Month: May 2013

President Obama is scheduled to give a speech tomorrow at the National Defense University on national security and counterterrorism policy. Many are eagerly awaiting an unprecedented moment of candor, expecting the president at least to clarify certain ‘ambiguities’ (read: utter lack of transparency) on the legal and moral approach to his war on terror.

While the president may mention the drone war, I predict he will fail to address the most hard-hitting questions about its (il)legality.

There is a reason the Obama administration has kept the drone war secret, and it’s not about protecting sources and methods. The real reason is to shield the White House from accountability for crimes committed.

This was articulated rather well by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in deciding on a lawsuit brought against the Obama administration by The New York Times for not disclosing more information about the drone war.

“I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret,” McMahon said.

In Senate testimony last month, Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, reiterated a similar criticism, arguing that “When a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”

More specifically, the most glaring breach of law the Obama administration has committed in its drone war is to unilaterally redefine the legal standards that justify the use of force. The Justice Department’s leaked memo on targeted killings showed that Obama has altered the meaning of the word “imminence” – a prerequisite for the use of force by a state.

The memo refers to what it calls a “broader concept of imminence” than what has traditionally been required, insisting actual intelligence of an ongoing or imminent plot against the U.S. is simply not a standard the administration chooses to impose on itself (as if it were up to their discretion).

“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states, contradicting conventional international law.

There are other aspects of the drone war that clash with international law. A new report out this week by the International Crisis Group calls on the Obama administration to “Demonstrate respect for the international humanitarian law principles,” by “halting reported signature strikes that target groups of men based on behavior patterns that may be associated with terrorist activity rather than known identities; and ending the reported practice of counting all military-aged men in a strike zone as combatants unless sufficient evidence proves them innocent posthumously.”

And finally, the foundation upon which the drone war rests is the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which empowered the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

But the administration’s case for the drone war is that it targets “al-Qaeda and its associated forces.” In other words, any individual or group that a couple of high-level officials secretly determine fits that expansive description, including U.S. citizens and Islamist groups that did not even exist at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

In Senate hearings last week, top Pentagon lawyer Robert Taylor kept using the words “associated forces” to justify the legality of the drone war under the 2001 AUMF. Until Senator Angus King of Maine told him those words never appear in the text of the AUMF.

“You guys have invented this term, associated forces, that’s nowhere in this document,” King said. “It’s the justification for everything, and it renders the war powers of Congress null and void.”

On all of the above points, the administration has barely a legal leg to stand on. To expect Obama to substantively address them is to expect him to highlight his own criminality.

The historic conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt of genocide and crimes against humanity was annulled late last night by the country’s high court.

BBC:

The three-to-two ruling by a panel of constitutional judges annuls everything that has happened in the trial since 19 April, when Gen Rios Montt was briefly left without a defence lawyer.

The defence team had walked out of the court on the previous day in protest at what they called “illegal proceedings”.

…According to the constitutional court ruling, the guilty verdict and the 80-year sentence handed down by Judge Jazmin Barrios on 10 May are therefore now void.

Human rights group Amnesty International said it was a “devastating blow for the victims of the serious human rights violations committed during the conflict”.

Montt’s lawyers had walked out in protest, called for the dismissal of the judges, tried to delay the proceedings, etc. It seems like their tactics to stall were effective, if belatedly.

See more on the trial and conviction here.

Update: Prior to this news, The New York Times hosted a debate on just how culpable the Reagan administration was in the war crimes in Guatemala. Here’s Greg Grandin’s take:

…even before [Reagan’s] 1980 election, two retired generals, who played prominent roles in Reagan’s campaign, reportedly traveled to Central America and told Guatemalan officials that “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.”

Once in office, Reagan, continued to supply munitions and training to the Guatemalan army, despite a ban on military aid imposed by the Carter administration (existing contracts were exempt from the ban). And economic aid continued to flow, increasing to $104 million in 1986, from $11 million in 1980, nearly all of it going to the rural western highlands, where the Mayan victims of the genocide lived.

This aid helped the Guatemalan military implement a key part of its counterinsurgency campaign: following the massacres, soldiers herded survivors into “model villages,” detention camps really, where they used food and other material supplied by the U.S. Agency for International Development to establish control.

And Reagan was consistent in his moral backing for Guatemala’s genocidaires. On Dec. 5, 1982, for instance, he met with Rios Montt in Honduras and said he was “a man of great integrity” and “totally dedicated to democracy.”

Just 10 days before this meeting, one declassified U.S. document reveals that the State Department had been informed of a “well-founded allegation of a large-scale killing of Indian men, women and children in a remote area by the Guatemalan army.”

Other declassified documents reveal that the White House was less concerned with the massacres than with their effectiveness, or with countering the bad publicitystemming from reports of the atrocities.

The day after Reagan’s endorsement, Guatemalan soldiers arrived at a village called Dos Erres and started killing. The slaughter went on for three days and by the time it was over at least 162 people, including many children, were dead.

The New York Times’ Disunion series has an excellent essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne by Cynthia Wachtell, author of “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914.” In 1863, Hawthorne wrote to an English friend: “The war-party here do not look upon me as a reliably loyal man, and, in fact, I have been publicly accused of treasonable sympathies.”

The article notes: “In Concord, where Hawthorne moved in 1860 after spending seven years abroad, he found himself out of step with his old friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (who died in May 1862), as well as others of his neighbors.” There was perhaps more enthusiasm for going to war in Massachusetts than in any other northern state. While Ralph Waldo Emerson initially supported the war, he made sure that his son was not conscripted into the Union meat-grinder. Hawthorne, in an essay he wrote after spending time in Washington, DC, and Virginia, scoffed at the glorification of the conflict. Wachtell notes: “Hawthorne tramples on the era’s well-respected literary conventions and proprieties: he does not adopt a strident tone of Union partisanship. He does not offer mournful lines about the deaths of brave and beautiful soldiers. He does not deliver the sort of rousing or circumspect reporting that routinely filled Northern newspapers and magazines.”

“Hawthorne refused to adhere to the restrained and respectful norms of wartime writing, and he expressed none of the standard wartime pieties. Instead, he used black humor to devastating effect. Describing battlefield deaths, he wrote, ‘A bullet offers such a brief and easy way, such a pretty little orifice, through which the weary spirit might seize the opportunity to be exhaled!’

“Where others saw a noble war to end slavery and preserve the Union, Hawthorne saw a questionable conflict that claimed the lives of young men, empowered inept generals, and seemed unlikely to end with a subdued South…”

Hawthorne suffered “the opprobrium of his neighbors. Acquaintances shunned him, while old friends could only shake their heads… No topic is beyond the reach of his wit: not generals, not the war dead, not even the Northern martyr and darling of the transcendentalists of Concord, John Brown.”

I have been a huge fan of Thoreau and Emerson since I was 18.  But seeing how they embraced war as a means of moral/national uplift — sad to see those philosophers go wrong. Emerson was skeptical of government – except when folks proposed that it launch a bloody crusade.

UPDATE:  A more accurate title for this post would have been “Nathaniel Hawthorne, Civil War Scoffer.”  But it is too late to change it now without throwing off any & all links.

The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf has written a good post on an unfortunately seldom-made argument against so-called “humanitarian intervention” – namely that there are huge opportunity costs.

“Almost every time someone calls for a war to be entered on humanitarian grounds, there’s a way to save more lives more cheaply and reliably with philanthropic spending,” he explains.

“And even if it’s true that doing nothing [in Syria] will result in sure death for many, the same is true if we do nothing about disease or sanitation or infrastructure or working conditions in much of the developing world,” he adds. “That isn’t an argument for doing nothing. It’s an argument for directing whatever we decide is the right amount to spend on humanitarian causes in a way that maximizes the utility of every dollar.”

Friedersdorf is being generous by taking humanitarian interventionists at their word about what drives their arguments for war. It’s fair to assume that many American citizens who advocate humanitarian intervention actually have humanitarian concerns. But for most policymakers and think-tank experts, humanitarianism is merely a pretext to justify war for other reasons.

For example, the most vocal advocates of U.S. military intervention in Syria have said all along that taking out the Assad regime would be a major geo-political blow for Iran in the same breath as “we have to stop the killing.” While the death count in Syria is horrifying, there are other conflicts currently plaguing the Earth that are far bloodier, like in the Congo, that garner no arguments for U.S. intervention. You see, for a humanitarian crisis to be worthy of an American military response, the location has to be strategically vital.

In case you haven’t got the point yet: the interests of the state are paramount, while appeals to save lives merely help legitimize the case for war.

This could hardly have been clearer back when the Clinton administration bombed Serbia under the pretext of stopping a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. Up until that point, the number of Kosovar Albanians that had been killed probably didn’t surpass 2,000. Compare that with the tens of thousands of Kurdish separatists in Turkey who were being slaughtered as Washington sent unprecedented amounts of money and weapons to Ankara. The same goes for Indonesia, as it was carrying out much larger atrocities against the people of East Timor.

Another giveaway is that one of the requirements for “humanitarian intervention” is that it is something only the United States may do. So, as the United States was rampaging into Iraq in a war based entirely on false pretenses, it was a criminal act for Iran to lend support to Iraqi insurgents trying to oust the occupier which had literally just caused a humanitarian crisis by invading. Meanwhile, the U.S. can aid and abet the Syrian rebels and claim it is legitimate because they aim to mitigate the humanitarian crisis (the policy has prolonged the suffering, by the way).

The U.S. would have considered it a brazen criminal act for Russia to have intervened in Vietnam to help save some of the 3 million people our senseless war there killed. And it would be an outrage to any politician in Washington for China to take the lead in a humanitarian intervention against the Assad regime. That would be aggression, I’m sure the Obama administration would say. But again, that’s because geo-politics are what counts, not saving lives.

Conor’s point just adds to these arguments. If saving lives was really what John McCain cared about, he wouldn’t be advocating military action in Syria, he’d be raising money with Bill Gates for mosquito nets and vaccines.

To take an even narrower line of argument, consider the financial costs alone. Humanitarian aims were incorporated into the assortment of pretexts for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Together, the total cost of these wars may reach $6 trillion. Think of how many lives could have been saved, how much human suffering mitigated, if $6 trillion was allocated to philanthropic pursuits over these 10 years rather than to these wars of choice. What if it were distributed to various areas of research and development in health care or technology? What might we have had?

At the very least, simply allowing Americans to keep all that money (or, more precisely, to not have saddled them with the debt to pay in the future) would have saved the lives of several hundred thousand Iraqis and Afghans who were killed in the wars and saved several million displaced people whose lives wouldn’t have been made intolerable but for U.S. foreign policy.

It is absurd to continue to apply some moral justification to the warfare state. It is always and everywhere immoral, and in virtually every case America’s warmongers kill more people than they ever dreamed to save.