From Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic:
The second notable statement concerns the killing of 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
Tom Junod gives the back story:
He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their country — they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs against America and Americans: the rare man of words who could be said to have a body count. When he was killed, on September 30, 2011, President Obama made a speech about it; a few months later, when the Obama administraton’s public-relations campaign about its embrace of what has come to be called “targeted killing” reached its climax in a front-page story in the New York Times that presented the President of the United States as the last word in deciding who lives and who dies, he was quoted as saying that the decision to put Anwar al-Awlaki on the kill list — and then to kill him — was “an easy one.” But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn’t on an American kill list.
Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he “an inspiration,” as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone “operational,” as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests. He was a boy who hadn’t seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family’s home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he’d lived while on his search, and the friends he’d made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.
How does Team Obama justify killing him?
The answer Gibbs gave is chilling:
ADAMSON: …It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he’s underage. He’s a minor.
GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.
Again, note that this kid wasn’t killed in the same drone strike as his father. He was hit by a drone strike elsewhere, and by the time he was killed, his father had already been dead for two weeks.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that the US government is planning on “adding names to kill or capture lists for years“:
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. U.S. 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.
Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.
Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.
given the dire financial straits the US finds itself in and the casual attitude to murder, i’m surprised the Drone terror strikes aren’t the basis of some kind of lucrative, sponsored Game Show.
>> Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.
Perpetual war. Business is good!
I remember reading that someone once presented Joseph Stalin with a list of names, and that he took out his pencil and checked a lot of them. Next day those checked were all dead. It seems that the check-marks were interpreted as a kill-indicator by whoever next got the paper.
So easy. BTW, in the story, Stalin had intended something else by the check-marks.
Oh, well. But seriously! Must be rather intoxicating to receive (or give yourself) the power to kill anyone you like. Even to the point of creating this power and then passing it on to the next president, whoever that might be. But that’d be OK, because the next president must be a decent fella, what with being president and all.
Anyone who opposes, or is presumed to oppose, the aggression of the US can become a candidate for the kill list. The mission of subjugation allows for any capability; our capitalist dictatorship provides the incredible capacity. Unconditional defeat has been the recent historical remedy for regimes with the global domination plans of the US and revolution appears impossible. Decay from within, caused by the dehumanization of being the oppressor and the imposition of austerity may eventually end American terror.
The targeted killing policy is beneath the nonsensical “war on terror” umbrella which is itself under the even more rediculous “they hate us because we’re free” umbrella. One of the big disappointments of the Obama years has been his failure, and the failure of the congreess, to even attempt to change the narrative about who our enemies are and why we’re fighting them. Since Bush uttered the words “war on terror” the conflict has been cast as an exclusively ideological struggle, a “clash of civilizations”, pitting American enlightenment against Arab barbarism. Without acknowledging the central, political motivations of Al Qaida, et al., we will remain committed to fighting a mirage, a fight that will include more dead Americans as per the President’s ‘enemies of the state’ claims, his war on terror and his kill list.