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URING his inauguration, President Obama spoke of an America of open roads and bright vistas. His words sculpted the figure of a government of equity and enlightenment, one that promoted moral strength through law and fairness not one that found its way through naked might. Barely three weeks later, this comely figurine was shattered, its halo replaced by the spiked helmet and mailed fist of realpolitik. Once again, the President proved to be master of the cynical art of acting in direct contradiction to ideals publicly stated. The man is often steered by a strange countergauge where the more passionately he espouses an idea, the more latitude he takes in breaching it. This past week saw the purported leak of a Justice Department memorandum justifying the extrajudicial killing of suspected American-citizen terrorists. The alleged leak occurred as his nominee for CIA Director, John Brennan, a prime advocate of the drone bombing program, appeared for Congressional confirmation hearings. Releasing the salacious document beforehand, the leak was an Administration stratagem to minimize the drama that might come if the news was first unveiled at the unscripted public hearings. This way, everyone would expect Brennan's hearing testimony to accord with the memo; thus, his position would be more anti-climatic than shocking. The preview afforded by the memo would have significantly dulled the public conscience. The foibles of human nature being as they are, people might have gotten irritated, even angered, by first hearing the discomfiting views from the curmudgeon Brennan. However, it is more difficult for people to be aroused by an impersonal, anonymous document. We are more apt to erupt at another person but not at a piece of paper despite the inescapable fact that the writing came from a human hand and that the views therein are as egregious as they come. If the American constitution were a walled city, this memo would represent the Mongols, Vandals and Huns combined for one protracted, merciless siege. Never in post-Civil War America has the Justice Department taken the axe to the constitution as have Obama's attorneys. That this unmitigated assault on civil liberties is presided over by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, two men of color, is a black day in Black History. After the large injustices our race has suffered at the hands of arrogant power gone mad, it travesties our peculiar story that two Black men would stand as henchmen for an attack on the precious liberties that have offered their people partial solace from inequity through the years. It seems power not only intoxicates, it deadens the memory of those who come to wield it without due preparation. While the memo shall live to serve the national security complex's short-term interests, it will be recorded in the pages of American history as a blatant retrogression in the face of a millennium of Anglo-American jurisprudence limiting the arbitrary powers of the king and executive. The paper shall not endure as an important contribution to the republic. It shall go down as a permanent blot on the names of these two lawyers. The slipshod memo allows the government can kill an American citizen without resort to criminal charge or trial if that person is in Al Qaeda or an "affiliated force." This is first of several loopholes. Notorious Al Qaeda membership reasonably places a person on notice that he skates on thin ice with sharks and piranha lurking in the water below. However, the phrase "affiliated force" casts a broad and vague shadow. Eluding clear definition, the phrase can be used to encompass many activities, groups and persons a layman would consider legitimate. An organization engaged in nonviolent opposition to American policy can be such a force since it lends moral support to Al Qaeda. A humanitarian organization providing essential social services in a neighbor-
THE NATION ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2013
Droning out of democracy •A ruler's lust for power is the people's loss of liberty.
•Obama
•Holder
BRIAN BROWNE
hood where some Al Qaeda operatives dwelt might fall into this category. One cannot expect the national security agencies of the present Administration to define the term with prudent narrowness. These agencies are no more improved than they were under the Bush government. These same agencies encouraged war against another sovereign nation based on false information from a mercenary intelligence source. The byproduct was the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq. The agencies are still unrepentant about this mortal folly. If the agencies could help author an unnecessary and harsh war placing an entire nation in the manacles of grief, what reticence would they harbor at the destruction of a life here or there? There would be no reticence. Remember, the Obama's Administration's Pentagon and FBI quickly labeled the pacifist, neo-beatnik Occupy Wall Street movement as potential domestic terrorists simply because people erected tents in public parks and made a nuisance of themselves to the moneyed elite by sitting before the front doors of New York's biggest financial houses. In a prior generation, these acts would have been deemed rather staid manifestations of civil disobedience. Today, the activity is viewed by authorities as a national security threat. Whatever those in power dislike can now be called terrorism and the innocent actors may well be susceptible to a terrorist's curt fate. Beyond this nebulous language, there is no attempt to define and thus apprise people of what type of behavior may place them in grave danger of being deemed a member of an affiliated force. The memo further holds that an American citizen must present an imminent threat before being summarily killed. This sounds rational. Sadly, the missive then treats the word "imminent" with the acme of sophistry. The memo slyly mentions the government uses "a broader conception of imminence" than what is commonplace. In this loophole, one can bury a multitude of abuses. Whoso-
ever penned the phrase "a broader conception" should win the maiden Nobel Prize for Best Understatement in Pursuit of Unnecessary War. The standard dictionary and definitions of "imminent" are cast out the window like litter sudden caught aflame in a moving car. The government says imminent does not require evidence of an attack in the immediate future. The person does not have to be actively engaged in planning or executing a plot. Once he is deemed a terrorist, the imminence of an attack is assumed. The person can be executed without any connection to any activity. Thus, the requirement of an imminent attack is a figment. It is an illusory condition because the memo so redefines "imminent" as to mean its opposite. The memo then gives "an informed, high-level US official" the power to determine which Americans can be executed. The government is bold enough to take a life but too secretive to tell us in whose hands such power has been vested. Presumably, the official is the president but the memo provides leeway for him to delegate such grave decisions to anonymous bureaucrats who work the shadows and thus believe they can act with impunity because the multiple layers of an increasingly secretive bureaucracy shields their actions from public glare. This is not the menu of democracy. It is fare of the incipient beginnings of a police state. That President Obama and his Attorney General countenance such a memo tells much about the steep diminution of American democracy. The memo's doublespeak is not written in the spirit of democracy. Not since slavery has such tortured language been employed to give official imprimatur to the immoral taking and abuse of human life. Back then, slavery was deemed the "necessary evil." Today, the unconstitutional taking of a life is sanitized as being an exercise in protection of the "greater good." But this is not the way of modern America. Its yeast is of foreign origins. Stalin or Mussolini would understand and approve this memo; its
•Brennan stilted words trace the crooked paths their minds worked. No Department that truly believes in Justice would have written this lewd assignment. This memo reads as if from the archives of the KGB or East Germany's dreaded Stasi not from the halls of democracy. Despite the legal embroidery, the memo is an instrument of constitutional infringement without modern peer. In violation of the constitution's Fifth Amendment, it claims government has the right to execute a citizen minus involvement in a crime. By giving the executive arm the power to decide who is a terrorist and how to punish the person, the presidency arrogates to itself the powers of the judiciary, again breaching the constitution's requirement of due process. The implied theme of the memo is that since government is intent on killing terrorists, anyone killed must be a terrorist. This Jesuitical reasoning is of the same inimical leaven that haughty governments have used down the centuries: since they always do the right thing, to question their actions is unpatriotic, if not outright felonious. This was the way of the Star Chamber and the Inquisition. The legacies of both are mired in poison and innocent blood. Here, we reach the crux of the matter. Mankind has struggled for centuries against the wiles and whims of absolute power. Should war now be apt, it is not war against terrorism that should be called forth. It is a war against the excess of government upon the liberty of the individual. It is a sad tale indeed that the American government now leads the assault against the very freedoms it once held dear. It is obvious that no government should be allowed to take life without an impartial judge scrutinizing the fatal action. When government kills someone, people should hope the executed was a genuine terrorist; but they ought not to accept the government's word on it. They must put government to the test of verification lest their lives become endangered by government run amok for government without restraint is government run amok. If government is so sure about the accuracy of its conclusions, it has no reason to fear scrutiny from a neutral judge. A republic cannot long endure when the people are told government's judgments are infallible and beyond reproach. People know the assertion to be false. If they acquiesce, it is not due to the validity of the claim but due to the timidity of the populace. This topic may seem far afield for Africa and Nigeria. Yet it is closer than you would like. Last month, America announced the establishment of a drone base in Niger. The drones are
purportedly for surveillance; it is but a slight operation change to move from aerial surveillance to airstrikes. If the American government can assume such a cavalier attitude to executing American citizens, imagine the lack of care that will be given the decimation of distant Africans. Second, African nations seem enamored with America. But the America you now see is not America the great or the beautiful. It is American the arrogant, a spoiled, inconsiderate child of those previous generations that forged a fine republic on the western shores of the North Atlantic. To mimic the ways and manner of the current America is to echo the faltering of democracy not it blossoming. Never in American history has a president supported the proposition that, outside the tides of hot combat, the government can kill a citizen an American without prior resort to judicial process. President Obama has assumed powers characteristic of an authoritarian despot on the defensive due to a serious civil insurrection. Like his predecessor, Obama claims America is at war against terrorism. At the mention of "war" and "terrorism" patriots are expected to stand erect, salute fall in line and proffer no questions. The so called war against terrorism is a misnomer just as is the war against drugs. I dare not think what may be the new remedy in the war again poverty. Given the morose logic of the drone memo, they perhaps will conclude the best way to fight poverty is to do away with poor people! Despite the horrific tragedy of September 11, Al Qaeda never presented an existential threat to American national security. The terrorists cannot bring America to her knees. Weighed against the vast history of warfare, the contest of America against terrorism is at most a skirmish. The most serious threat to America is not Al Qaeda or other terrorists but America's overreaction to them. America has been willing to peel apart is democracy and forfeit its trove of civil liberties in pursuit of an enemy that offers no mortal threat. This is akin to using a shotgun to fell a gnat buzzing at your ear. You may well get the insect but you will blow away a precious portion of your anatomy in the dumb process. America can be effective against terrorism without shedding the civil liberties that made it special. To do so, its political leaders must summon the courage to withstand the pressure applied by the military and national security industry to turn the nation and the larger part of the globe into an armed and fenced encampment. In the end, the process envisioned by the bestial memo will be used and terrorists will be killed as a result. Many innocent people will be done in as well. Never in the history of mankind has the executive assumed such broad powers without severely abusing them. President Obama is not so exceptional that he can cheat history on this point. He has and will continue to kill innocent people in the exaggerated expression of a war that does not exist in the form and to the extent that his generals and security advisors counsel him. Because the monsters they fight are more imaginary than real, their behavior in combating these inflated foes risks detaching Obama and his advisors from reality. They have entered a self-righteous cocoon where they believe only they have the requisite knowledge, information and wisdom to render the sensitive decision. The more the people ask for openness, the more these leaders resent the democratic urgings. They will become more secretive and become more aggressive in their execution of would be terrorists to prove the rightness of their ways and means. They believe they will be protecting the beloved republic. In actuality, they will do more damage than any terrorist could ever mount. America will gradually cease being a nation of law and rights. It will become one of might and the expedient. At that point, the august bald eagle will fly from the nest because it has fallen and been given over to the wolves and jackals of the age. 08060340825 (sms only)