rssDrone Attacks Signal CIA’s Willingness to Assassinate Terrorists
Monday, July 13, 2009 at 8:02 pm
- 9 Comments
An MQ-Reaper drone prepares to land after a mission in Afghanistan (U.S. Air Force photo)
In October 2002, a suspected al-Qaeda operative named Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, whom the United States believed to be a participant in the 2000 assault on the U.S.S. Cole, took a drive through the northern Yemeni mountains that had become his home. An unmanned, remotely piloted CIA Predator drone tracking al-Harthi from the sky released its payload, a Hellfire missile, into his car, killing al-Harthi and five others. Rather than deny responsibility for the strike, the Bush administration boasted of it. “One hopes each time you get a success like that, not only to have gotten rid of somebody dangerous, but to have imposed changes in their tactics and operations and procedures,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told CNN.
Illustration by: Matt Mahurin
The 2002 Harthi strike — the first successful one of its kind — yielded scores more attacks on al-Qaeda targets from pilotless drones. Those strikes have proliferated intensely over the last year in the tribal areas of Pakistan, as CIA officials believe they stand the best chance for killing Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. Such forays into assassinations since 9/11 help provide context for understanding a still-secret post-9/11 program canceled last month by CIA Director Leon Panetta that might have represented another erosion of the U.S.’s three-decade ban on such targeted killings.
“Killing people during war is different from the U.S. government targeting specific persons, outside a battle zone, for killing,” said Vicki Divoll, a former lawyer for both the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “And even in the so-called war on terror, most lawyers who study this issue believe that targeted killing of a named terrorist falls within the ban in a presidential executive order that has been around since the Ford administration.”
The executive order Divoll referred to has come to be known as EO 12333, which President Reagan issued in 1981, building on the efforts of Presidents Ford and Carter. It states, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
Very little has been revealed about this new program, but the drone strikes appear to be entirely separate from it. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the program Panetta shut down was an inchoate effort to hunt and assassinate terrorist leaders that did not progress far beyond the planning stages. The Guardian added on Monday that the effort was geared toward al-Qaeda members taking refuge in U.S.-allied countries, where the use of military force — and in some cases, the cooperation of domestic law enforcement or intelligence — could not be contemplated. Neither the CIA nor the White House would comment on the program.
The ban itself is not law, but rather a statement of policy, meaning that violations of it might get an official “fired or demoted” but not jailed, Divoll said. Nor is it ironclad. According to an interpretation of EO 12333 written for Congress in January 2002 by the Congressional Research Service’s Elizabeth B. Bazan, resolutions passed by the House and Senate days after 9/11 authorizing “all necessary and appropriate force” to respond to the perpetrators of the attack “might be viewed as sufficient” for the intelligence community to take “actions that might otherwise be prohibited under the assassination ban.”
Because the ban isn’t a law, modifications to EO 12333 are subject only to presidential discretion. Bazan wrote that any such modifications “would have to be published in the Federal Register” in most cases. But with the assassinations ban, “the president can change that policy at any time, or even secretly waive it in certain circumstances,” Divoll said.
Over the past year, the proliferation of CIA drone strikes into the Pakistani tribal areas has intensified. Reuters reports that the agency has launched 48 strikes over the past 18 months, with the most recent coming on Saturday and targeting a communications installation controlled by local Taliban commander Beitullah Mehsud.
But Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said that the authority for using drone strikes against al-Qaeda does not emanate from the executive order. “The Predator strikes are justified as defensive measures and as authorized by Congress through its post 9/11 resolution,” Clarke said. During the Clinton administration, as documented by the 9/11 Commission report, officials determined that strikes against al-Qaeda targets were instances of anticipatory self-defense and therefore not violative of the assassinations ban.
“al-Qaeda was a military target,” Clarke said. “Targeting the leaders of a military is not a violation of EO 12333.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that the secret CIA program depended upon a presidential legal finding for hunting and eliminating al-Qaeda leaders. It is unclear what legal authority that finding claimed, and whether it is related to EO 12333.
While there has been much furor in Congress over the program being unknown to lawmakers until recently, no lawmaker briefed on the program has claimed the Bush administration’s effort itself violated any law. In 2005, the Pentagon publicly acknowledged a program launched in concert with the CIA to create mixed civilian-military “Strategic Support Teams” for the al-Qaeda hunt. Lawmakers at the time expressed some concern about the teams, but none called them illegal. Nor have any lawmakers assailed the legality of the CIA’s drone strikes.
“I think its taken for granted these are acts of war at a time of war,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy expert with the Federation of American Scientists. “That’s why it seems to me there must be something more than that involved here.”
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9 Comments
Pingback posted July 14, 2009 @ 3:06 am
[...] on suspected Qaeda members in Pakistan, has taken the same view. Or even fierce Bush critic Spencer Ackerman notes: [...]
Comment posted July 14, 2009 @ 8:50 pm
“al-Qaeda was a military target,” Clarke said. “Targeting the leaders of a military is not a violation of EO 12333.”
I frankly cannot believe that I am reading this drivel without annotation. So al-Quaeda is a military organization, it just does not happen to have a state or government to go with it. And, it's “soldiers” are not subject to the Geneva Conventions and are not regular POWs. Except for its leaders, and any bystanders, if they are assassinated, and only if it is assassination by air force.
National News in context? This does not even pass muster as stenography.
Comment posted July 15, 2009 @ 2:30 am
Facts don't move people; myths do. What's so surprising about perpetual war among people who assume life is a holy war of good v. evil, instead of a dance or some other organic metaphor? “Acts of war in a time of war” is the “get out of jail free” card for the executive, esp. under the plenary powers of the unitary exec advocated by Cheney and his legion of doom.
Allow me to ask, what's a myth?
~~~~~~
[This is] a lesson in what historians call “exceptionalism”, the notion that the United States has the divine right to bring what it describes as liberty and democracy to the rest of humanity. That this merely disguised a system of domination, which Martin Luther King described, shortly before his assassination, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”, was unspeakable. As the great people’s historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, Winthrop’s much-quoted description of the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill”, a place of unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400 Pequot Indians was a “triumphant joy”. The countless massacres that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by “the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained”.
http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2009/…
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Jacking an entire nation is surprisingly easy. This is how we do it: grab them by their most intimate myths.
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Cheney's Myth says: The terrorists are coming! Quick, do as you're told or you'll get us all killed. The Big Man Upstairs has authorized us to do whatever it takes to keep us safe in a world and time of war. God bless the Big Man Upstairs! Since we're doing the work of the Big Man, we can do no wrong; and anyone opposing us also opposes the Big Man. That makes them suspected evil-doers. Why should we give evil-doers a fair trial? Don't you know they hate us? Let the Big Man put them in a hidden hell forever. Gathering up and containerizing evil is the only way to keep us safe.
~~~~~~~~
American Exceptionalism says: God loves us the most, that's why we're destined to rule the earth forever, amen. God bless America! (God damn the rest of you.)
Since we're doing the work of the Big Guy Upstairs, says the myth, we can do no wrong; likewise, anyone who opposes us also opposes God, making them 'evil-doers' of whom we are duty bound to rid the world.
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I think we should call it Goering's Method, or the Goering Treatment, or maybe Cheney's Variations on Goering's Method.
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SEN. ROBERT BYRD: My hands tremble, but my heart still throbs. I read this quote: “Naturally, the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” Hermann Goering, president of Reichstag, Nazi Parliament, 1934.
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As many readers may know, 'myth' is not synonymous with 'lie;' it's a metaphorical image of the composition and functioning of the cosmos that shapes the world in which we are enacting this wholly absurd theater of life.
National myths deliver us as a people into our Promised or Waste Land, exactly as we load them with our intentions: passengers into life boats, or kittens into burlap sacks?
Either way we're getting taken for a ride. We need to direct our own passage, but we aren't brought up as self-sovereign citizens.
Instead, we're taught to be loyal subjects, fans, of a political master of a mechanical universe; to demonstrate our loyalty by our fervor when presented with patriotic symbols.
We're conditioned to go kill or die at the whim of an imperious president with “for god, king, and country” as the subtext.
In this way, the power of myth of American exceptionalism is being used to power weapons-grade domestic propaganda.
Factual arguments, however well phrased, often fail to move electorates, but the power of myth never fails.
Pingback posted August 30, 2009 @ 7:12 pm
[...] The Washington Independent » Drone Attacks Signal CIA’s Willingness to Assassinate Terrorists washingtonindependent.com/50693/drone-attacks-signal-cias-willingness-to-assassinate-terrorists – view page – cached Drone attacks in Pakistan provide context for a still-secret CIA program. — From the page [...]
Comment posted August 5, 2010 @ 8:04 am
American Exceptionalism says: God loves us the most, that's why we're destined to rule the earth forever, amen. God bless America! (God damn the rest of you.)
Comment posted August 23, 2010 @ 2:50 am
God bless America! (God damn the rest of you.)
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