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.

You may also be interested in reading:

How Do You Spell "Hypocrisy?"

Catch-22

Why This? Why Now?

At the top of the front page of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is a reprint of a Washington Post article by Craig Whitlock (“Missteps by U. S. in Africa revealed”) reporting that in 2003, the U. S. had an opportunity to assassinate Mokhtar Belmokhtar, alleged mastermind of last month's attack on an Algerian natural gas facility in which 38 hostages were killed. The attack was “vetoed” by the U. S. ambassador to Mali, Vicki Huddleston.

“I'm really frustrated right now because I think we blew it,” said retired Air Force General Charles Wald, exhibiting perfect 20/20 hindsight. If you read far enough into the article, you find that Ms. Huddleston gave three reasons for blocking the proposed air strike: (1) Belmokhtar had never attacked Americans; (2) ten years ago, he was considered only a “minor figure;” and (3) it was “unclear” whether he was actually in the proposed target area. I'm not a terrorism expert, but those sound like three very good reasons not to bomb somebody. The article, however, presents this as a huge blunder by Ms. Huddleston.

The first thing to note about this article is that it is unlikely to have resulted from an independent investigation by the Post reporter. It is there because somebody leaked it. The Pentagon is proposing to expand American strikes into Africa by unmanned aircraft (drones). The article implies that our only mistake is not doing targeted assassinations of Africans soon enough. This story is a public relations triumph for the Pentagon under any circumstances, but it appears in the context of several recent developments related to American military policy.

• A memo giving a “legal defense” of the American policy of assassinating U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism has been leaked to NBC reporter Michael Isikoff. The defense can be charitably described as inadequate, and raises more questions than it answers. Here is Rachel Maddow interviewing Isikoff. It is well worth watching.
  
  
  
  
• President Obama has claimed the right to unilaterally engage in acts of cyberwarfare (computer sabotage) against American enemies, including the right to carry out preemptive cyberstrikes.
  
  
• The Senate will hold a confirmation hearing Thursday on the President's appointment of John Brennan to head the CIA. Brennan is strongly identified with support for drone strikes against enemy targets. He will almost certainly be questioned about the policy—but probably not very aggressively.

This Just In . . .

The British government has just awarded a $31 million contract to Prox Dynamics of Norway for development of a nano-drone, to be used for surveillance in Afghanistan. The miniature helicopter is four inches long and weighs 16 grams. It is part of a trend toward ever smaller drones.

Use of a nano-drone for surveillance is outrageous enough, but equipping them with powerful nano-bombs is said to be only months away. How long will it be possible to keep these devices out of the hands of private citizens? Will a future U. S. president be assassinated by a nano-drone?

How Do You Spell "Hypocrisy?"

Following the massacre of 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre, President Obama condemned the killings, and said, “(T)he federal government stands ready to do everything necessary to bring whoever is responsible for this heinous crime to justice.” Here are the President's complete remarks.

While it is obvious that the defendant should be brought to justice, these remarks are hard to accept coming from a president who has involved the United States in a program of targeted assassination of suspected al-Qaeda members and sympathizers, including American citizens, without due process of law. Using unmanned aircraft, or drones, the program targets several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. It could be argued that we are not engaged in a legal war with any of those countries, certainly not the last three, and that these are war crimes under international law. The drone program even bears some eerie similarities to the Aurora massacre. It unleashes sudden, violent death, on what often seem to be randomly selected innocent people. It is responsible for the death or maiming of unknown numbers—probably in the thousands—of innocent civilians.

During the eight-year presidency of Dick Cheney, the U. S. became a nation of torturers. Under President Obama, we have become, in Jeremy Scahill's words, “a nation of assassins.” Unlike the ethically-challenged behavior of the Bush administration, the drone program has escalated virtually without criticism from progressives.

Needless to say, the program is entirely futile as a way of fighting terrorism, since it instills deep hatred of the United States in the citizens of these countries. This guarantees that for every terrorist “leader” we kill, hundreds will stand ready to take their place.

The drone assassination program is presented in detail in a May 29 New York Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane. It describes President Obama as personally approving the selection of each target of so-called personality strikes, using biographical sketches on note cards, referred to by his aides as “baseball cards.” It's much easier to get on the other type of kill list—to become the target of a so-called signature strike. If you are a young man, you merely have to fit a vague profile of suspicious behavior. One source joked that a satellite photo of “three guys doing jumping jacks” is sufficient to label a location as a terrorist training camp.

One reason we don't know how many civilian casualties have resulted from the drone attacks is that the administration has developed a self-serving and deceptive definition of enemy combatants: all military-age males are assumed to be guilty “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” (Of course, no one looks for such evidence.)

How does the Obama administration square the summary execution of American citizens with the Constitution's guarantee of a fair trial? According to the Justice Department, the Fifth Amendment requirement of due process “could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

Here is lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald discussing the targeted killing program, and Jeremy Scahill defending his claim that the United States is engaged in “murder.”

For a more thorough discussion of the drone program, I recommend Scahill's 40-minute speech at the Drone Summit in Washington, D. C., in April. Here is part one. You Tube will lead you to the remaining three parts. See also Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt.

It is widely speculated that the details of the drone program were leaked to the New York Times by administration sources in order to bolster the President's tough-guy image for the upcoming elections. Apparently, the Obama campaign thinks that Americans consider being a mass murderer an important qualification for the office. However, the article may have unintended consequences.

Becker and Shane make it clear that the President personally supervises every detail of the drone program, including the kill list. In the past, international war crimes tribunals have had difficulty establishing a clear link between the actions of national leaders and atrocities committed on their behalf, since they are usually separated by several layers of bureaucracy. This article supports the claim that President Obama is personally responsible for these assassinations. This could come back to haunt him after he leaves office. As is the case with Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush, Obama may have to refrain from most travel abroad, since he could be arrested at any time and charged with war crimes under international law.