Why was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki killed?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I think the Obama Administration, and the president personally, has some explaining to do:

Though everyone already knew that U.S. forces killed American Al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki in a 2011 drone strike, the Obama administration only admitted in May that he was among four Americans targeted overseas. The government's justification for killing one of its own citizens without due process is still sketchy, though Attorney General Eric Holder assured us it was, "lawful, it was considered, and it was just." The White House has been even more evasive about why al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son was killed by a drone two weeks later, saying only that he and two other slain American citizens "were not specifically targeted by the United States." In a devastating New York Times op-ed published Thursday, his grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki demands to know why. "My grandson was killed by his own government," he writes. "The Obama administration must answer for its actions and be held accountable."

In the op-ed, Nasser al-Awlaki describes his grandson Abdulrahman as a typical teen who "watched The Simpsons, listened to Snoop Dogg, read Harry Potter and had a Facebook page with many friends." In September 2011 he left home without permission because he wanted to find his father. He turned up at a cousin's house in southern Yemen and called after learning of his father's death to say he was coming home. Two weeks later, Abdulrahman, his teenage cousin, and five other people were killed in an open-air restaurant.

Actually, I'm not sure an explanation is nearly enough. What we need is some accountability -- yes, from a president who claims he has the right -- and that it is both legal and just -- to kill American citizens, not to mention anyone else, simply by fiat.

Oh, and a 16-year old at that.

Did young Abdulrahman just have the wrong last name? Was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? It all seems rather suspicious, and terribly wrong, and hopefully, however, unlikely, Nasser's lawsuit will force some answers.

There's been a lot of focus recently on the killing of another minor at the hands of someone with a gun and an exaggerated sense of authority. This killing, like drone killing generally, may not involve racism and gross injustice in the legal system, but there are undeniable similarities nonetheless.

To George Zimmerman, and to those like him, Trayvon Martin was the Other, and he was targeted as such. But so too, for the wagers of America's endless "war on terror," most of it waged well out of sight, are the innocent Muslim victims of drones.

No, I'm not saying that Obama is like Zimmerman. I'm just saying that the killings are similarly troubling. There is understandable outrage over the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict, though at least Zimmerman was eventually charged and put on trial. There should be similar outrage at how the government is killing innocent people -- including children, including Americans -- in the name of the American people themselves.

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Denying reality: Surveillance state apologists and the obsequious submission to authority

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Ever since the Edward Snowden saga started, I've been writing "surveillance state apologists of the left" tweets, directed mainly at Obama-can-do-no-wrong types who seem to think there's nothing wrong with what the NSA is doing, with what's been authorized under the Patriot Act, and with what the country is doing generally in its effort to go after terrorists. In some cases, these surveillance state apologists are also drone war apologists. Generally, they're a-okay with the national security state, not least because it's one of their own running the show right now, and so they viciously attack Snowden, and Greenwald, and make fun of "emoprogs," and avoid actually having to address the nuts and bolts of what the government is doing in their name, and to them, and what that means for life, liberty, and privacy.

Great to see the surveillance state apologists of the left turn their head-up-the-ass venom on #Snowden and @ggreenwald again.
— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) July 1, 2013

At The Atlantic yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf, whom I admire greatly for his uncompromising views on drones, domestic surveillance, and other aspects of the national security apparatus, wrote about the "privacy moderates" in similar terms -- that is, about those who think that "the national-security state ought to be subject to more oversight, debate, scrutiny, and restrictions" but who also "contrive frames that enable them to criticize both the surveillance state and its antagonists, as if the excesses of both sides are commensurately important and worrisome," and who sometimes "even attack critics of the NSA more energetically than the surveillance state itself." He writes:

I am mystified by the "privacy moderate" who yearns for a debate about the surveillance state without anyone being so transgressive as to leak the information without which there would be no debate.

Indeed. I would just add that there are many not just in the "middle" but also on the left who aren't yearning for any such thing, so enamored are they of Obama, so much have they been taken in by the fearmongering propaganda that is the democracy-crushing currency of the national security state, the state of fear that it feeds to justify its acquisition of ever more power, justifying ever more intrusions into life, liberty, and privacy.

I highly recommend the whole piece, but the following passages stood out to me:

What I sense, but cannot prove, is the privacy moderate's desperation to avoid facing the full extent of the establishment's extreme behavior. Americans once condemned such excesses. The Obama Administration is nowhere near as morally odious as, e.g., the bygone East German state. But Americans didn't just criticize its surveillance apparatus, the Stasi, because the East German regime used it for evil. Quite apart from the character of the regime and its secret police, Americans found the very notion of secret, pervasive spying on innocent citizens repugnant. We found the notion of vast files kept on private citizens creepy, because that isn't the role the state ought to play in a free society. Today, the American state is engaged in intentionally spying on tens of millions of innocent citizens. It did its utmost to hide the truth about that spying. 

*****

In fact, the U.S. government is, right this second, pouring untold billions into what is ultimately an effort to monitor all digital communications; scan all mail; amass a fleet of surveillance drones that can hover in the sky for days on end; develop technology to scan all faces in crowds; assemble gigantic databases of biometric data; break all encryption efforts; indiscriminately spy on millions of citizens in friendly countries like Germany and Brazil; and share spy technologies with allies. None of that is in dispute. What's hyperbolic is calling people hysterical because they see the endgame of various plans to impose ever broader surveillance on whole societies. There isn't a government document somewhere titled, "The Plan to Destroy Global Privacy," but that is exactly what Western intelligence agencies will do if adequately funded and left, unopposed, to their own devices. Anyone who can't see that hasn't adequately grappled with the implications of Snowden's revelations, the history of spy agencies allowed to operate in secret, or the radical new capabilities that advances in data analysis and retention have given states (and are likely to give them in the near future if they aren't stopped).

As a matter of history, Constitutional theory, and policy, the people now running national security in the United States are surveillance-state extremists.

As I and many others keep saying, again and again and again, this isn't about Snowden or Greenwald, or anyone else for that matter. This is about the takeover of America by its national security elements, about the out-of-control growth of the "intelligence community" and its political and corporate allies, and about the challenge to meaningful democratic self-governance that this entails.

But we can't talk about that, can we? Because too many people who should know better are content to live in willful ignorance, attacking those who expose the truth and pretending that all's well even as everything they supposedly stand for is being crushed.

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Barack Obama and the end of the War on Terror

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There's a lot to dislike about the way President Obama has handled the so-called war on terror -- the continuation of much of the Bush-Cheney national security state; the kill list and the drone war -- but he showed yesterday in his thoughtful speech at the National Defense University that he understands the nature of the problem -- that is, both the threat to America and the way America responds to that threat -- and recognizes the need for change.

Indeed, as is so often the case with him, what was truly remarkable was not just his intellectual grasp of the enormously complex world beyond America's borders but the maturity with which he was able to explain that complexity to an audience, the broader American and global audience as well as those in attendance, that is demanding answers without really understanding the questions, that is often at odds with itself, and that often wants simplistic solutions. And he laid out a plan for further action that was at once nuanced and crystal clear.

Now, that doesn't mean I agree with all of it. His strenuous defense of the use of drone strikes -- they are effective; they are legal; they save lives -- hardly resolves the matter. The U.S. may be going after terrorists, and Obama may be exercising caution in the use of drones, but the drone war still kills and terrorizes not just those who wish to do America harm but innocents as well, and, of course, there is still the matter of the astonishing amount of power, including over life and death for many -- that has been vested in the office of the president and that Obama has at his disposal. He is certainly right that "[t]o say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance," and that sort of self-reflection is welcome, but it is not clear that the much-ballyhooed "framework" is enough to prevent abuse.

But, look, like this or not, and obviously many on the left do not, Obama said what needed to be said:

America does not take strikes to punish individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat.  And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set.

Now, this last point is critical, because much of the criticism about drone strikes — both here at home and abroad — understandably centers on reports of civilian casualties. There's a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties and nongovernmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in every war. And for the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred throughout conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives. To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties — not just in our cities at home and our facilities abroad, but also in the very places like Sana'a and Kabul and Mogadishu where terrorists seek a foothold. Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes. So doing nothing is not an option. 

Again, I'm not saying that this is the end of it, that we should just take him at his word, or that it's all good now. Far from it. But this... this is leadership. Like it or not. Agree with him or not. The world is a crazy place and he's the president of the world's most powerful country. The choices aren't always clear, and there's rarely a clear good and a clear evil. Those who criticize him, as I myself have done, should consider what they would do were they burdened with those reponsibilities -- doing what needs to be done to protect the country and its people, and providing leadership both at home and around the world, while also operating within a democratic system at home that is anything but easy to navigate -- what they would do were they sitting in the Oval Office with the final say on what is done.

Of course, huge questions remain: What will come of this "larger discussion we need to have about a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy"? What about these "proposals to extend oversight of lethal actions outside of warzones that go beyond our reporting to Congress"? How will he "[address] the underlying grievances and conflicts that feed extremism"? How will the U.S. "patiently [support] transitions to democracy in places like Egypt and Tunisia and Libya"? How will he address "the daunting challenge of terrorism from within our borders"? What about the drone war? What about Gitmo? What about the paralysis of hyper-partisanship, mostly from Republicans, in Capitol Hill?

The problem with Obama has always been the gap the separates rhetoric from reality, from action. He talks big, in other words, without always following through. The rhetoric was excellent yesterday. On the one hand, he laid out a plan of action to protect the country and advance its values and objectives while also ending the era of "perpetual war" that continues to plague the country. On the other hand, it was an extremely self-defensive, if also self-aware, speech, and the concern is that it's just a new spin on the same old policies. We shall see.

There's good reason to be cynical when you pay attention to U.S. politics, and maybe I'm just not in the mood for such cynicism. Certainly I have often given Obama the benefit of the doubt throughout his presidency, and maybe I still want to have hope, to believe that meaningful change is possible. But there's no denying that what he brings to the job is mature, thoughtful leadership -- and, yes, you can lead by giving speeches, by trying to influence public opinion through rhetoric.

Disagree with him, if you want. Yes, by all means, disagree with him -- we should, we must, have a larger discussion about where we go from here. And hold him accountable. Yes, make sure what he says isn't just empty rhetoric. But imagine if it were Romney giving this speech, or McCain, or those many others who think that chanting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" amounts to a foreign policy. President Obama is not saying America is the best and leaving it at that. He's not saber-rattling. He's not hiding behind the flag. He's inviting us to think about what it means to be America, and to express American power, in this complicated age. And when you think about it, that's pretty amazing, like what he had to say or not.

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