Editor, TomDispatch.com
How the White House Became a Killing Machine
Posted: 02/17/2014 8:54 am EST Updated: 02/17/2014 8:59 am EST
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Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
Imagine this: a president and his top officials as self-professed
assassins -- and proud of it, even attempting to gain political
capital from it. It's not that American presidents have never been
associated with assassination attempts before. At a National Security
Council meeting, Dwight D. Eisenhower personally ordered the CIA to
"eliminate" Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, then feared as a
future "Castro of Africa." "After a dead silence of fifteen seconds,"
Tim Weiner tells us in Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA, "the
meeting went on." And the Kennedy brothers were evidently involved in
at least one attempt to kill Fidel Castro, while the CIA of Lyndon
Johnson's era mounted a massive assassination program in Vietnam.
Still, in those days, something dark and distasteful clung to the idea
and presidents preferred to maintain what was called "plausible
deniability" when it came to such efforts. (In 1981, by Executive
Order, President Ronald Reagan actually banned assassination by the
U.S. government.)
Now, top officials connected to the White House proudly leak details
about their ongoing efforts to use drones to assassinate obscure
suspected terrorists in the backlands of the planet. They take pride
in comparing their activities to a religious calling. They want the
public to know that they and the president spend significant time and
effort on such "targeted killings." The most recent case to see the
light of day is the
prospective assassination of an American citizen and suspected
"al-Qaeda facilitator," evidently in the tribal borderlands of
Pakistan. When it comes to this possible future assassination, they
seem eager to emphasize
via leaks the care they are taking in preparing the way.
In the process, they have produced legalistic documents so secret that
they can't be shown
to the public, though their existence and import can indeed be
publicized. These justify to their satisfaction the killing of
Americans without what once would have been considered "due process"
or any role whatsoever for the actual legal system. The president and
his top officials are ready at a moment's notice to
discuss in public, with a
legalistic turn of mind and a finicky attention to bureaucratic
detail, whether such killings can properly be carried out in the U.S.
as they are abroad, or whether the angels of death
should be the U.S. military or the CIA -- as if this were of any
legally binding import. (Congress, in turn, has been
balking at appropriating money for the military to take over more of
the CIA's drone killings.) No less striking, the media is by now
almost instantly bored with such reports, which prove, at best, to be
minor one-day ripples in the vast tide of the news.
And in the face of all this, Americans seem to exhibit a remarkable
lack of interest. The transformation of the White House into a killing
machine? Whether any of this has anything to do with legality? More
than 12 years after the 9/11 attacks, it's evidently just everyday
life in America. That the president is our
assassin-in-chief and that drones are acceptable weapons of choice in
such killings are givens. It's also a given that, in the name of
American security, anything goes as long as it's wrapped in an
exculpatory, feel-good legalistic package, even if it bears no actual
relationship to what Americans might once have called legality. Today,
in "
Drone Killing the Fifth Amendment
," Peter Van Buren, ex-State Department whistleblower and author of We
Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of
the Iraqi People
, explores the deep derangement of all this and what it means in the
building of a "post-Constitutional America."
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