Month: February 2014

An important story from the Associated Press today explains how the Obama administration is considering whether to extra-judicially assassinate another American citizen in contravention of the suspect’s constitutional rights to due process.

The suspect, the AP reports, is an American citizen and member of al-Qaeda, “and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new stricter targeting policy issued last year.”

Under unprecedented pressure and public scrutiny for his unchecked secret drone war, President Obama recently narrowed the scope of the targeting policy. And now, apparently, there are bureaucratic protocols (not, mind you, the Fifth Amendment) getting in the way of killing the suspect.

Those new bureaucratic protocols, however, are as dispensable as the Constitutional mandates constraining government power over the individual. AP:

The senior administration official confirmed that the Justice Department was working to build a case for the president to review and decide the man’s fate. The official said, however, the legal procedure being followed is the same as when the U.S. killed militant cleric and former Virginia resident Anwar al-Awlaki by drone in Yemen in 2011, long before the new targeted killing policy took effect.

The legal procedure followed in the government’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki was revealed in a Justice Department memo leaked one year ago. The memo decrees the president can order the assassination of an American citizen – without submitting evidence to a court, without any oversight from Congress, and without even making its legal reasoning available to the public – so long as at least one “informed, high-level” U.S. official declares them to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaeda or “an associated force.” Continued:

The official said the president could make an exception to his policy and authorize the CIA to strike on a onetime basis or authorize the Pentagon to act despite the possible objections of the country in question.

So while Obama supposedly imposed procedural limits on drone-killing U.S. citizens without due process, those are not rules he has to follow. They are not binding, just as the Fifth Amendment’s mandate that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” is not binding. The president can do what he wants. There are no legal restraints on his actions.

What does this say about the presidency in 2014, then? Is Obama a president or a king? In a 1775 critique, John Adams described an emperor as “a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy.”

I honestly don’t know how else to describe the office of the presidency if it openly admits it is bound by no law.

Update: Statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project:

“The government’s killing program has gone far beyond what the law permits, and it is based on secret evidence and legal interpretations. The targeted killing of an American being considered right now shows the inherent danger of a killing program based on vague and shifting legal standards, which has made it disturbingly easy for the government to operate outside the law. The fact that the government is relying so heavily on limited and apparently unreliable intelligence only heightens our concerns about a disastrous program in which people have been wrongly killed and injured. Today’s revelations come as the administration continues to fight against even basic transparency about the thousands of people who have died in this lethal program, let alone accountability for the wrongful killings of U.S. citizens.”

Read their story at the new online magazine The Intercept here.

The U.S. State Department’s top diplomat for Europe Victoria Nuland made headlines yesterday when an audio recording of her phone conversation with the U.S. Ambassador with Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was released. Rumors are swirling that the Russians were surveilling the U.S. diplomats and released the audio recording to embarrass the United States.

What was so embarrassing about it? Nuland, frustrated that the European Union wasn’t acting more forcefully on the Ukraine issue, said “Fuck the EU.”

Here’s the conversation:

While the expletive is what caught all the media attention, much less was paid to the substance of the discussion, which involved Nuland and Pyatt talking about the Ukrainian opposition and some kind of transition, as if it’s any of their business.

Here’s an excerpt from the State Department Press Briefing with reporters asking about the extensive U.S. meddling in Ukraine’s affairs that was made evident by the audio recording:

QUESTION: — now, once we get into it. Quite apart from the colorful language that is used in reference to the European Union, the conversation appears to – well, doesn’t appear to suggest, it does – the conversation shows that the United States certainly has – or at least officials within the U.S. Government have certain opinions about certain Ukrainian opposition leaders and others. And I’m wondering how that squares with your repeated insistence that every – all of this is up to the Ukrainians to decide themselves.

[State Dept. Spokeswoman] MS. PSAKI: It’s not inconsistent in the least bit. It is no secret that Ambassador Pyatt and Assistant Secretary Nuland have been working with the Government of Ukraine, with the opposition, with business and civil society leaders to support their efforts, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that at any point, there have been discussions about recent events and offers and what is happening on the ground. And as you know, Assistant Secretary Nuland is on the ground right now continuing our efforts in that regard.

It remains the case that it is up to the Ukrainian people themselves to decide their future. It is up to them to determine their path forward, and that’s a consistent message that we’re conveying publicly and privately.

…QUESTION: Because they’re – look, the Russians have repeatedly accused the United States Government of interfering in Ukraine’s politics.

MS. PSAKI: Mm-hmm.

QUESTION: The U.S. Government has, to some degree, made reciprocal claims about Russia. Does not the fact that U.S. diplomats purportedly are discussing who should and should not be in a Ukrainian government hint at some possibility of U.S. interference here?

MS. PSAKI: Absolutely not. There – it should be no surprise that U.S. officials talk about issues around the world. Of course we do. That’s what you do, that’s what diplomats do, and discuss especially issues where we’ve been closely engaged. The Secretary met with the opposition this weekend. He stopped by a meeting with the foreign minister. It’s up to the people of Ukraine, including officials from both sides, to determine the path forward. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are discussions about events on the ground.

QUESTION: This was more than discussions, though. This was two top U.S. officials that are on the ground discussing a plan that they have to broker a future government, and bringing officials from the UN to kind of seal the deal. This is more than the U.S. trying to make suggestions. This is the U.S. midwifing the process.

Continue reading “Is the US Trying to Install a Ukrainian Government, or Leaving It Up to Ukrainians?”

Here’s how the relationship between Israel and Gaza works: successive “cease-fires” are repeatedly adopted and continuously violated, leading more often to skirmishes than to lulls in violence. Israel bombs Gaza with airstrikes, Gaza shoots rockets into Israel. Then a new “cease-fire” is imposed.

If you were to ask anyone, from a casual observer to a ‘well-informed’ media commentator, which side violates the ceasefires more often, they would almost surely say Gaza. The newspapers and network news media constantly inform the American people when a rocket is hurled from Gaza into Israel. Both Israeli and American politicians cite this phenomenon in speeches and press conferences to justify Israel’s continuing economic blockade of Gaza, among other things. With regard to the Gaza situation, practically all we hear about is rockets.

In an ongoing study of violence between Israel and Gaza, The Jerusalem Fund, a non-profit in Washington, D.C., has catalogued cease-fire violations on either side. The principal finding is as follows: “Palestinian launches have been rare and sporadic and occurred almost always after successive instances of Israeli cease-fire violations.” Despite this, in the diplomacy on Mid-East peace, we invariably hear about Israel’s security concerns, while that of the Palestinians’ is hardly mentioned.

Here is a graph of the findings:

Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund, explains how it typically works: Israel can “fire into Gaza without accountability, provoke a reaction and then claim self-defense.” See here for his explanation of the methodology.

I have written about previous cases in which Israel breaks the cease-fire with bombings, shootings, or territorial incursions, and then uses the retaliation from Gaza as a justification to launch a deeper bombing campaign here and here.

Israel violates the cease-fires more often, bombs Gaza more times than Gaza rockets Israel, and kills more Palestinians than Palestinians kill Israelis. But these findings are not what is striking. What is striking about this is that almost everybody believes the opposite of the reality. Here’s Munayyer with more on that:

Continue reading “The Truth About Cease-fire Violations Between Israel and Gaza”

Since the revelations about the NSA from Edward Snowden’s leaks last year, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, who authored the Patriot Act, has come out in opposition to certain NSA surveillance practices, particularly bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata.

The NSA says that its authority to vacuum up all Americans’ call records comes from the Patriot Act’s Section 215. Sensenbrenner says that “no fair reading of the text would allow for this program.” In other words, the NSA is acting beyond the authority granted to it by law.

In testimony yesterday, Sensenbrenner said Congress is likely to take away NSA’s bulk collection capabilities. Here he is giving the DOJ’s James Cole a piece of his mind:

According to the Project on Government Oversight, “The U.S. is going to spend $1.5 trillion on the F-35, and it still isn’t meeting its goals. Watch the video and find out how this happened.” Several commentators including Winslow Wheeler and William Hartung discuss this flying monuments to government waste.