{"id":107627,"date":"2014-02-10T20:55:42","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T20:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=107627"},"modified":"2014-02-10T20:55:58","modified_gmt":"2014-02-10T20:55:58","slug":"policy-law-murder-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/policy-law-murder-murder\/","title":{"rendered":"Is a Policy a Law? Is Murder Murder?"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Swanson<\/strong>
\n RINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

An American citizen who is a member of al-Qaida is actively planning attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials say, and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so\u00a0legally<\/i><\/b>\u00a0under its new stricter targeting\u00a0policy<\/i><\/b>\u00a0issued last year. (From the Associated Press)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notice those words: \u201clegally\u201d and \u201cpolicy\u201d. No longer does U.S. media make a distinction between the two. Under George W. Bush, detention without trial, torture, murder, warrantless spying, and secret missile strikes were\u00a0illegal.\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Under Obama they are\u00a0policy.<\/i><\/b> And policy makes them \u201clegal\u201d under the modified Nixonian understanding that if the President does it as a policy, then it is legal.<\/p>\n

Under the U.S. Constitution, the laws of the nations in which drone murders take place, treaties to which the U.S. is party, international law, and U.S. statutory law, murdering people remains illegal, despite being policy, just as it was illegal under the less strict policy of some months back. The policy was made stricter in order to bring it into closer compliance with the law, of course \u2013 though it comes nowhere close \u2013 and yet the previous policy remains somehow \u201clegal,\u201d too, despite having not been strict enough.<\/p>\n

Under that previous policy, thousands of people, including at least four U.S. citizens, have been blown to bits with missiles. President Obama gave a speech last year in which he attempted to justify one of those four U.S. deaths on the basis of evidence he claimed to have but would not reveal. He made no attempt to justify the other three.<\/p>\n

The new policy remains that the president can murder anyone, anywhere, along with whoever is near them, but must express angst if the person targeted in a U.S. citizen.<\/p>\n

The idea that such lunacy can have anything to do with\u00a0law\u00a0<\/i>is facilitated by human rights groups\u2019 and the United Nations\u2019 and international lawyers\u2019 deference to the White House, which has been carried to the extreme of establishing a consensus that we cannot know whether a drone murder was legal or not unless the president reveals his reasoning, intention, motivation, and the details of the particular murder.<\/p>\n

No other possible criminal receives this treatment. When the police read you your rights, you are not entitled to object: \u201cPut those handcuffs away, sir! I have a written policy justifying everything I did, and I refuse to show it to you. Therefore you have no grounds to know for certain that my justification is as insane and twisted as you might imagine it to be based merely on what I\u2019ve done! Away with you, sir!\u201d<\/p>\n

The loss of a coherent conception of law is a grievous one, but that\u2019s not all that\u2019s at stake here.<\/p>\n

Numerous top U.S. officials routinely admit that our drone wars in the Middle East and Africa are creating more enemies than they kill. General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in June 2010 that \u201cfor every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.\u201d Veterans of U.S. kill teams in Iraq and Afghanistan interviewed in Jeremy Scahill\u2019s book and film\u00a0Dirty Wars\u00a0<\/i>said that whenever they worked their way through a list of people to kill, they were handed a larger list; the list grew as a result of working their way through it. The wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and the abuses of prisoners during them, became major recruiting tools for anti-U.S. terrorism. In 2006, U.S. intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate that reached just that conclusion.<\/p>\n

We are shredding the very concept of the rule of law in order to pursue a policy that\u00a0endangers<\/a>\u00a0us, even as it helps to\u00a0justify<\/a>\u00a0the erosion of our civil liberties, to\u00a0damage<\/a>\u00a0the natural environment, and to\u00a0impoverish<\/a>\u00a0us, as it\u00a0kills<\/a>many innocent people. Maybe they\u2019ve secretly got drones doing the thinking as well as the killing.<\/p>\n

David Swanson is an anti-war activist and blogger at\u00a0War Is a Crime<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Swanson RINF Alternative News An American citizen who is a member of al-Qaida is actively planning attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials say, and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so\u00a0legally\u00a0under its new stricter targeting\u00a0policy\u00a0issued last year. (From the Associated Press) Notice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,461],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-107627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-editorials"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}