President Obama is wielding several security powers that have been historically controversial among Democrats, from indefinitely detaining Guantánamo prisoners to shutting down torture lawsuits as “state secrets” that cannot be addressed in court. There has not been a major Democratic backlash, but all the recent attention on Obama’s “kill list” -- a set of targets that has included American citizens as young as 16 years old -- seemed like an opening for a new chapter in challenging the administration’s security policies.
For starters, the kill list is just different. Many divisive security measures linked to the Bush administration have been inherently convoluted -- Obama’s team had to clean up a mess while developing new policies on the fly. For example, take the Bush-era detainees. Some are difficult to convict in civilian courts because the evidence against them was gathered through torture. Obama supporters understand that the administration’s options are more limited on this score, a predicament Daniel Klaidman stresses in his new chronicle of Obama’s terror policies, Kill or Capture.
The drone program, however, goes far beyond what Bush ever did. It was not required by the past. And it sets a stunning precedent for the future.
Essentially, the program kills people chosen through a secret government process, including Americans and individuals selected merely for being near other targets, with no due process or publicly asserted legal authority.
Yet so far, most elected Democrats, liberal interest groups and progressive commentators have almost entirely avoided the issue. (There are some notable exceptions: the ACLU, Glenn Greenwald, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jeremy Scahill, Eliot Spitzer, the blog FireDogLake, Democracy Now! and editorials by the New York Times and The Nation.) In the Senate, foreign policy–minded Democrats have focused more on criticizing the leak of the program than its content. In the House, 26 members did write a letter questioning the program. (It was led by Congressmen Kucinich and Conyers, longtime proponents of executive power oversight, and joined by two outlier Republicans, Ron Paul and Walter Jones.) The protests in the House don't have much of an outside game to fortify their effort: Most liberal groups are taking a pass during this election year. To pick one example, MoveOn.org, which is still pushing to close Guantánamo Bay in the Obama era, has not touched the kill list. People who oppose detention without trial, of course, usually oppose execution without trial.
Meanwhile, a few grassroots activists are making some noise. On the official White House website, activists recently used the “We The People” petition portal to tweak the drone program.
“Considering that the government already has a ‘Do Not Call’ list and a ‘No Fly’ list, we hereby request that the White House create a ‘Do Not Kill’ list in which American citizens can sign up to avoid being put on the president’s ‘kill list,’” explains the petition, “and therefore avoid being executed without indictment, judge, jury, trial or due process of law.”
The effort has drawn about 5,000 supporters. But it needs 20,000 more by June 29, in order to qualify for an official response from the White House.
The petition may sound like little more than a wry sideshow, but in the past, this administration’s avenues for online interaction have propelled neglected human rights issues into the conversation. When Obama was first elected, over 75,000 people voted for a question on his transition website asking whether torture allegations would be investigated or prosecuted. The administration initially dodged it, even though it was the most popular query, which sparked more interest in the topic. ABC’s George Stephanopoulis cited the popular question in an interview with Obama himself, thrusting a largely taboo issue into the national debate.
At the time, the grassroots interest in torture accountability seemed like it might reflect a new, digitally savvy human rights constituency. Now that Obama is the one testing the same human rights principles, however, the grassroots outrage is harder to find.
Michael Crowley, a reliably measured senior correspondent for Time, sums up the pushback to the kill list as a demonstration of “dismay from some usual suspects on the left, but little outrage overall.” The silence is striking, Crowley writes, because “not only is Barack Obama asserting extraordinary executive power in ways that would have made Bush-era Democrats howl,” but he is “overseeing a very strange transformation” of the presidency into an “executioner-in-chief.” It may be the strangest byproduct of Barack Obama’s high personal appeal -- he can legitimize extraordinary new powers without a debate, let alone an outcry.
Ari Melber writes for The Nation, where this was first published. He is on Tumblr and Twitter.
Follow Ari Melber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AriMelber
Tom Engelhardt: Praying at the Church of St. Drone
Michael Brenner: "Just War" or Just War?
Michael Brenner: America As Self-Declared Victim
Yet If we capture a criminal obviously guilty of the most heinous crimes, he is accorded every kind of chance to defend himself, have free lawyers, delay punishment almost indefinitely. Like Anthony Sowel here in Cleveland. Raped, tortured and killed 11 women and attacked many more. Who frankly ought to have been someone killed instead of captured.
If it is possible to identify combatants who are at the same time effectively international criminals, holed up in lawless regions, accessible only by drone, why not attack them that way? The American citizen part is the rare instance when someone born here goes over to the other side. He gets attacked along with the rest. It is in fact not legal to capture a bona fide combatant and try him for being one. We are obliged to hold him as a "POW" indefinitely. A built-in quandary in the Geneva Convention, based on assumptions no longer valid.
The concern should be the collateral damage, and outright mistakes. The alternative is to not pursue the action at all. I say, chilling as the concept of a "kill list" is, it is better than the two alternatives: carpet bombing, or do nothing.
And for those who can't make bail. They sit in jail for up to a year while the charade plays out.
A: That depends, is the president a Republican or a Democrat?
Their Foreign policy, their trade policy, their Wall Street policy seem very close!
Just an observation.
Whereas Obama himself was originally beholden to certain CEO's and upper management of the banking industry to get himself immediately up to speed in a crisis, and subsequently gave the industry itself a lot of slack, the banks have shut down their support of him now. Their money goes to Romney, for obvious reasons. He is one of them with a vengeance. They are massively in bed with Republicans now to get themselves the best deal. Truly, money never sleeps. Neither does it have allegiance.
If any of these acts were committed against us, we would be highly reactive, yet we meekly allow our government to do all this and more under the guise of "protecting" us. This should not be an issue for the right or the left to argue over. If any of us care about living under the rule of law and the bill of rights, we should all be protesting. It is another question entirely whether that would do any good.
as a LIBERAL, I am glad that the president both takes responsibility for the use of deadly force and uses a consistent, rational process to determine when to use deadly force.
Perhaps the real issue is with the common definition of liberal. Most "liberals" I know understand that force is sometimes necessary in the real world. Most "liberals" I know appreciate that someone is finally utilizing a rational process for determining the use of force. Most "liberals" I know value that someone is also taking responsibility for the use of force.
wait....how are you an INTJ....recognition of facts, evaluating situations are markers of an INTJ.....perhaps you need to take the test again
please...try practicing reading comprehension for once....
My statement "Most "liberals" I KNOW ...." (emphasis added) clearly limits the statements I make to those I know
Also the psychology of it. Terrorist exist to inspire terror. If they get the same by constantly looking into the sky and wondering if this is the day that a drone missile is going to hit their camp and wipe them out. Then I am all the more for it. This is how we should have fought terrorism from the start.
This one does. As comforting as it may be to live in a pollyannish bubble, there are people out there who would do us great harm (and I can understand why in some instances). I'd prefer we could accomplish this with no loss of civilians and recognize we create enemies when we drone.
Having said that, we've made our bed and have to sleep in it as best we can.
And anyone who supported the "liberation of Iraq" put a sock in it already as 100,000's of civilians died in that fiasco and your duplicitious attempts to bash Obama is without credibility.
The POTUS is fighting this the way it should of been from th get-go.
Semper Fidelis
I'll take that as a minor victory.