From: LewRockwell.com and Global Research.ca
Anthony Gregory
It’s official. The American dystopia is here. Obama administration officials admit
that the CIA assassination program that snuffed out Anwar al-Awlaki
last Friday is guided by a secret panel that decides who lives and dies.
According to Reuters:
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
Let that sink in. The
U.S. presidency, supposed leader of the free world, has a clandestine
committee that chooses American citizens to assassinate. This from the
administration that promised unprecedented transparency and a ratcheting
back of Bush-era civil liberties abuses. This from the president who
vowed to restore habeas corpus and subject executive war powers to
judicial scrutiny. This from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
What’s more striking,
however, is the deafening silence. Sure, the ACLU opposes all this, as
do a smattering of public voices. Yet it seems for everyone expressing
proportional concern about this, there are a thousand leftist protesters
whining about the top one percent, and a thousand conservatives whining
about the leftist protesters.
How fitting that the
presidency that Tea Partiers accused of planning to convene death panels
to handle health care rationing has openly admitted to having created
such a panel whose declared purpose is not simply to withhold socialized
medical resources, but to direct the cold-blooded murder of citizens
who are sufficiently bothersome enemies of the regime. Yet in a majestic
irony, many of the conservatives who feared Obama’s life-and-death
bureaucracies are cheering on his most explicit and frightening seizure
of dictatorial power in all his presidency, and perhaps one of the
greatest of all presidential power grabs in the sweep of U.S. history.
Meanwhile,
Obama’s millions of supporters still think the idea that this man is a
fascist, a tyrant, a threat to liberty, is hysterical hate speech and
itself a danger to American democracy. Yet Barack Obama appears
dedicated to out-Bushing Bush when it comes to shredding the Bill of
Rights and sticking his middle finger at the very idea that he ought to
be accountable to anything but his own power.
Make no mistake. We are
witnessing a defining moment in America’s transformation into a
totalitarian nation. Not because the murder of al-Alwaki, or even the
death panel that sealed his fate, is some sort of anomaly in terms of
morality or even presidential power. The U.S. presidency has already
sentenced millions to death with its wars, its sanctions, its bombings,
its terrorism, its covert ops, its torture chambers. The nukings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to take a couple of famous examples, long ago
revealed the awesome and murderous power of the Oval Office, whether or
not these bombings were as "illegal" as the offing of al-Alwaki. And the
families of thousands of innocent Afghans and Pakistanis killed in
drone strikes had no doubts about Obama’s imperial touch, even before
this latest atrocity.
But the circumstances
surrounding this particular hit job, and the death panel behind it,
deserve more than a footnote. There is the brazenness of it all – the
audacity, as a younger Obama might say – of the administration just
coming clean about its mysterious council that serves as judge and jury
behind closed doors. There is the frank admission of its existence with
all else being kept secret. There is also the precision – the fact that
this program is one focused on offing political enemies, rather than
just bombing neighborhoods in an ad hoc attempt to weaken another
government in a war. There is also the open-ended nature of this
conflict, a war on terrorism that can last even longer than the clash
with the USSR, a war whose immortality seems even more possible now that
Barack the law professor is in charge, rather than George the rancher.
Taken together,
this is just the kind of creepy atmosphere befitting of a total state, a
Communist or fascist government or a nightmarish bureaucracy contrived
in the mind of a Cold War-era novelist imagining what America would look
like in the 21st century after taking one too many wrong
turns. It is almost as if the administration is trying to preempt the
conspiracy-minded by giving them something that would be unbelievable
only fifteen years ago, but is today easily taken for granted because of
course the president has a secret death panel that deliberates on the
secret, unchecked executions of American citizens, to be conducted by
robots flying in the sky.
Needless to say, anyone
who defends this, especially if given the opportunity to think through
the implications, is surely no friend of liberty, whether they be
fair-weather "civil libertarian" liberals who would rather cheer for
their president than wake up and smell the fascism, or conservatives who
claim to distrust government except when it exercises the most lethal
powers in the most lawless way imaginable. We must recognize that the
movement for freedom and against true oppression is clearly no majority,
regardless of what Tea Party Republicans and Wall Street occupiers
might say.
There is a more
fundamental lesson to be learned, however, and one to remember for the
ages: This is the nature of the state. It is, by its institutional
nature, always and everywhere seeking to expand power in any way it can.
To claim and practice the power to kill on its own unreviewable
prerogative is simply the fulfillment of its very design. At times of
crisis, especially concerning national security, states almost always
tend toward aggrandizement toward their realization as totalitarian
entities.
For all who find Obama’s
death panel frightening – and all of us should – let us remember that
this is simply what governments do when they can get away with it. We
are only now seeing the American state achieving its maturity. At the
founding of the Federal Government, the Framers unleashed a monster that
could never easily be restrained, even creating a presidency with all
too much power over military affairs. Then came Jackson, Polk, Lincoln,
Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Bush and Obama, each one building
on the horrible precedents of past American despots, each reaching
further toward the ideal of a completely unencumbered presidential hand,
one that could snap its fingers and order death to anyone anywhere on
the globe.
There
is a silver lining, however, albeit one circumscribing a large and dark
cloud indeed. A government can develop and come of age, but it is a
mortal institution. As it grows it puts strain on the public ideology it
requires to live, wrecks the economy it feeds on, and alienates the
allies that allow it to be a global empire. To be a total state is the
dream of all regimes, but it is an unsustainable reality, and certainly
so at the size the U.S. government has become. The more the U.S.
presidency and American nation-state morph into an Orwellian version of
themselves, the closer they will come to finally expose themselves as
being no different from the tyrannies that have enslaved mankind for
millennia. For generations much of the world has been under the spell of
the lie of American democracy, the propaganda that the brutality of
power politics can be tempered through elections and an eloquent piece
of parchment. We can hope that the day this great lie is universally
seen as a tragic joke, the true significance of Obama’s CIA death panel
will be remembered.
Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.
