Assassination Nation Celebrates Joyous Killing of OBL

April 30, 2012 in Montana

by lizard

Osama Bin Laden’s active status: still dead. The popular consensus seems to be that’s a good thing.

Politically, it’s gold. Mitt’s woe of unfairness is a hard sell. I’d say that dog won’t hunt, but if I say that it sounds stupid.

Here’s something else that seems to be a good thing: war by drone strike, according to a vast-majority of Americans—83%—polled by ABC News/Washington Post:

As the 2012 election approaches, there’s one area where President Barack Obama can feel confident he has broad voter support – his military policies and use of drones against terror suspects, according to a new poll.

The vast majority of Americans — 83 percent— say they approve of Obama’s use of unmanned drones against terrorist suspects, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Wednesday. And two-thirds of those polled say they also support using drones specifically against American citizens in other countries who may be terrorists.

Below the fold is Jeremy Scahill giving a little talk at the conclusion of the recent drone summit, mostly about drones and killing and stuff, and how, no, it’s not a good thing. Not in the least fucking bit.

Please watch it. It’s really fucked up what we are allowing to be done in our name.

And when it comes home, there will be those who say we deserve it.

Honestly, if new tactics like signature drone strikes become the norm, then maybe we do deserve it.

Because we’re not doing enough to stop it.

5 Comments

larry kurtz (@larry_kurtz)

May 1, 2012 at 10:05 am

good post, liz: urge Gov. Schweitzer to commute this death sentence.

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/us/will-montana-recognize-redemption/

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lizard19

May 1, 2012 at 5:11 pm

Medea Benjamin talks about why she interrupted John Brennan yesterday

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Derek and the Demonics

May 1, 2012 at 7:17 pm

Oh yeah! You gotta love that Death From Above! Back in the old days flying in the AC-47 Spooky we had a lot of fun wasting gooks by the dozens and dozens. But the box lunches were really crappy. So I’m all for sitting back in some air conditioned bunker, eating hot chow and drinking a cold one while operating a joystick and getting the same or better results on the ground. And now girls can do it too!

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- lizard19
  
  May 1, 2012 at 8:14 pm
  
  this is a new century, Derek. we’re now nationally invested in killing towel-heads.
  
  Reply
lizard19

May 1, 2012 at 8:31 pm

here’s an interesting piece about Obama’s US citizen killing powers:

Over the last decade, the US has developed a very interesting double standard when it comes to the killing of American citizens. During the Bush administration, we developed the rule of “we can kill you, but you can’t kill us.” The Military Commissions Act of 2006 made it a war crime, punishable by death in a military commission, for any alien unlawful enemy combatant (now referred to as alien unprivileged enemy belligerents) to kill, or attempt to kill any American, including US soldiers, if the killing could be linked to the ongoing armed conflict. Since the entire world was declared a battlefield, this basically meant that anytime a foreigner (or at least a Muslim foreigner) killed an American, we considered it a war crime. It didn’t matter if we invaded your country (for instance, Afghanistan) and were actively trying to kill you; if you were an unlawful combatant, you couldn’t fight back. And by the way, in the war on terror, there were no lawful combatants on the other side because everyone fighting against us was deemed to be a civilian and “out of uniform.” Even the Taliban, the fighting forces of the government of Afghanistan at the time we invaded, were declared unlawful combatants.

The US has actually successfully prosecuted two individuals for this new war crime of “fighting Americans,” or what used to be called “war.” In 2007, the US prosecuted David Hicks, an Australian, for joining the Taliban and fighting against the US and the Northern Alliance at the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan. Hicks pled guilty to “material support to terrorism” at a military commission in exchange for a short sentence and a return home from Guantanamo to Australia. In October 2010, Canadian Omar Khadr was convicted by a military commission of “murder in violation of the law of war” for throwing a hand grenade that killed a US soldier during a pitched battle in Afghanistan in which Khadr was shot twice. Khadr, just 15 at the time of this incident, was the first child soldier prosecuted as a war criminal in modern history. The US also tried, unsuccessfully, to prosecute another child, my client Mohammed Jawad, for “attempted murder in violation of the law of war” for allegedly throwing a hand grenade in Kabul that injured two US soldiers. The case fell apart when the military commission ruled that the primary evidence against Jawad, his “confessions,” were the product of torture and therefore inadmissible.

Now, under the Obama administration, we have added a corollary to the rule of “we can kill you, but you can’t kill us,” namely, “you can’t kill us, only we can kill us.” When an American citizen is killed by a foreign armed group in a place like Yemen, as happened recently with teacher Joel Shrum, we rightly consider it a terrorist act, and perhaps even a war crime. If a US citizen were to be killed by a foreign intelligence service, we would treat it as an assassination, and possibly an act of war. But, according to a March 5, 2012, speech at Northwestern Law School by Attorney General Eric Holder, it is perfectly lawful for our own intelligence service to target and kill an American citizen, at least outside the US where “capture is not feasible.” And if a few innocent civilians happen to be killed in the process, that is just incidental collateral damage. As my friend and colleague Morris Davis said in a JURIST article in October, even if you accept the notion that people like Anwar al-Awlaqi are lawful military targets, the CIA targeted killing program still violates the international law of war because CIA personnel are not lawful combatants — uniformed personnel of a national military — but rather are civil servants and government contractors. Indeed, the lack of uniform and lack of membership in a state military are the precise criteria prosecutors have cited for claiming that accused unlawful combatants like Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad were violating the law of war when they engaged in hostile acts towards US soldiers. Incredibly, according to an article in the New York Times, the Pentagon actually changed the definition of “murder in violation of the law of war” in the 2010 Manual for Military Commissions (the implementing regulation for the Military Commissions Act) to accommodate concerns that the language could be used to argue that CIA Predator operators were violating the law of war. Holder insists that American citizens are given full constitutional due process before being targeted for killing, and that only Americans who present an “imminent threat of violent attack” will be killed. The US government’s elastic concept of imminent threat apparently extends to unarmed civilians who are driving across the barren desert of Yemen. No wonder the Obama administration doesn’t want the targeted killing program subjected to judicial oversight.

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