SALON– The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest today reports that “U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people.”  That’s no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization.  The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.

But buried in Priest’s article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret “hit list” of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture.  The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.  

Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced — falsely, as it turns out — that he was killed in one of those strikes.

Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”  They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

Read full article about the Presidential Assassination of US Citizens Abroad.

Written by Glenn Greenwald

Photo by flickr user DVID SHUB

SALON– The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest today reports that “U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people.”  

That’s no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization.  The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.

But buried in Priest’s article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret “hit list” of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture.  The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.  

Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced — falsely, as it turns out — that he was killed in one of those strikes.

Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”  They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens.  That’s just the essence of war.  That’s why it’s permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they’re captured and helplessly detained.  But combat is not what we’re talking about here.  The people on this “hit list” are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities.  More critically still, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the “battlefield” as the entire world.  So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks.  That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

Read full article about Presidential Assassination of U.S. Citizens.

© 2010 SALON

AMERICAN PROSPECT– Two weeks ago, Noor Uthman Mohammed sat in the same high-security military-commissions courtroom at Camp Justice, Guantánamo Bay, that was built to hold the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other September 11 defendants.

Clad in the white garments of a detainee who has had no recent “discipline” problems, Mohammed stroked his gray-flecked beard as the judge, Navy Cpt. Moira Modzelewski, set the next hearing for August. Mohammed’s presumptive trial date is in February 2011, nearly a decade after his 2002 capture in Pakistan alongside Abu Zubaydah. Zubaydah is perhaps best known as the first detainee to be subjected to waterboarding by the Bush administration.

Mohammed is one of the lucky ones. He is, after all, among the 35 Guantánamo detainees getting a trial and not one of the 50 the administration says are “too dangerous to release” but can’t be tried. His lawyers — while frustrated with the pace of the proceedings — are nonetheless relieved by the changes made to the military commissions.

“There are significant improvements both in terms of procedure, rights available, and rights to resources, in particular in death-penalty cases,” says Mike Berrigan, principal deputy chief defense counsel for the Office of Military Commissions. “But there’s a large hill to climb.” The size of that hill will become apparent in the coming weeks as reporters from all over the world descend on Guantánamo for the initial hearings in the case of Canadian national Omar Khadr, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 at the age of 15.

Howard Ross Cabot, a civilian attorney who is a part of Mohammed’s defense team, agrees. “Often times I read a lot of critical things about Guantánamo. It’s not that it’s great, but when you compare where we are today to where they were in 2002, 2003, 2004, we’re moving ahead,” Cabot says.

None of this is supposed to be happening. Barack Obama was elected having rejected the national-security policies of the Bush administration as a “false choice between security and liberty.” Just days after his inauguration, Obama signed an executive order mandating that the prison at Guantánamo Bay be closed within a year. Mohammed’s is the first of the new military-commission hearings to occur since that promise was broken. With the administration waffling on its original decision to try the 9-11 defendants in civilian court, the high-security courtroom where Mohammed’s hearing took place may yet serve its original purpose.

In the meantime, the ongoing existence of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay stands as a poignant symbol of the Obama administration’s failure to reverse the trajectory of U.S. national-security policy and of its ultimate decision to embrace the core framework of the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” The military commissions, for example, are fairer. They ban evidence gained through torture, put the burden on the government to argue that hearsay evidence is reliable, (in the past, the presumption went in the other direction), and now require judges to use virtually the same standards as civilian courts in evaluating classified evidence — all reforms put in place by the 2009 Military Commissions Act.

Continue reading about the Kinder, Gentler Gitmo.

© AMERICAN PROSPECT, 2010

Photo by flickr user Art Makes Me Smile