Assassin in Chief

Robert Scheer writes

So now we have Rambo Obama, a steely warrior who, according to a lengthy leaked insider account in The New York Times, hurls death-dealing drones at anyone who threatens the good old USA. Including children. Those children are presumed guilty by virtue of proximity, and the Times plays along, not even modifying a targeted terrorist with the word “alleged,” as once had been the paper’s convention: “When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises—but his family is with him—it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”

Obama as the cool triggerman is an image useful to White House operatives as they buff the president’s persona for the coming election. But what it reveals is the mindset of a political cynic whose seductive words cloak the moral indifference of a methodical executioner. Forget Harry Truman, who obliterated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Lyndon Johnson, who carpet-bombed millions in Vietnam. The Democrats have got themselves another killer, one whose techniques are as devastatingly effective, but brilliantly refined.

The story obviously was planted in The New York Times to benefit the Obama political campaign. Otherwise, why would the president’s former chief of staff, William Daley, and three dozen current and past intelligence insiders provide the newspaper with the most sensitive details of national security decision-making?

Pfc. Bradley Manning was held for many months in solitary confinement for allegedly disclosing information of far lower security classification. The difference is that the top secrets in the news article are ones the president wants leaked in the expectation they will burnish his “tough on terrorism” credentials. This is clearly not the Obama whom many voted for in the hope that he would stick by his word, including the pledge he made on his second day in office to ban brutal interrogation and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. “What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes,” the Times now reports concerning the early promises by Obama. “They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric.”

Parse that sentence carefully to learn much of what is morally decrepit in our journalism as well as politics. The word “realist” is now identical to “hypocrite,” and the condemnation of immoral behavior addresses nothing more than “rhetoric” that only the “fervent” would take seriously. The Times writers all but thrill to the lying, as in recounting the new president’s response to advisers who warned him against sticking to his campaign promises on Guantanamo prisoners: “The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice was followed.”

How telling that reporters who might as well be PR flacks are so admiring of the power of “wiggle words” to free a politician from accountability to the voters who put him in office: “A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies—rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention—that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

The Obama answer to those human rights groups is the same as that offered by George W. Bush: Get the Justice Department to say that anything goes. When Obama wanted to kill “an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial,” the Times tells us, “[t]he Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” Obama approved, and two American citizens were assassinated, including Samir Khan, who was not on any official list of targeted terrorists. “This is an easy one,” Obama told his chief of staff.

What makes such decisions particularly easy is that Obama does not have to release any details of drone attacks or the legal rulings of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that justify the assassinations—exactly the practice that Bush followed in regard to the OLC briefs that he cited for the legality of his torture policy. Michael Hayden, a director of the CIA under Bush and now an adviser to presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney, accurately described the danger that this poses to a democratic society: “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable. I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe.”

But imperial plutocracies do.

I wrote much on this in an article for Veer Magazine back in April saying, Welcome to the future you were warned about by notables like President Eisenhower who said, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist." Remember also President Truman's admonition; “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency --- For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.” And here we are. The National Security State, according to former insiders, has become so powerful it renders the Republic a sham -- a powerless puppet show.

But back to now. President Obama came in on high hopes as a constitutional scholar who campaigned on a platform of reining in the power of the Executive, ending torture, and closing our prison in Guantanamo. His inauguration was seen by many as an end to a dark period of repression, war, government spying on citizens, and torture. Alas, in this regard his presidency has proven a disappointment. If anything, Obama has expanded the power of the Executive and of the National Security apparatus and continues to do so. On December 31, 2011 Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012. This act authorizes the government, via the military, to arrest anyone, including American Citizens, and hold us indefinitely without charges or due process. Or as Glenn Greenwald points out, with Obama and his Justice Department legal advisers' distortion o "due process" to the point of eliminating it, kill us.

So, here we are, in a time when our President can order the assassination of anyone, including American citizens without due process. Where a National Security state more powerful and not answerable to Congress can arrest and disappear any of us for any or no reason without charges, where drones roam the globe killing guilty and innocent alike and have now been okay'd for domestic surveillance, and where the President has the authority, under the recently signed National Defense Resources Preparedness order to take control of all energy, production, transportation, food, and even water resources by decree – even in peacetime. What can we do?

Occupy the streets and halls of power! Resist!. Shut It Down!