January 8, 2013 |
On President Barack Obama's second full day in the Oval Office in
2009, he signed important executive orders that signaled a clear break
with the excesses of George W. Bush's “war on terror.” Obama decreed
that the Guantanamo Bay prison camp would be closed in a year and that
the United States would no longer perpetrate torture. No longer would
men, some of them innocent, languish without charges in what has been
described as an American gulag by Amnesty International. No longer would
men be subjected to brutal interrogation tactics that clearly amounted
to torture, like water boarding.
The orders would “restore the
standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have
made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with
terrorism,” said Obama.
Fast-forward to today. Guantanamo remains
open, warrantless wiretapping continues, and drone strikes have
accelerated, leading to the deaths of innocent civilians and a burst in
support for anti-American forces in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Instead
of breaking with the Bush era, Obama has codified and permanently
institutionalized the “war on terror” framework that has characterized
American foreign policy since the September 11, 2001 attacks. And they
have done all of this largely in secret, refusing to open up about how
drone strikes are decided on. So while torture has been thrown out of
the American playbook, other black marks remain. Obama has done
everything but restore “core constitutional values” to how the U.S.
conducts itself around the world.
Perhaps the most potent symbol
of Obama's willingness to institutionalize Bush-era frameworks for
dealing with terrorism is his January 2013 appointment of John Brennan
as new Central Intelligence Agency director. Brennan was a key supporter
of many Bush-favored tactics used by the CIA, including torture and
extraordinary rendition. When Obama first contemplated appointing
Brennan in his first term to the post he's been appointed to now, the
outcry was swift and Brennan pulled out from consideration. Now, the
reaction has been meek—a symbol of how Bush-era military and
intelligence tactics have become normalized to the extent that nobody
bats an eye when a man with a sordid record at the CIA is appointed to
head up the entire agency.
Obama has kept the U.S. on a permanent
war footing with no end in sight through a variety of methods. Here are
five ways the Obama administration has institutionalized the
never-ending war on terror.
1. Drones
The
image of the gray, pilotless aircraft flying through the sky to
eventually rain hellfire down will be indelibly tied to Obama. His
administration has made drone strikes in countries like Yemen, Somalia
and Pakistan the weapon of choice when it comes to dealing with
suspected militants. You have to look at the numbers of drone strikes
under the Bush and Obama administrations to truly appreciate how Obama
has taken this Bush tool and increased its use exponentially.
The
first drone strike in U.S. history occurred in 2002, when a CIA-operated
drone fired on three men in Afghanistan. The drone strikes have since
migrated over to battlefields away from U.S.-declared wars. In Pakistan,
the Bush administration carried out a total of 52 strikes,
according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
which closely tracks drone strikes. That led to the deaths of an
estimated 438 people, including 182 civilians and 112 children. But the
Obama administration has ordered at least 300 drone strikes in
Pakistan—and Obama's second term has yet to begun. Those strikes have
killed about 2,152 people, including 290 civilians, of whom 64 were
children.
The drone strikes also have a devastating impact beyond the deaths reported. As a
New York University/Stanford University study
on drone strikes stated, the constant buzzing of drones in the sky
“terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and
psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under
drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired
at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect
themselves.”
Instead of looking forward to how this permanent
drone war might end, the Obama administration has decided to
institutionalize the process. In October 2012, the
Washington Post revealed
that the administration had undertaken a two-year long strategy to
institutionalize what has become known as the “kill list,” or the list
of suspected terrorists the Obama administration unilaterally decides to
kill by drone strikes. The administration calls it the “disposition
matrix,” which refers to the different plans the administration has to
“dispose” of suspected militants. The
Post described the
“matrix” as part of “the highly classified practice of targeted killing,
transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure
capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.”
2. Warrantless Wiretapping
One
of the enduring scandals of the George W. Bush years was that
administration's practice of wiretapping American citizens with no
warrant in order to spy on suspected terrorists. The
New York Times,
which broke the story in 2005, reported that “months after the Sept. 11
attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security
Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to
search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved
warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.” The move raised
concerns that the Bush administration was crossing constitutional limits
on wiretapping Americans.
But the outcry from those concerned
with civil liberties has largely been muted in the Obama era. In late
December 2012, President Obama signed an extension of a law that allows
the U.S. to “eavesdrop on communications and review email without
following an open and public warrant process,” as NPR summed it up. The
law was an extension of the 2008 law that legalized the Bush
administration's wiretapping of American citizens.
As national security blogger Marcy Wheeler notes in a
recent piece for the Nation,
the president's signature on the new bill on wiretapping means that the
U.S. “has nearly unrestrained authority to eavesdrop on those who
communicate with people outside the country. The government doesn’t even
need to show that these foreign targets are terrorists or that the
conversations center around a plot. This means any international
communication may be subject to wiretapping.”
3. Proxy Detentions
Under
the Bush administration, the process of “extraordinary rendition”
involved abducting people accused of terrorism and shipping them off to
another country where they were interrogated and tortured. The Obama
administration has continued to use foreign countries to detain and
interrogate suspects, but the details of how they do it are changed from
the Bush era. Still, the overall practice of using other security
forces to do your dirty work remains in place.
The Washington Postreported on January 1
that “the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of
holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without
due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the
years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” While the Post used the term
“rendition,” the more accurate term would be “proxy detention,” as
Mother Jones pointed out.
The
most recent iterations of the practice of using other countries to
detain suspects the U.S. wants to interrogate have been in countries
like Dijibouti and Nigeria. The
Post reported on one December
2011 case in which an man from Eritrea “revealed that he had been
questioned in a Nigerian jail by what a U.S. interrogator described as
a 'dirty' team of American agents who ignored the suspect’s right to
remain silent or have a lawyer, according to court proceedings.”
Other cases have been publicized by
Mother Jones.
The magazine reported on the case of Yonas Fikre, a Muslim-American
from Oregon who was detained in the United Arab Emirates. There, Fikre
and his lawyers claim, he was beaten and held in stress positions. He
claims there was cooperation between the FBI and UAE security forces. So
the FBI was using the UAE forces to detain people the U.S. wanted to
interrogate.
4. Guantanamo
Although the
continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay camp is hardly the sole fault
of President Obama, it does symbolize the abject failure to reject the
Bush administration's approach to terrorism.
While it's important
to note that the Republican Party has blocked Obama's desire to close
Guantanamo, he has not expended political capital on closing the prison
and has signed bills that restrict his ability to do so. The most recent
bill concerning Guantanamo Bay crossed his desk at the beginning of the
year.
Despite threatening to veto the bill because it restricted
the executive branch's authority, Obama signed it, and curtailed his own
ability to move ahead on closing the infamous camp, where people have
languished without charge for years on end. The National Defense
Authorization Act of 2013, where the Guantanamo provisions are included,
restricts “the transfer of detainees into the United States for any
purpose, including trials in federal court. It also requires the defense
secretary to meet rigorous conditions before any detainee can be
returned to his own country or resettled in a third country,”
according to the Washington Post.
Human
rights activists blasted the move. “Indefinite detention without trial
at Guantanamo is illegal, unsustainable and against U.S. national
security interests, and it needs to end,” Human Rights Watch's Andrea
Prasow told the
Post. “The administration should not continue
to just blame Congress. President Obama should follow through on his
earlier commitments and make the effort to overcome the transfer
restrictions.”
5. Indefinite Detention
This issue, over all the others, says loud and clear that the Obama administration is preparing for an endless war on terror.
Domestically,
indefinite detention reared its ugly head back in December 2011, when
President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, a
defense funding bill. Included in the bill was a provision allowing for
indefinite military detention without charge or trial. Despite concerns
raised by civil liberties activists, Obama signed the bill into law,
although an executive signing statement vowed that the president would
“not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of
American citizens.”
That has not allayed the concerns of civil
liberties groups. The American Civil Liberties Union states: “The NDAA’s
dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all
future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely
imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any
battlefield....Under the Bush administration, similar claims of
worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen
detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now
assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again.”
While
no American citizens have been detained under the law yet, indefinite
detention has been a hallmark of the war in Afghanistan. Thousands of
detainees have remained in Bagram Air Field, including non-Afghan
detainees. Picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan, they have been
held for years without charge or trial.
“Since 2002, the U.S.
government has detained indefinitely thousands of people there in harsh
conditions and without charge, without access to lawyers, without access
to courts, and without a meaningful opportunity to challenge their
detention,” the
ACLU notes.
So
as the Obama administration fills out its cabinet posts and prepares
for another four years, the permanent war on terror will stay with us.
From drones to proxy detentions to indefinite detention, the
constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office has institutionalized and
expanded some of the worst hallmarks of the lawless Bush era.
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