"we can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us" but trying is "a necessary part of what we do"

[Eugen Leitl]

(I still can't understand how Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler were never
nominated for a Nobel Peace Price).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list?smash

Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent

Complete with a newly coined, creepy Orwellian euphemism b 'disposition
matrix' b the administration institutionalizes the most extremist powers a
government can claim

Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 October 2012 13.17 BST	

National Counterterrorism Center FBI

The National Counterterrorism Center, the site of a new bureaucracy to
institutionalize the 'kill list'. Photograph: FBI

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

A primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil
liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent, vested not
only in current leaders one may love and trust but also future officials who
seem more menacing and less benign.

The Washington Post has a crucial and disturbing story this morning by Greg
Miller about the concerted efforts by the Obama administration to fully
institutionalize b to make officially permanent b the most extremist powers
it has exercised in the name of the war on terror.

Based on interviews with "current and former officials from the White House
and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies",
Miller reports that as "the United States' conventional wars are winding
down", the Obama administration "expects to continue adding names to kill or
capture lists for years" (the "capture" part of that list is little more than
symbolic, as the US focus is overwhelmingly on the "kill" part).
Specifically, "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad
consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another
decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States
has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on
terrorism."

In pursuit of this goal, "White House counterterrorism adviser John O Brennan
is seeking to codify the administration's approach to generating capture/kill
lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the
counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced." All of this, writes
Miller, demonstrates "the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the
highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements
into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly
permanent war."

The Post article cites numerous recent developments reflecting this Obama
effort, including the fact that "CIA Director David H Petraeus is pushing for
an expansion of the agency's fleet of armed drones", which "reflects the
agency's transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it
does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its
pre-September 11 focus on gathering intelligence." The article also describes
rapid expansion of commando operations by the US Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) and, perhaps most disturbingly, the creation of a permanent
bureaucratic infrastructure to allow the president to assassinate at will:

    "JSOC also has established a secret targeting center across the Potomac
River from Washington, current and former U.S. officials said. The elite
command's targeting cells have traditionally been located near the front
lines of its missions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. But JSOC created a
'national capital region' task force that is a 15-minute commute from the
White House so it could be more directly involved in deliberations about
al-Qaeda lists."

The creepiest aspect of this development is the christening of a new
Orwellian euphemism for due-process-free presidential assassinations:
"disposition matrix". Writes Miller:

    "Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly
developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation
targeting list called the 'disposition matrix'.

    "The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an
accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including
sealed indictments and clandestine operations. US officials said the database
is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the
'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones."

The "disposition matrix" has been developed and will be overseen by the
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its purposes is "to augment"
the "separate but overlapping kill lists" maintained by the CIA and the
Pentagon: to serve, in other words, as the centralized clearinghouse for
determining who will be executed without due process based upon how one fits
into the executive branch's "matrix". As Miller describes it, it is "a
single, continually evolving database" which includes "biographies,
locations, known associates and affiliated organizations" as well as
"strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture
operations and drone patrols". This analytical system that determines
people's "disposition" will undoubtedly be kept completely secret; Marcy
Wheeler sardonically said that she was "looking forward to the government's
arguments explaining why it won't release the disposition matrix to ACLU
under FOIA".

This was all motivated by Obama's refusal to arrest or detain terrorist
suspects, and his resulting commitment simply to killing them at will (his
will). Miller quotes "a former US counterterrorism official involved in
developing the matrix" as explaining the impetus behind the program this way:
"We had a disposition problem."

The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed b "It
is the keeper of the criteria," says one official to the Post b is, by
itself, rather odious. As Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts noted
in response to this story, the ACLU has long warned that the real purpose of
the NCTC b despite its nominal focus on terrorism - is the "massive,
secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about
most people in the United States".

In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which
all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically
monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes "records from law enforcement
investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student
records" b "literally anything the government collects would be fair game".
In other words, the NCTC - now vested with the power to determine the proper
"disposition" of terrorist suspects - is the same agency that is at the
center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American
citizens.

Worse still, as the ACLU's legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented
back in July in a must-read analysis, Obama officials very recently abolished
safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during
the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information
about innocent Americans for more than 180 days b a limit which "meant that
NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on
innocent Americans" b it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated
this constraint by authorizing the NCTC "to collect and 'continually assess'
information on innocent Americans for up to five years".

And, as usual, this agency engages in these incredibly powerful and invasive
processes with virtually no democratic accountability:

    "All of this is happening with very little oversight. Controls over the
NCTC are mostly internal to the DNI's office, and important oversight bodies
such as Congress and the President's Intelligence Oversight Board aren't
notified even of 'significant' failures to comply with the Guidelines.
Fundamental legal protections are being sidestepped. For example, under the
new guidelines, Privacy Act notices (legal requirements to describe how
databases are used) must be completed by the agency that collected the
information. This is in spite of the fact that those agencies have no idea
what NCTC is actually doing with the information once it collects it.

    "All of this amounts to a reboot of the Total Information Awareness
Program that Americans rejected so vigorously right after 9/11."

It doesn't require any conspiracy theorizing to see what's happening here.
Indeed, it takes extreme naivetC), or wilful blindness, not to see it.

What has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly
secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two
functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of surveillance data
about all Americans without any judicial review let alone search warrants,
and (2) creates and implements a "matrix" that determines the "disposition"
of suspects, up to and including execution, without a whiff of due process or
oversight. It is simultaneously a surveillance state and a secretive,
unaccountable judicial body that analyzes who you are and then decrees what
should be done with you, how you should be "disposed" of, beyond the reach of
any minimal accountability or transparency.

The Post's Miller recognizes the watershed moment this represents: "The
creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists
reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic." As he explains,
extra-judicial assassination was once deemed so extremist that very extensive
deliberations were required before Bill Clinton could target even Osama bin
Laden for death by lobbing cruise missiles in East Africa. But:

    Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has
spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that
sustain it.

To understand the Obama legacy, please re-read that sentence. As Murtaza
Hussain put it when reacting to the Post story: "The US agonized over the
targeted killing Bin Laden at Tarnak Farms in 1998; now it kills people it
barely suspects of anything on a regular basis."

The pragmatic inanity of the mentality driving this is self-evident: as I
discussed yesterday (and many other times), continuous killing does not
eliminate violence aimed at the US but rather guarantees its permanent
expansion. As a result, wrote Miller, "officials said no clear end is in
sight" when it comes to the war against "terrorists" because, said one
official, "we can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us" but trying
is "a necessary part of what we do". Of course, the more the US kills and
kills and kills, the more people there are who "want to harm us". That's the
logic that has resulted in a permanent war on terror.

But even more significant is the truly radical vision of government in which
this is all grounded. The core guarantee of western justice since the Magna
Carta was codified in the US by the fifth amendment to the constitution: "No
person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law." You simply cannot have a free society, a worthwhile
political system, without that guarantee, that constraint on the ultimate
abusive state power, being honored.

And yet what the Post is describing, what we have had for years, is a system
of government that b without hyperbole b is the very antithesis of that
liberty. It is literally impossible to imagine a more violent repudiation of
the basic blueprint of the republic than the development of a secretive,
totally unaccountable executive branch agency that simultaneously collects
information about all citizens and then applies a "disposition matrix" to
determine what punishment should be meted out. This is classic political
dystopia brought to reality (despite how compelled such a conclusion is by
these indisputable facts, many Americans will view such a claim as an
exaggeration, paranoia, or worse because of this psychological dynamic I
described here which leads many good passive westerners to believe that true
oppression, by definition, is something that happens only elsewhere).

In response to the Post story, Chris Hayes asked: "If you have a 'kill list',
but the list keeps growing, are you succeeding?" The answer all depends upon
what the objective is.

As the Founders all recognized, nothing vests elites with power b and profit
b more than a state of war. That is why there were supposed to be substantial
barriers to having them start and continue - the need for a Congressional
declaration, the constitutional bar on funding the military for more than two
years at a time, the prohibition on standing armies, etc. Here is how John
Jay put it in Federalist No 4:

    "It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that
nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting
anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations
are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal,
such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition,
or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or
partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind
of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice
or the voice and interests of his people."

In sum, there are factions in many governments that crave a state of endless
war because that is when power is least constrained and profit most abundant.
What the Post is reporting is yet another significant step toward that state,
and it is undoubtedly driven, at least on the part of some, by a
self-interested desire to ensure the continuation of endless war and the
powers and benefits it vests. So to answer Hayes' question: the endless
expansion of a kill list and the unaccountable, always-expanding powers
needed to implement it does indeed represent a great success for many. Read
what John Jay wrote in the above passage to see why that is, and why few, if
any, political developments should be regarded as more pernicious.  Detention
policies

Assuming the Post's estimates are correct b that "among senior Obama
administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are
likely to be extended at least another decade" b this means that the war on
terror will last for more than 20 years, far longer than any other American
war. This is what has always made the rationale for indefinite detention b
that it is permissible to detain people without due process until the "end of
hostilities" b so warped in this context. Those who are advocating that are
endorsing nothing less than life imprisonment - permanent incarceration b
without any charges or opportunities to contest the accusations.

That people are now dying at Guantanamo after almost a decade in a cage with
no charges highlights just how repressive that power is. Extend that
mentality to secret, due-process-free assassinations b something the US
government clearly intends to convert into a permanent fixture of American
political life b and it is not difficult to see just how truly extremist and
anti-democratic "war on terror" proponents in both political parties have
become.

UPDATE

As I noted yesterday, Afghan officials reported that three Afghan children
were killed on Saturday by NATO operations. Today, reports CNN, "missiles
blew up part of a compound Wednesday in northwest Pakistan, killing three
people - including one woman" and added: "the latest suspected U.S. drone
strike also injured two children." Meanwhile, former Obama press secretary
and current campaign adviser Robert Gibbs this week justified the US killing
of 16-year-old American Abdulrahaman Awlaki, killed by a US drone in Yemen
two weeks after his father was, on the ground that he "should have a far more
responsible father".

Also yesterday, CNN profiled Abu Sufyan Said al-Shihri, alleged to be a top
al-Qaida official in Yemen. He pointed out "that U.S. drone strikes are
helping al-Qaida in Yemen because of the number of civilian deaths they
cause." Ample evidence supports his observation.

To summarize all this: the US does not interfere in the Muslim world and
maintain an endless war on terror because of the terrorist threat. It has a
terrorist threat because of its interference in the Muslim world and its
endless war on terror.

UPDATE II

The Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko, writing today about the Post
article, reports:

    "Recently, I spoke to a military official with extensive and wide-ranging
experience in the special operations world, and who has had direct exposure
to the targeted killing program. To emphasize how easy targeted killings by
special operations forces or drones has become, this official flicked his
hand back over and over, stating: 'It really is like swatting flies. We can
do it forever easily and you feel nothing. But how often do you really think
about killing a fly?'"

That is disturbingly consistent with prior reports that the military's term
for drone victims is "bug splat". This - this warped power and the
accompanying dehumanizing mindset - is what is being institutionalized as a
permanent fixture in American political life by the current president.
UPDATE III

At Wired, Spencer Ackerman reacts to the Post article with an analysis
entitled "President Romney Can Thank Obama for His Permanent Robotic Death
List". Here is his concluding paragraph:

    "Obama did not run for president to preside over the codification of a
global war fought in secret. But that's his legacy. . . . Micah Zenko at the
Council on Foreign Relations writes that Obama's predecessors in the Bush
administration 'were actually much more conscious and thoughtful about the
long-term implications of targeted killings', because they feared the
political consequences that might come when the U.S. embraces something at
least superficially similar to assassination. Whoever follows Obama in the
Oval Office can thank him for proving those consequences don't meaningfully
exist b as he or she reviews the backlog of names on the Disposition Matrix."

It's worth devoting a moment to letting that sink in.