Pre-Crime

Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.

                                                                                         Barack Obama

We are living in the era of pre-crime. Pre-crime refers to targeting people for arrest and possibly execution on the suspicion that they might, at some possible time in the future, commit a crime. An example is our infamous policy of signature strikes, in which young Muslim men are assassinated by American drones not on the basis of their past behavior, but because they fit a demographic profile, or signature, that the government predicts may result in their participating in future acts of terrorism. Since we have enraged virtually the entire Muslim world by our killing of innocent people, this criterion can be used to justify the execution of virtually any young man from the Middle East.

Two stories broke yesterday. One is a piece of investigative journalism that reveals the carelessness with which drones strikes are carried out. The second is a news item that was planted by the government in an attempt to justify another assassination of an American citizen suspected of terrorist involvement.

Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, along with filmmaker Laura Poitras, have started a new website, The Intercept, which will be devoted to publishing investigative articles about national security policy. Glenn Greenwald is the journalist in whom National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden confided and who is gradually publishing articles based on the files he leaked. Jeremy Scahill is the author of the book and film Dirty Wars, a history of the US “war on terror” since 9/11.

Yesterday, Scahill and Greenwald published their first investigative article, “The NSA's Role in the US Assassination Program.” It describes how NSA metadata are used to locate and kill potential terrorists. President Obama has claimed that an individual is targeted for assassination only if there is a "near certainty" that they have the right person and no innocent people will be killed. This is, of course, absurd given what we know about the number of innocent people who have died. The article puts this claim in a new perspective by explaining why the targeted assassination program is so error prone.

NSA metadata enters the system in two ways. First of all, it targets people for assassination based on the whether a cell phone they are suspected of owning has been in frequent contact with the cell phones of other suspected terrorists. This is the same way US metadata are being used to identify Americans suspected of terrorist involvement. Secondly, once suspects are placed on a kill list, drones are equipped with transceivers which attract signals from their cell phone or its SIM card, which are used to locate the phone and kill anyone who may be nearby. Since it is phones that are being targeted rather than people, there is no guarantee that the target still possesses the phone, resulting in a high likelihood of “collateral damage,” the killing of innocent people. In fact, since the targets are aware of how their phones are used to locate them, they will use multiple phones and give away used phones in order to maximize confusion.

Scahill and Greenwald report that much of their information came from an anonymous informant who previously worked as a drone operator, and that the accuracy of some of his claims was verified with the help of the Snowden data base.

The Scahill-Greenwald article adds a new dimension to the NSA's activities, since it was previously assumed to be only involved in domestic surveillance. According to the Washington Post, the NSA's motto for this relatively new program is “We track 'em, you whack 'em.”

Below is yesterday's interview of Scahill and Greenwald by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. I have placed a link to The Intercept in the right-hand column of the blog.

Yesterday's other breaking news actually made its way into the corporate media. According to an Associated Press report, US officials are debating whether to assassinate another American citizen living abroad who is said to be involved in some unspecified way with al-Qaida. (The New York Times reports that he is living in Pakistan.) The US previously deliberately assassinated Anwar Awlaki, a Muslim clergyman living in Yemen. Three other Americans have been killed, but the government is apparently claiming they were collateral damage.

A good portion of Dirty Wars is devoted to a detailed history of the Awlaki case. There is a good deal of evidence that Awlaki was radicalized by US government harrassment. There was internal debate within the government over whether his assassination was justified, since he was primarily a propagandist known for his sermons denouncing US foreign policy and calling for jihad. There is no evidence that he was involved in direct planning of terrorist attacks. In other words, he appears to have been assassinated for what used to be known as exercising his First Amendment right of free speech.

The AP report suggests that, as in the Awlaki case, American officials were divided over whether there is sufficient evidence to justify killing this new target, but they have decided to go ahead with the assassination. The motive for leaking this story to the press is unclear. It's possible that they hoped to elicit comments from the Right such as those by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:

Individuals who would have been previously removed from the battlefield by US counterterrorism operations for attacking or plotting to attack against US interests remain free because of self-imposed red tape. [These rules] are endangering the lives of Americans at home and our military overseas in a way that is frustrating to our allies and frustrating to those of us who engage in oversight of our classified activities.

Not surprisingly, Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union had a different take on the matter:

Outside of armed conflict zones, the Constitution and international law prohibit the use of lethal force unless it is used as a last resort against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of grave harm. Even in the context of an armed conflict against an armed group, the government may use lethal force only against individuals who are directly participating in hostilities against the United States.

Needless to say, our government's widespread pursuit of pre-criminals falls far short of meeting this standard.

I have two other comments about pre-crime.

• The current policy of stopping and frisking African-Americans and other young people of color can be seen as a variation of the pre-crime model. The goal appears to be to jail as many young men as possible, even if only for minor offenses. Once they have a criminal record, they are usually unable to obtain a job that pays a living wage. They are likely to become either recidivists, permanent residents of the US prison system, or poor people, unable to vote.

• As Jeremy Scahill notes, our previous history tells us that methods and technologies previously used against enemies abroad are eventually brought home and used against the domestic population. For a variety of reasons, it's likely that most Americans will suffer a steep and permanent decline in their standard of living in the next couple of decades, which will lead to considerable unrest. The NSA infrastructure will be available for use against political dissidents (“pre-criminals”) in this country.

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