBI was going to expose him."
But Abdul-Malik had another encounter with al-Awlaki soon after al-
Awlaki left America with Abdulrahman and the rest of his family. "I
was
taking the pilgrimage to Mecca. I was on the bus and heard a
familiar
voice. I looked up and saw that our spiritual guide was Anwar al-
Awlaki. He recognized me and invited me to split the preaching with
him. He never spoke of politics during the pilgrimage, and he
couldn't
have been more gracious. I didn't see him again until I checked him
out
on the Internet after he became so controversial. He was not only
saying that it was the duty of Muslims to kill Americans; he was
saying
that it was the duty of Muslims to kill Muslims who didn't believe
as
he did. I thought, He's talking about me. There are people who say
that
he couldn't have said the things he's supposed to have said. But
they're in deep denial. They don't want to admit that somewhere
along
the way something happened to their guy."
You knew, before you became president, that you could send soldiers
to
war. Like every president who came before you, you had to answer
questions not just of competence but of conscience when you
campaigned
to become America's commander in chief.
Unlike your predecessors, however, you had to answer an additional
question before you took the job. Other presidents had to decide
whether they could preside over the slaughter of massed armies, and
the
piteous suffering of whole populations.
You had to decide if you could target and kill one person at a time.
Maybe it's an easy question, considering the difficulty of the
others.
Maybe killing one person isn't a burden; maybe it's a relief, in
light
of the alternatives. After all, you inherited three wars from George
W.
Bush: the two "hot theater" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the
"asymmetrical" war against Al Qaeda. The Iraq war killed tens of
thousands of Iraqis, maybe more. The Afghanistan war is a trap from
which we struggle to extricate ourselves. The first was vain; the
second, in vain. The war with Al Qaeda is, by comparison, a vision ?
a
vision of how war could be, and never has been. It is a war of
individuals instead of armies. It is a war of combatants instead of
civilians. It is a war of intelligence instead of brute force. It is
a
war not only of technological precision but moral discrimination,
designed to separate the guilty from the innocent. It is, indeed,
war
as an alternative to war: It saves lives by ending lives; it
responds
to those plotting mass murder by, well, murdering them.
And that is what makes the question so profound and so profoundly
difficult. "For some reason, it's an unusual and extraordinarily
grave
thing when you have an individual person who's being singled out for
targeting," says an administration lawyer who was instrumental in
formulating its targeting policy. "It's not a distinction that holds
up
when you press it a bit ? I mean, snipers target individuals, and
they're still considered soldiers. And yet the distinction between
shooting at armies and shooting at individuals is there. It's an
intuitive thing, I think, in the human animal."
It's probably a hard-wired thing. It's certainly an ancient thing,
fundamental to the creation of human conscience. The difference
between
shedding the blood of many for a cause outside yourself and shedding
the blood of one for a cause of your own seems ineffable ? and yet
it's
nothing less than the difference between war and murder.
Yet you are committing something that looks like murder in the cause
of war. You are shedding the blood of one in order to spare the
blood
of many. You are not observing moral distinctions so much as you are
inventing them, in the pursuit of what you regard as both a historic
opportunity and a personal obligation. You have made a historic
opportunity into your personal obligation, and in so doing you have
made sure that no man can become president unless he knows that he
has
it within him to kill another man ? one whose face he has probably
seen, one whose name he probably knows.
What happened to Anwar al-Awlaki was that he went to prison. Why he
was arrested is a matter of dispute. He'd begun speaking against the
United States almost as soon as he left the U. S. in 2002, winning
fame
for his "inflammatory" rhetoric and his transfixing ability to
radicalize young Muslims. He started in En-gland, making speeches at
mosques, and then moved back to Yemen, making videos for the
Internet.
He moved his family back and forth between his ancestral village and
the large apartment belonging to his father and mother in Sanaa. His
father had risen to prominence since getting his Ph.D. in the United
States. He had been president of the University of Sanaa, and now he
was agriculture minister for the government. But he could not keep
his
son out of jail. He could not keep his son silent, and so he could
not
keep his son safe.
Anwar al-Awlaki was arrested in 2006. He was arrested in Yemen, by
Yemen, without any charges. It's often reported that he was arrested
in
a "tribal dispute" rather than at the behest of the United States;
what's certain, however, is that once he was in jail, the United
States
expressed an interest in keeping him there. He was questioned again
by
the FBI and stayed in jail for eighteen months. Nasser al-Awlaki
never
took Abdulrahman to see him. "It was very hard for Abdulrahman to
have
his father in jail," Nasser al-Awlaki says. "It was very hard for
the
whole family. We couldn't see him for a long time. Anwar wasn't even
allowed to have any books his first year in prison. Then they only
allowed him books in English. I gave him Moby-Dick. I gave him
Charles
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. And also Shakespeare. He became a
very
good reader of Moby-Dick and Charles Dickens. He liked the stories
of
Dickens because they were about cultural issues and tried to relate
those issues to Yemen and the Muslim world."
To the dismay of many in the Department of Homeland Security, Yemen
released Anwar al-Awlaki from prison in December 2007. He never
lived
again with his family, because he felt that his presence endangered
them. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, along with his mother and four
siblings,
stayed in Nasser al-Awlaki's house in Sanaa. Anwar al-Awlaki moved
to
his ancestral village, near the Arabian Sea, and lived under the
protection of his tribe, the Awlakis. He'd associated with Al Qaeda
before going to prison; now his role became clear. While Al Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula engaged in a Taliban-like struggle for Yemen,
he
would be the American. He would be the one who could get to America,
by
the example of his betrayal. He was still a citizen; he would use
his
citizenship to engage in treason, and his fluency ? what a member of
his first mosque in Colorado called his "beautiful tongue" ? to
inspire
those who wanted to follow.
He didn't have to seek them out. Though he lived at the end of the
earth, they came to him through e-mails and through his medium, the
Internet. One who found him had gone to the mosque in Falls Church.
He
was now an Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood. He wanted to talk to his
former imam about the obligation of jihad. Anwar al-Awlaki answered
him
back. They corresponded ? with the FBI aware of the correspondence ?
and on November 5, 2009, the Army psychiatrist shot forty-three
Americans at Fort Hood, killing thirteen. Anwar al-Awlaki wrote in
praise of the murders, and he called for the release of the
correspondence. He wanted people to read the e-mails. He wanted
people
to know that he was not a murderer. He was not a terrorist. He was
an
American who knew what to say to a worldwide audience of people who
wanted to murder Americans, and that made him ? as a New York City
counterterrorism official later called him ? "the most dangerous man
in
the world."
[ON THE POLITICS BLOG: Tom Junod Considers the Implications]
You are not the first president with the power to kill individuals.
You are, however, the first president to exercise it on a mass
scale.
You inherited the power from George W. Bush as one of several
responses
to terrorism. You will pass it on to your successor as the only
response, as well as an exemplar of principle. Your administration
has
devoted far more time and energy to telling the story of targeted
killing than it has to telling the story of any of your domestic
policies, including health care. It is as though you realize that
more
than any of your policies, the Lethal Presidency will be your legacy.
How did this happen? How did your administration become the
administration to embrace and unleash a power that has always
existed
and yet has never been anything but reluctantly employed? Yes, you
could argue that the power to kill is an inherent power of the
presidency ? that, as former Bush-administration legal counsel Jack
Goldsmith says, "it is not remotely a new power. In World War II, we
targeted enemies all over the globe."
You could argue that the National Security Act of 1947 both created
the Central Intelligence Agency and gave presidents the power to
kill
individuals in secret, under the rubric of "covert action."
You could argue that even when the Church Committee held
congressional
hearings in the seventies to investigate, among other abuses of
power,
the CIA's program of political assassinations, its members had a
vote
on what it called "direct action" ? and decided, according to then-
senator Walter Mondale, "that the executive should still have the
authority to deal covertly in the action area. Push comes to shove,
the
president is there to protect the American people and find a way to
do
it."
And you could argue ? you have argued ? that Congress already
approved
everything you've done "in the action area" when it passed its
authorization for the use of military force in the wake of 9/11.
But in fact the statutory power to kill individuals has always been
subject to deep moral qualms about its use, not to mention
constitutional constraints. It has never been used so openly or so
routinely, much less as an accoutrement to an administration's
national-
security agenda. A country that preventively kills its enemies is
simply a different country from the one we've been throughout our
history, and so although Congress preserved the president's power to
engage in "covert" or "direct" action, President Ford signed an
executive order against the use of assassinations in 1976.
And although Jimmy Carter attempted to use special-operations forces
to rescue hostages in Iran, "we had very little direct action of any
kind," says his vice-president, Walter Mondale. "We didn't get
involved
in any intelligence actions as distinct from intelligence gathering."
And although Bill Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden with cruise
missiles in 1998, he justified the operation as an attack on Al
Qaeda
training camps rather than as an attack on an individual.
And although Israel responded to the wave of suicide bombings that
began in 2000 with the second Palestinian intifada by employing the
tactic of what it was the first to call "targeted killing," the U.
S.
ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, condemned it without hesitation:
"The United States government is very clearly on the record as being
against targeted assassinations. They are extrajudicial killings and
we
do not support that."
And although in the months leading up to 9/11 the CIA's
Counterterrorism Center urged director George Tenet to arm the
Predator
drone with Hellfire missiles, Tenet was reluctant to do so because
he
didn't want to get the CIA back in the business of killing ? he was,
according to the 9/11 report, "appalled" by the suggestion and
thought
the CIA "had no authority" to "pull the trigger."
Of course, the attacks of 9/11 overcame Tenet's reluctance and
everyone else's. But even then a lawyer who worked in the Bush
administration's Justice Department and was present in the White
House
Situation Room in the days after the attacks remembers that "the
question of whether you can target one guy was one of the first
debates. The intelligence agencies were very specific. They had a
list
of people to be generally targeted" ? what would become known as a
kill
list ? "and they wanted assurance that they would not be prosecuted.
We
advised them that we will not go after you if you meet these
conditions."
What were the representatives of the intelligence agencies afraid of
being prosecuted for? "Murder," says the lawyer. But a year after
the
intelligence agencies received the Justice Department's assurances
that
killing an individual identified as an enemy combatant in wartime
was
not the same as simply killing an individual, a Predator drone flown
by
the CIA launched a Hellfire missile at a car driving in an isolated
area of Yemen. The missile hit its target and killed six people,
including an American citizen, Kamal Darwish. The American was
identified as one of a group of Americans accused of having
terrorist
connections, but he was not on any kill list. Two milestones,
however,
had been reached simultaneously: the first U. S. drone strike and
the
first U. S. citizen killed by drone.
This is your inheritance, Mr. President ? the legacy of statutory
power and moral qualm that you had to sort through even before you
took
office. You have responded by claiming the power and admitting the
qualm. But there is something strange about the Lethal Presidency's
public statements: What they communicate is always something
different
from what they say. Your admission that you struggle in the exercise
of
lethal power is meant as an assurance that your struggle compels you
to
use lethal power responsibly. But neither you nor anyone in your
administration has allowed the impression that that struggle is
anything but an obstacle to be surmounted and that you are anything
but
resolute in surmounting it. You struggle with your moral qualms
about
the Lethal Presidency only to gain the moral distinction of
triumphing
over them ? and to claim, as the Lethal President, the higher
morality
of killing.
[ON THE POLITICS BLOG: Tom Junod Considers the Implications]
Anwar al-Awlaki was never charged with a crime. He was never charged
for any of his suspected connections to the 9/11 hijackers. He was
never charged with the crime for which he was jailed in Yemen. He
was
never charged for his e-mails to the Fort Hood murderer. He was
never
charged for his treason. And yet on the day before Christmas 2009,
President Obama approved a Yemeni air strike on an Al Qaeda meeting
that was based on CIA intelligence ? and that included Anwar al-
Awlaki
as a target. The strike killed thirty people. But it spared al-
Awlaki.
A day later, a young Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
boarded
Northwest flight 253 with a bomb devised by an Al Qaeda bomb maker
sewn
into his underwear. The flight originated in Amsterdam; it was bound
for Detroit, and when it came into U. S. airspace, Abdulmutallab
tried
to detonate what he had in his pants ? to give America an
extravaganza
of mass murder on Christmas Day.
The bomb ignited but didn't explode, and Abdulmutallab was overcome
by
the passengers. He wound up cooperating with American authorities
after
his arrest and told them that not only had he engaged in
correspondence
with Anwar al-Awlaki, he had plotted to bring down an American
airliner
under al-Awlaki's direction.
Anwar al-Awlaki had always sought the space between inflammatory
speech and overt conspiracy. And so after news broke of
Abdulmutallab's
failed attempt to kill Americans, he went on the Internet to remind
America of its vulnerability ... to taunt the country where he was
born
? and its president ? with his beautiful, murderous tongue.
But to the Obama administration, he had gone from inspiring attacks
on
America to planning them ? he had become "operational." He was
actively
plotting to kill Americans and harm American interests. He was
aligned
with Al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate. He met the definition of enemy
combatant and imminent threat. And so, although he was a U. S.
citizen
? and although the Obama administration had already countenanced
trying
to kill him on Christmas Eve ? he was put on a kill list.
It is not known exactly when he was included on the list. What is
known is that he was put on the list while Abdulmutallab was just
beginning to cooperate with the FBI. What is known is that the
administration had been thinking of how to target al-Awlaki for some
time, and that it leaked its intentions to The Washington Post in
part
to satisfy what it believed were its constitutional requirements to
him. What is known is that the Post published its story just about a
month after America's attack on al-Awlaki and al-Awlaki's attack on
America, and that when Nasser al-Awlaki read that his son was on a
kill
list, he immediately tried saving his life.
He began by writing President Obama a personal letter in which he
reminded the president of the similarities in their backgrounds and
said that he distributed cigars when his son Anwar was born in
America.
Then he sought counsel from the ACLU and the Center for
Constitutional
Rights and did the most American thing of all.
He sued.
"I tried every legal means to stop the targeted killing of my son,"
Nasser al-Awlaki says. "George Bush had my son locked up [in Yemen],
but he didn't order his killing. I could not believe that a
president
would order the killing of my son. But Eric Holder and Barack Obama
are
giving us a new definition of the due process of the law. How can
they
kill him without due process?"
He lost. In December 2010, a judge opened his ruling with an
acknowledgment of the "stark and perplexing questions" the lawsuit
raised; then he ruled that the father lacked the legal standing to
sue
for the son and, further, that targeted killing was a "political
question" outside the jurisdiction of the court. Nasser al-Awlaki
did
not appeal because he feared the administration's power, and its
vengeance. He did not get his injunction against the president, and
had
no choice but to complain to anyone who would listen that his
American
son was being denied due process by being put on an American kill
list.
He did not understand the administration's most audacious claim:
that
the machinations required to put a citizen on a kill list were due
process; that a citizen's presence on a kill list was itself proof
that
due process had been afforded.
On January 20, 2009, you were inaugurated as president of the United
States. On January 22, you signed executive orders that banned harsh
interrogations, closed the CIA's "black sites," and called for the
closing of the detention center at Guant嫕amo Bay. On January 23,
two
drone attacks killed fifteen people in Pakistan. Newspaper reports
suggested that none of them were senior members of Al Qaeda, but the
outgoing CIA director assured you that at least five of them were
militants. In his book Obama's Wars, Bob Woodward wrote this of your
response: "The president said good. He fully endorsed the covert
action
program, and made it clear he wanted more." More recent revelations
in
The New York Times suggested that you were concerned about the
wanton
nature of the attack and the loss of innocent life. You demanded to
know what happened and instituted a new standard: Unless the CIA
could
guarantee that there would be no civilian casualties, you personally
would have to approve the strike.
So you lived up to your word, both to the American public and the
CIA
itself. You ran for president on the promise to restore the moral
basis
of American counterterrorism after eight years of the severe
latitude
enjoyed by George W. Bush. But when you sent your transition teams
to
the CIA in the weeks before your inauguration, they made sure to
assure
the agents and officers on hand that "they were going to be 'as
tough
if not tougher' than the Bush people," says a former senior official
at
the agency. "You have to understand the dynamic. They basically
shitcanned the interrogation board. But they wanted to make it clear
that they weren't a bunch of left-wing pussies ? that they would be
focusing and upping the ante on the Predator program."
There were two kinds of opportunity. The first was strategic. "When
President Obama first took office, there was a real and present
danger
from Al Qaeda, particularly in Pakistan, where it was under no
pressure," says Bruce Riedel, the former CIA officer you hired to
assess the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "The intelligence
community was giving the president these warnings, and the only
weapon
he had at his disposal was the CIA's drone program. So it seemed
prudent to increase its pace and its activity. I advised it, along
with
others, including [counterterrorism advisor] John Brennan."
"The basic approach is clearly a continuation of what began under
George Bush," says Michael Leiter, head of the National
Counterterrorism Center for the last two years of the Bush
administration and the first two years of yours. "Where there was a
change was in the intensity of the activity. And intensity counts for
a
lot. It wasn't that the White House said, 'You have to pick up the
pace.' It was that the intelligence community listened to the
president's strategic goals and said, 'If that's where you're trying
to
go, the current pace isn't going to get you there. So we can pick up
the pace if you want to pick up the pace. There are ways to do
that.'
"
The second opportunity was political. From the start of your term,
Mr.
President, you have used your aggressive prosecution of
counterterrorism programs ? in other words, killing ? to stave off
attacks from the Right. This is not to say that you kill with an eye
on
the polls. It is to say that your political advisors have always had
an
interest in promoting the Lethal Presidency, to the extent even
those
involved in "the process" are well aware that it is by killing that
you
have, in the words of a former administration official,
"credentialed
yourself on national security." It is to say that the obvious
political
utility of killing leads to the appearance of political
consideration
and to contemplation of the monstrous possibility that somewhere in
the
world someone has been killed to bolster your right flank.
Of course, it has worked. When you have been accused of appeasing
terrorists, you have foreclosed the discussion simply by saying,
"Ask
Osama bin Laden." And when the Right criticizes your
counterterrorism
policies, it doesn't ? it can't ? criticize you for all the killing.
It
is reduced to criticizing you for killing terrorists instead of
capturing them and interrogating them in Guant嫕amo. It criticizes
you
on intelligence grounds rather than moral ones. Listen to Senator
Saxby
Chambliss, the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence: "You're seeing individuals that we should be capturing
and gaining intelligence from not being captured. They're for the
most
part being targeted otherwise."
And yet there can be no more devastating moral criticism than the
criticism that you are killing for convenience ? killing as an
alternative to something else. "We lack, as a nation, a place to put
terrorists if we catch them," says Senator Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina. "In most wars, if you're the CIA director or the secretary
of
defense and you just captured the number two of an enemy
organization,
most people would say, 'Oh, great.' You know what we'd say? 'Oh,
shit.'
It's a hot potato nobody wants to handle, and I can tell you, from
talking to them, that it affects the forces on the ground. I can
tell
you that the operators are in a bad spot out there. They know that
if
they capture a guy, it creates a nightmare. And it's just easier to
kill 'em."
You are touchy about this criticism and your representatives respond
with force when it is leveled at you. John Brennan has dismissed
this
criticism ? this scenario ? as "absurd." Jennifer Daskal, the lawyer
you brought in to oversee human-rights compliance at Guant嫕amo,
calls
it "a nonsensical argument," given the inaccessibility of the
regions
where most of the killing takes place. And Michael Leiter says,
"It's
not like there were a massive amount of detentions in Waziristan
[the
province in Pakistan that has taken the brunt of the drone attacks]
before President Obama took office. There were none."
The numbers, however, are at the very least suggestive. Since taking
office, you have killed thousands of people identified as terrorists
or
militants outside the theater of Afghanistan. You have captured and
detained one. This doesn't necessarily mean that you are killing
instead of capturing ? "that's not even the right question," says
the
former administration official, who is familiar with the targeting
process. "It's not at all clear that we'd be sending our people into
Yemen to capture the people we're targeting. But it's not at all
clear
that we'd be targeting them if the technology wasn't so advanced.
What's happening is that we're using the technology to target people
we
never would have bothered to capture."
The mother had to wake the boy for his 4:30 prayers. In this he was
not so different from other teenaged boys in the Muslim world. Boys
have to be awakened for their prayers. Their parents have to wake
them.
It is required.
The family prayed and went back to bed. When the mother woke at 7:
30,
she found her two youngest children watching cartoons. It was a
Sunday
morning, usually a school day in Yemen. But September 4, 2011, was a
holiday. At eight o'clock, the mother told her daughter to wake up
her
two boys. The daughter came back and said that the oldest boy,
Abdulrahman, was not in his bed. The mother searched the house and
found the kitchen window open. Then she found a note under the mat
by
her bedroom door. It was from Abdulrahman, in Arabic, asking her
forgiveness for leaving ? for going out into the world to find his
father.
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki had not seen Anwar al-Awlaki in two years. At
one time, when his father was living in the family's ancestral
village
near the Arabian Sea, he used to visit his father and live with him
for
weeks at a time. But then drones were heard over the village, and
his
father fled into the mountains. Nobody knew where he was.
"Abdulrahman
was very aware who his father was and knew that the U. S. government
was trying to kill him," wrote Anwar al-Awlaki's sister in an e-mail
about her nephew's last days. "Why is his father targeted? That may
be
the question that Abdulrahman thought about all the time."
The family thought he'd be back in a few days because he left with
only his backpack. They thought about going to find him, but then
worried that if he had found his father, his father's location would
be
revealed, and the Americans would kill him. So they waited. A few
days
later, they got a call from their relatives in Shabwah province.
Abdulrahman was with them, spending time with his teenaged second
cousin. He had not found his father. He still had no idea where he
was.
What you want us to know about the process ? the review process, the
targeting process ? is essentially what you want us to know about
yourself, Mr. President. It is moral and responsible. It is rigorous
and reflective. It is technocratic, but it encourages people to ask
hard questions and engage in passionate debate. When it makes a
mistake, it learns from its mistakes, and gets better. It is human
and
flawed, but it tries really hard. It starts with meetings involving
as
many as one hundred people from different agencies and ends with the
approval of targets by John Brennan and the approval of operations
by
you. Your responsibility is full and final, and in the end you
emerge
as agonized and humane, heroic and all-powerful.
You have accepted no judicial review of any of your decisions. Your
administration has insisted that there is no role for the courts in
the
making of war, and has cited both tradition and precedent to back up
its position. You have accepted, however, what Eric Holder calls the
"robust oversight" of Congress.
"We are notified of specific operations within a day or so of them
taking place," says a congressional staffer who works for the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence. "Fax is one of the ways by which
notifications are done, but there are also briefings and official
notifications and reports. What I can say is that we are generally
not
surprised by a new kind of activity. If there is something new, we
are
generally told about it in advance. When we're doing our job the
right
way, people outside the government should have no idea we're doing
it."
The killing of an American citizen: That was a new activity. And so
"the program was talked about all the way to its conclusion," says
Senator Saxby Chambliss. "Any time you're engaging a citizen ?
particularly one as noted as Anwar al-Awlaki ? there's reason to be
more vigilant just to make sure that all the requirements of the law
are being abided by. We were briefed any number of times during the
process, and also on the final authorization of what could take
place."
In a speech he gave in March, Attorney General Eric Holder
articulated
the central doctrine of the Lethal Presidency: "The Constitution
guarantees due process, not judicial process." Of course, he is
speaking of American citizens. The Constitution guarantees
combatants
from other countries nothing. And yet we still give them something
like
due process; we still give them the meetings involving one hundred
members of the executive branch, we still give them the impassioned
interagency debate, we still give them the input of Justice and
State,
we still give them John Brennan, we still give them you, Mr.
President,
and your moral prestige. And if they are citizens, well, then, there
is, in the words of John Brennan, "additional review" ? additional
review that must surely constitute due process.
In the history of war, no enemy has been given this kind of
consideration. The people we're targeting aren't soldiers; they're
plotters ? murderers ? who deliberate over the deaths of innocents.
And
in response we give them a review process that deliberates on how to
spare innocents and kill only the guilty; that is self-critical;
that
works constantly to eliminate "mistakes"; that aspires to a kind of
perfection and comes so close to achieving it that a year ago John
Brennan could announce in a speech that the program operating in
Pakistan had been operating since the summer of 2010 without "a
single
collateral death."
No, there is no court, and there is no judge. But instead of a court
there is the White House Situation Room, and instead of a judge
there
is you ? the Lethal President who has worked tirelessly to earn what
is
the hallmark of the Lethal Presidency:
Moral confidence in the act of killing.
Anwar al-Awlaki was nowhere near his son. He was in the mountains of
Jawf province, hundreds of miles away. Over the previous year and a
half he had survived two drone attacks that had killed thirty-two of
the wrong people. Now he was with Samir Khan, another American
citizen
who'd betrayed his country and was working as an Al Qaeda
propagandist.
He was not on a kill list, but it didn't matter. On September 30,
Khan
was riding in a convoy taking al-Awlaki and others down a mountain
road. They had heard and seen Predator drones scouring their refuges
before. They probably didn't hear the one that killed them ... or
maybe
they did. "They fired seven rockets into those cars," Nasser al-
Awlaki
says. "They destroyed the cars and everything of the car and the
people
in the car. The people there told us they were all cut to pieces.
They
collected their remains and put them in two graves. At least they
were
given a proper Muslim funeral."
The next day, Abdulrahman called his mother from the ancestral
village
near the Arabian Sea. He had heard about what happened to his
father.
He was coming home.
You were proud that you were able to kill Anwar al-Awlaki. You were
proud because his death marked "another significant milestone in the
broader effort to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates"; because by
killing him you almost certainly saved American lives; and because
you
obeyed the law.
This is the consuming irony of the Lethal Presidency. You have
become
the Lethal President because you are also the Rule-of-Law President.
You have been able to kill our enemies because you have forsworn
waterboarding them. You have become the first president to execute
without trial an American citizen because you hired David Barron and
Martin Lederman ? the constitutional lawyers renowned for their
blistering attacks on the legal memos that justified the Bush
administration's use of torture ? to write the legal memos that
justified the execution without trial of an American citizen.
"President Bush would never have been able to scale this up the way
President Obama has because he wouldn't have had the trust of the
public and the Congress and the international community," says the
former administration official familiar with the targeting process.
"That trust has been enabling."
There have been thousands killed as the result of direct orders of
the
Lethal Presidency. How can each death be said to be the end product
of
rigorous review when there are so many of them? And most
importantly,
how can the care given to the inclusion of individual terrorists on
CIA
and DOD kill lists be extended to those who are killed without the
administration ever knowing their names ? those who are killed in
"signature strikes," based on data, rather than "personality
strikes,"
based on human intelligence?
The simple answer: It can't, especially when, in the words of a
former
senior CIA official, "the increase in signature strikes is what
accounts for most of the increased activity." The Lethal Presidency
is
using intelligence to put people to death, but when the official
familiar with targeting is asked about the quality of the
information,
there is a long pause before the answer.
"I can't answer that question," the official finally says. "You get
information from intelligence channels and you don't know how
reliable
it is or who the source was. The intelligence services have
criteria,
but most of the time the people making the decision have no idea
what
those criteria are. Some people [targets] you see over and over
again.
But when someone turns up for the first time, it's harder to have
confidence in that information."
It is only human to have faith in the "human intelligence" generated
by the agents, operatives, and assets of the CIA. But that's the
point:
What's human is always only human, and often wrong. America invaded
Iraq on the pretext of intelligence that was fallacious if not
dishonest. It confidently asserted that the detainees in Guant嫕amo
were the "worst of the worst" and left them to the devices of CIA
interrogators before admitting that hundreds were hapless victims of
circumstance and letting them go. You, Mr. President, do not have a
Guant嫕amo. But you are making the same characterization of those
you
target that the Bush administration made of those it detained, based
on
the same sources. The difference is that all your sentences are
final,
and you will never let anybody go. To put it as simply as possible:
Six
hundred men have been released uncharged from Guant嫕amo since its
inception, which amounts to an admission of a terrible mistake. What
if
they had never even been detained? What if, under the precepts of
the
Lethal Presidency, they had simply been killed?
For all its respect for the law, the Obama administration has been
legally innovative in the cause of killing. It has called for the
definition of an "imminent threat" to be broadened and for the
definition of "collateral damage" to be narrowed. An imminent threat
used to be someone who represented a clear and present danger. Now
it
is someone who appears dangerous. Collateral damage used to be
anyone
killed who was not targeted. Now the term "collateral damage"
applies
only to women and children. "My understanding is that able-bodied
males
of military age are considered fair game," says the former
administration official, "if they're in the proximity of a known
militant."
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki. Did that make
him an imminent threat? He was sixteen years old, able-bodied. Did
that
make him fair game? To his family, he was still a child. Does that
make
him collateral damage? He was an American citizen. Does that mean
that
he should have been given due process? Should his citizenship have
offered him a degree of protection not enjoyed by the other boys who
were with him on the night of October 14, 2011? They were all able-
bodied, after all. They were all teenagers. They all had the
potential
to be dangerous someday.
On that night, though, they were all celebrating Abdulrahman's last
night in his ancestral village near the Arabian Sea. He had been
waiting for Yemen's political unrest to die down before heading
home.
Now the way seemed clear, the roads less perilous, and he was saying
goodbye to the friends he'd made. There were six or seven of them,
along with a seventeen-year-old cousin. It was a night lit by a
bright
moon, and they were sitting around a fire. They were cooking and
eating. It was initially reported that an Al Qaeda leader named
Ibrahim
al-Banna was among those killed, but then it was reported that al-
Banna
is still alive to this day. It was also reported that Abdulrahman al-
Awlaki was a twenty-one-year-old militant, until his grandfather
released his birth certificate. There is the fog of war, and then
there
is the deeper fog of the Lethal Presidency. What is certain is only
this: that a drone crossed the moonlit sky, and when the sun rose
the
next morning, the relatives of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki gathered his
remains ? along with those of his cousin and some teenaged boys ? so
that they could give a Muslim funeral to an American boy.
This is what Senator Carl Levin, who receives regular briefings on
"clandestine activities" as chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, says about the death of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki: "My
understanding is that there was adequate justification." How? "It
was
justified by the presence of a high-value target."
This is what his aunt says about his death in an e-mail: "We were
all
afraid that Abdulrahman would get caught up in the turmoil in Yemen.
However, none of us thought that Abdulrahman will face a danger from
the sky. We thought that the American administration, the world
leader
and superpower will be far and wide from such cruelty. Some may say
Abdulrahman was collateral damage; some said he was in the wrong
place
at the wrong time. We say that Abdulrahman was in his father's land
and
was dining under the moon light, it looked to him, us and the rest
of
the world to be the right time and place. He was not in a cave in
Waziristan or Tora Bora, he was simply a kid enjoying his time in
the
country side. The ones that were in the wrong place and time were
the
American drones, nothing else."
You have spoken once about the drones and teenaged boys. You weren't
speaking as the Lethal President but you were referring to the
Lethal
Presidency. You were also making a joke. You were at the podium at
the
2010 White House Correspondents' Dinner. You welcomed the Jonas
Brothers and said, "Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don't
get
any ideas. I have two words for you ? Predator drones. You will
never
see it coming."
You have never spoken of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Though you probably
approved the strike that killed him, you have never mentioned his
name
in public. Though he was an American citizen killed by an American
drone, you have kept the circumstances of his death secret. Though
what
we know about the circumstances of his death casts doubt on most of
the
claims your administration makes about both the rigor of the process
and the precision of the program, there has been no call in Congress
for an investigation or a hearing. You have been free to keep the
American people safe by expanding the Lethal Presidency ? by
approving
the expanded use of signature strikes in Yemen and by defying an
edict
of the Pakistani parliament and continuing drone strikes in
Pakistan.
You have even begun thinking of using the Lethal Presidency as an
example for other countries that want Lethal Presidencies of their
own.
"Other nations also possess this technology," said John Brennan in
his
most recent speech. "Many more nations are seeking it, and more will
succeed in acquiring it. President Obama and those of us on his
national-security team are very mindful that as our nation uses this
technology, we are establishing precedents that other nations may
follow, and not all of them will be nations that share our interests
or
the premium we put on protecting human life, including innocent
civilians."
Of course, the danger of the Lethal Presidency is that the precedent
you establish is hardly ever the precedent you think you are
establishing, and whenever you seem to be describing a program that
is
limited and temporary, you are really describing a program that is
expansive and permanent. You are a very controlled man, and as
Lethal
President, it's natural for you to think that you can control the
Lethal Presidency. It's even natural for you to think that you can
control the Lethal Presidencies of other countries, simply by the
power
of your example. But the Lethal Presidency incorporates not just
drone
technology but a way of thinking about drone technology, and this
way
of thinking will be your ultimate export. You have anticipated the
problem of proliferation. But an arms race involving drones would be
very different from an arms race involving nuclear arms, because the
message that spread with nuclear arms was that these weapons must
never
be used. The message that you are spreading with drones is that they
must be ? that using them amounts to nothing less than our moral
duty.
The former official in your administration ? the one familiar with
targeting ? has suggested a question intended to encapsulate the
danger
represented by the expansive nature of the Lethal Presidency:
"Ask the administration if the president himself is targetable." But
here's something simpler, and more human. You have made sure that
you
will not be the only Lethal President. You have made sure that your
successor in the White House will also be a Lethal President, as
well
as someone somewhere else in the world.
What if the next Lethal President is not as good and as honorable as
you? What if he is actually cruel or bloodthirsty?
What if he turns out to be ? like you, Mr. President ? just a man?
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/obama-lethal-presidency-0812-5#ixzz20FgAcjGJ
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