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kill list
How the US Became an International Serial Killer
What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
Mar 25, 2026
For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or “targeted killing” as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase.
On March 17th and 18th, the United States and Israel assassinated three senior Iranian government officials in targeted air strikes: Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij domestic security forces; and Esmaeil Khatib, Iran’s Intelligence Minister.
The missile that killed Ali Larijani also demolished an apartment building and killed more than a hundred people. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces were now authorized to assassinate any senior Iranian official whenever they can, and they have continued to do so, bringing the number of Iranian officials assassinated in the past year to at least seventy.
The assassination of Ali Larijani is a blow to the already fraught chances for a negotiated peace between Iran and the United States and Israel. Ali Larijani was an experienced, pragmatic senior official who had played leading roles in negotiations with the US and other world powers since 2005.
What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
Larijani had degrees in math and computer science, attended the revered seminary in Qom, and fought in the Iran-Iraq War, rising to the rank of brigadier-general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. After the war, he managed Iran’s state broadcasting service, earned a doctorate in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran, and wrote three books on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, before entering politics and government in 2005. In 2024, Larijani wrote a book on political philosophy, titled Reason and Tranquility in Governance.
If the US hoped to make peace and restore relations with Iran, Ali Larijani would have been a potential negotiating partner. The decision to assassinate Larijani two weeks into this war suggests that US leaders had no interest in negotiations.
Another possibility is even more chilling. Israeli leaders may have viewed Larijani as a potential off-ramp and deliberately eliminated him to ensure the war continues.
That killing was followed by an unprecedented Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field—the largest in the world and a shared resource with Qatar. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on energy infrastructure across Israel and the Gulf. In Qatar, damage to the Ras Laffan LNG terminal—one of the world’s most critical gas hubs—could take years and billions of dollars to repair.
As global energy markets reeled, US officials confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the South Pars attack had been coordinated with Washington, contradicting denials from President Trump.
The pattern is unmistakable. As one analyst put it, Israel appears to be escalating deliberately—eliminating moderates within Iran while striking critical infrastructure—to provoke a wider regional war that leaves no room for de-escalation.
Analysts debate how much Israel is driving this escalation and how much US officials are fully aligned. But an imperial power cannot outsource responsibility. As Harry Truman’s famous desk sign declared: The buck stops here.
In its alliance with Israel, the United States has normalized the systematic assassination of foreign leaders—from Palestine, and Lebanon, to Syria, Yemen and now Iran. This is not new. In 2020, President Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that had joined with US forces to fight the Islamic State.
Yet assassination is explicitly prohibited under US law. Executive Order 12333 states clearly: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
That prohibition emerged from the Church Committee’s investigation into US assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and General René Schneider in Chile.
It also reflects long-standing international law, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions.
After 9/11, however, the United States systematically ignored or circumvented many of the constraints of US and international law. As US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq led to widespread armed resistance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began arguing for what he called “manhunts,” to deploy US special operations forces to hunt down suspected resistance leaders and kill them, as Israeli undercover units already did in occupied Palestine.
General Charles Holland, the head of US Special Operations Command, refused to authorize such operations, but his retirement in October 2003 allowed Rumsfeld to appoint more like-minded officials to senior positions and bring in the Israelis to train American death squads in Israel and North Carolina.
“Dead men tell no tales,” as the saying goes, and there has been almost no accountability for the resulting killings, which systematically killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two senior US commanders told the Washington Post that only about 50% of “kill or capture” raids by Joint Special Operations Command targeted the “right” or intended people or homes, while troops involved in these raids said that that assessment greatly overstated their rate of success.
Drone warfare accelerated the trend. Under President Obama, strikes expanded tenfold, turning targeted killing into a central pillar of US policy. By 2011, night raids in Afghanistan numbered in the hundreds each month, alienating the Afghan people and ultimately ensuring the defeat of the US occupation and the return of the Taliban.
Now US and Israeli forces are using air and drone strikes to assassinate Iranian leaders and kill civilians in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. The language of restraint has disappeared, replaced by open celebration of “lethality” and threats of further war crimes.What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
The United States now faces a stark choice: to continue down this path of lawless violence, or to turn the page on our nation’s life of international crime and finally, genuinely embrace diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with our neighbors.
The cumulative effect is stark: the United States has made assassination and extrajudicial killing routine instruments of policy, as it tramples the UN Charter, the Hague and Geneva Conventions and its own laws—undermining the very international legal order it claims to uphold.
Meanwhile, a multipolar world is emerging, driven largely by nations of the Global South. But the transition to a peaceful, sustainable world is far from certain. The greatest obstacle in its way is the continued reliance of the United States on the illegal threat and use of military force and economic coercion to try to maintain its own dominance.
Iran exercised restraint for decades in the face of false accusations regarding nuclear weapons, “maximum pressure” economic sanctions and escalating threats and attacks by the US and Israel. It quietly built up its defenses and military strategies for the day that it would need them, and that day has come.
The failure of the international community to stop successive US wars of aggression poses an existential threat to the UN Charter and the post–World War II order. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned at the CELAC Summit on March 21: “The more serious humanity’s problems become, the fewer tools we have for collective action. And that path leads only to barbarism.”
The United States now faces a stark choice: to continue down this path of lawless violence, or to turn the page on our nation’s life of international crime and finally, genuinely embrace diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with our neighbors, as the UN Charter requires.
For Americans—and for the world—that choice is becoming a matter of survival.
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Democrats Demand Trump Provide Legal Justification for Extrajudicial Murder of Alleged Drug Runners
"Congress has the sole constitutional responsibility to declare war and to authorize the use of force," notes a joint letter to the president. "You have failed to secure such authorization for these strikes."
Oct 08, 2025
Top Democratic members of key committees in the US House are demanding President Donald Trump come clean on the legal justification for extrajudicial bombings of alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean Sea over recent weeks, attacks which international law experts have called "patently illegal" and "murder" by executive fiat.
In addition to providing any legal justification for the lethal attacks, which have reportedly killed 21 individuals, a letter signed by five Democratic lawmakers demands to know which so-called "drug trafficking organizations" have been identified explicitly by the Trump administration for these targeted executions on the high seas.
"Congress has the sole constitutional responsibility to declare war and to authorize the use of force. You have failed to secure such authorization for these strikes," the letter states. "Further, the Administration’s severe lack of transparency and failure to share critical information with Congress prevents Congress from conducting constitutionally ordained oversight of the Executive Branch."
The one-page letter sent to the White House Tuesday was signed by Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary; Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee; Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
The letter to Trump states:
Per your Administration’s sparse reporting to Congress, you have determined that certain cartels are “non-state armed groups,” that you have “designated them as terrorist organizations,” and that you have “determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.”
However, your Administration has not identified any of the specific organizations you have determined to be included as designated terrorist organizations, nor the criteria or process used for making such determinations. You have also failed to specify the authority under which the Administration is able to designate affiliates of certain drug trafficking organizations as enemy combatants for the purpose of undertaking lethal strikes. We request that you immediately provide a list of all designated terrorist organizations to Congress, along with the associated determination criteria or methodologies used. In addition, you have not provided Congress with details regarding the intelligence associated with these strikes.
During a hearing before the US Senate on Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to answer questions about any legal guidance the Trump White House may have received from the DOJ about the bombings.
"I'm not going to discuss any legal advice that my department may or may not have given or issued at the direction of the president on this matter," Bondi told Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who sits on both the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees.
Trump openly confessed to the terrorizing effects the US bombings are having in Venezuela by saying that local civilians have now abandoned the maritime region where the bombings have occurred.
“We’re so good at it that there are no boats—in fact, even fishing boats,” Trump said last week during a speech to military leaders at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia. “Nobody wants to go into the water anymore.”
The letter from the five House lawmakers argues that the Trump administration "has not provided significant details with respect to the legal justification for these strikes beyond vague assertions of Article II powers."
While the lawmakers acknowledge that a president's authorities under Article II are significant, "they are not limitless."
"It is our understanding that the Department of Defense has determined strikes against designated terrorist organizations are legal on the basis of a legal opinion produced by the Department of Justice," the letter states. "We ask that you provide that legal opinion to Congress immediately."
Legal scholars have said there should be grave concern about the nature of the extrajudicial attacks, the latest of which occurred last week, killing a reported four people on board.
"The strike was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics—headed to America to poison our people," Hegseth claimed in a social media post on Oct. 3. Hegseth's pronouncement included no evidence whatsoever to back up his claim, but did include an unclassified video that captured the moment the vessel was struck:
Earlier this morning, on President Trump's orders, I directed a lethal, kinetic strike on a narco-trafficking vessel affiliated with Designated Terrorist Organizations in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the… pic.twitter.com/QpNPljFcGn
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) October 3, 2025
Hegseth vowed such US bombings "will continue until the attacks on the American people are over," but again offered no clear legal argument for how boats traveling on the open sea constitute an attack on Americans living thousands of miles away.
As Matthew C. Waxman, an adjunct senior fellow for law and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Tuesday, the attacks "could mark a major shift in US counternarcotics policy and raise legal and diplomatic questions by blurring the lines between law enforcement, interdiction, and war."
Amnesty International USA, in its assessment of the latest bombing on Oct. 3, expressed a significantly higher degree of alarm. "This is murder," the group declared. "The US government must be held accountable."
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The Court Said Trump Was Above the Law — And Now 11 People Are Dead at Sea
Trump simply ordered human beings erased. This isn’t just about a boat off Venezuela. It’s about whether America will allow a president, blessed by the Court, to kill without evidence, without process, without even the pretense of law.
Sep 05, 2025
When the Court says Trump is above the law, who speaks for the eleven dead on that boat? Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable.
Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the Court had given him immunity from any consequence and the leaders of his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed not just to his cruelty, but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license to kill.
For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Congress’s approval. Franklin Roosevelt went to Congress for Lend-Lease before escalating aid to Britain, and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned heavily on the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify everything from Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia to killing Bin Laden.
It looks like Trump has taken Miller’s reported hypothetical and turned it into policy. What was once an outrageous musing has become a bloody precedent.
The principle has always been that the United States does not simply kill people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched, it may be abused, but it has been invoked.
What Donald Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented. He gave the order to kill eleven human beings with no congressional approval, no international authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.
This was simply murder on the high seas. And the world knows it.
He did it in the full knowledge that six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have granted him immunity for crimes committed while in office, even international crimes. That ruling opened the door to precisely this sort of extrajudicial killing and stripped away one of the last guardrails protecting both our law and our global standing.
The official claim is that the boat carried members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But eleven people on a small vessel that couldn’t possibly travel as far as America doesn’t sound like a cartel’s drug shipment (typically there’s only one or two people manning such a boar); it sounds like desperate migrants fleeing a collapsing country.
That possibility makes the strike even more chilling when paired with a story Miles Taylor has told about Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller. Taylor recounts traveling with Miller and a Coast Guard admiral after a drug war event in Key West.
On that trip Stephen Miller asked the admiral if it would be legal to use a Predator drone to obliterate a boat full of migrants in international waters. Miller’s reasoning was that migrants weren’t covered by the Constitution, so what was to stop us from blowing them out of the water?
The admiral reportedly shot back that it would violate international law, that “you cannot kill unarmed civilians just because you want to.” At the time it was an alarming glimpse into the sadistic mind of a man who saw immigrants as less than human.
Now it looks like Trump has taken Miller’s reported hypothetical and turned it into policy. What was once an outrageous musing has become a bloody precedent.
This has profound legal and moral implications.
By attacking a vessel flying the flag of a sovereign state, Trump risked triggering a direct military confrontation. Venezuela could have fired back at American forces in the region. A firefight at sea can escalate quickly into a regional war, and Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro would have every incentive to turn to Russia and China for protection.
Leaders of both of those nations are eager to deepen their presence in our hemisphere, and this gives them an opening. It’s not inconceivable that Moscow or Beijing could send ships or aircraft to Venezuela in response.
That would put foreign military forces hostile to us within thirteen hundred miles of Miami. If shots were fired between American forces and Russian or Chinese deployments in the Caribbean, the slide toward a larger war would be real, very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 (except then we had a statesman as a president, instead of a corrupt buffoon).
World War I began with a simple assassination that pitted one nation against another and then the sinking of the civilian boat the Lusitania; this is how great power conflicts can begin. Trump’s reckless strike doesn’t just risk Venezuelan lives. It risks American troops, regional stability, and, in the most ominous scenario, world peace itself.
Meanwhile, at home, the timing is impossible to ignore. Authoritarians throughout history have turned to foreign crises to distract from domestic scandals.
Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia as Watergate began to close in. Reagan invaded Grenada days after hundreds of Marines were killed in Beirut. Trump has lived for decades under the shadow of allegations of sexual predation, including reports that Jeffrey Epstein recorded him with underage girls during the years he owned and ran Miss Teen USA.
If new evidence of that were to surface, Trump would need a distraction on a scale large enough to blot out the outrage. Creating a crisis with Venezuela, complete with martial language and threats of escalation while renaming the Department of Defense to Department of War, serves that purpose. It’s the oldest play in the authoritarian book: wag the dog.
Except this time the stakes are far higher. This time we’re dealing with a president who’s been told by six corrupted members of the highest court in the land that he’s above the law.
When Miles Taylor first revealed Miller’s macabre question about bombing migrant boats, some dismissed it as idle cruelty. It now looks like a glimpse into the inner workings of Trump’s policy mind. In this worldview, immigrants are vermin, human rights are optional, Democrats are “extremists,” and lethal force is just another tool of politics.
Combine that with the Supreme Court’s gift of immunity and you have a recipe for lawless violence on a scale America has never contemplated. The entire edifice of international law is designed to prevent precisely this sort of conduct.
Extrajudicial killings, violations of sovereignty, the targeting of civilians: these are the acts that international courts prosecute when they can, and that history condemns when courts cannot stop them.
And now we’re learning that Trump did something similar in 2019 when he was last president. He authorized a SEAL Team strike against North Korea, where they killed three civilians in a boat who were simply out fishing.
Extrajudicial killings, violations of sovereignty, the targeting of civilians: these are the acts that international courts prosecute when they can, and that history condemns when courts cannot stop them.
If America embraces this new Putin-like assertion of America’s power to bomb anybody, anywhere, on the whim of the president, we’ll have abandoned any claim to moral leadership.
Worse, we will have normalized the authoritarian logic that anyone the president labels an enemy can be eliminated without trial, without evidence, without process. We’ll have handed Xi a rationale to attack Taiwan; all he has to do is claim that a non-governmental gang within that nation is importing drugs into China (or something similar).
The international reaction has already been severe. America’s allies are horrified, our adversaries have been emboldened, and human rights groups are openly appalled.
But the real test is here at home. Do we still believe in the principle, famously cited by our second President John Adams, that America is a nation of laws and not of men? Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?
Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?
Keep in mind, the same Stephen Miller — who reportedly wanted to blow up boats of immigrants to kill more brown people — just in the past week claimed that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organization.”
The doctrine of immunity means there is no legal backstop. The only remaining check is political will. And Trump’s fascist toadies are all in on more extrajudicial killings.
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete “Kegger” Hegseth said:
“We’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike.”
Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio echoed the sentiment, saying during a speech in Mexico City yesterday that similar strikes “will happen again.”
This is why Democrats, independents, and every American who values the rule of law must call this out for what it is: an atrocity against eleven people, an assault on international norms, and a direct threat to American democracy.
Trump has shown us exactly how far he’s willing to go. He’s willing to risk a war in our hemisphere. He’s willing to put our troops in danger. He’s willing to risk drawing Putin and Xi into a confrontation with us that could spiral out of control. He’s willing to destroy lives to protect himself. And he’s doing it because six Republicans on the Supreme Court told him he could.
If Congress doesn’t act now to confront and contain this lawless behavior, if we don’t restore accountability to the presidency, then we’ll have surrendered not just our moral authority but our future.
The question is not whether Trump wants a distraction from his scandals; of course he does. The question is whether we’re willing to let Trump and his fascist toadies drag America and the world into catastrophe to get it.
This isn’t just about a boat off Venezuela. It’s about whether America will allow a president, blessed by the Court, to kill without evidence, without process, without even the pretense of law.
Eleven dead migrants are the proof of what immunity means in practice: impunity. If Trump can slaughter refugees today, what stops him from targeting dissidents, protesters, even political opponents tomorrow?
The answer, unless Congress and the people act, is nothing. And “nothing” is what those justices have left to protect us, our laws, and our humanity.
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ACLU to Biden: Do Not 'Review' Drone Killing Program--End It Once and for All
"Tinkering with the bureaucracy of this extrajudicial killing program will only entrench American abuses," said the group's national security expert.
Mar 04, 2021
In response to reporting on President Joe Biden's review of policies governing lethal airstrikes in foreign countries and implementation of "temporary" limits on drone killings outside of designated war zones, the ACLU is telling the administration that the only acceptable reform is to permanently abolish the United States' extrajudicial overseas assassination program.
"In the name of counterterrorism, U.S. presidents have for two decades authorized unlawful, secretive, and unaccountable killing abroad," Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's national security project, said Thursday in a statement. "This lethal program violates domestic and international law and has caused years of devastating harm to people in the majority-Muslim countries on the receiving end of American power."
"Tinkering with the bureaucracy of this extrajudicial killing program will only entrench American abuses," Shamsi added. "It must end."
In a tweet shared Thursday, the ACLU noted that "President Biden promised to end forever wars, but his administration has yet to take meaningful action."
Forgoing an official announcement, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan quietly issued the order to temporarily limit drone warfare "outside conventional battlefield zones" on January 20, the day of the president's inauguration, according to the New York Times.
"The military and the CIA must now obtain White House permission to attack terrorism suspects in poorly governed places where there are scant American ground troops, like Somalia and Yemen," the Times reported. "Under the Trump administration, they had been allowed to decide for themselves whether circumstances on the ground met certain conditions and an attack was justified."
Despite having issued "interim guidance" about the so-called "targeted" use of military force, Biden illegally "revenge" bombed Syria last week without congressional approval.
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About to Have His Day in Court, This American Journalist Wants to Know If He's on the US 'Kill List'
Award-winning war reporter Bilal Abdul Kareem, who says he has been the target of numerous U.S.-led airstrikes, was also wounded by Syrian tank fire while covering the country's civil war.
Nov 12, 2020
An American journalist who alleges he has been targeted for assassination for his reporting on Syria's civil war will challenge his apparent inclusion on the U.S. "kill list" in federal court next week.
Bilal Abdul Kareem, a Peabody Award-winning war reporter from Westchester County, New York who has worked for major international media outlets including CNN, Sky News, and the BBC, will ask a federal court in Washington, D.C. on Monday whether U.S. intelligence marked him for death because of his coverage of the nine-year conflict in Syria. As part of his work, Kareem conducted interviews with members of various armed groups, including militants targeted as the enemy by the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Syria in 2014.
"I have always believed part of being an American meant if you were accused of doing something, you would be given the opportunity to plead your case in court."
--Bilal Abdul Kareem, journalist
Kareem narrowly escaped being killed in five separate U.S. airstrikes in 2016, including an attack on his office and two strikes on vehicles in which he was traveling. Kareem was also wounded when he and his crew came under fire from a Syrian army tank while reporting for Sky News in Idlib last year.
A lower court initially upheld Kareem's right to bring the case, however it dismissed it after the government claimed the proceedings would require disclosure of "state secrets." Now on appeal, the central question before the court is whether the government can secretly authorize the assassination of American citizens without judicial review.
"I have always believed part of being an American meant if you were accused of doing something, you would be given the opportunity to plead your case in court," said Kareem. "But now, here I am, standing at the courthouse doors and the U.S. government is trying to deny me that opportunity. In Syria, in one of the most violent wars the world has seen, I try to champion the American ideals of justice, transparency, and accountability."
"I hope the court will see fit to uphold those same rights--my rights--here at home," he said.
Jennifer Gibson, an attorney who works on cases involving extrajudicial assassination for the U.K.-based international human rights advocacy group Reprieve and who is representing Kareem, accused the Trump administration of "asking the courts to jettison the right to due process, a value which sets America apart from dictatorships."
"The executive should not be allowed to act as judge, jury, and executioner unchecked," Gibson asserted. "In a country founded on the rule of law, Americans must have a right to challenge a secret death sentence."
Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who also represents Kareem, said that "this case presents one of the most profound issues of human rights in our lifetime."
"Even George Orwell could not have imagined a lawyer from the 'Department of Justice' standing up in court to say the U.S. president may order the CIA to execute an American journalist in total secrecy, without any judicial oversight," he added.
In 2018, journalist Matt Taibbi, then working for Rolling Stone, offered this profile of Kareem, including a look at the possibility he was placed on the U.S. government's targeted assassination list:
Although Kareem projects a sense of humor--"Most of my drama revolves around having a big mouth; I got it from my mother," he said in a recent interview--he has no illusions about the forces he is up against.
"You take a Black guy who's a Muslim and he's on a kill list he's trying to get himself off. What are the chances of that? I don't really have a lot of optimism," he told Syria Direct in July. "At the end of the day, it would be a long and messy court battle for them to have to prove anything. But why should they even go through all of that when they can just cross state secrets and finish me?"
"You take a Black guy who's a Muslim and he's on a kill list he's trying to get himself off. What are the chances of that? I don't really have a lot of optimism."
--Kareem
In May 2012, the New York Times revealed the existence of a secret Obama administration "kill list"--formally known as the disposition matrix--that included an unspecified number of U.S. citizens deemed mortal enemies in the so-called War on Terror. One of the men on the list, U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was assassinated in a joint CIA and military drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. His son, 16-year-old Colorado native Abdulrahman al-Awkal, was killed in a similar strike the following month.
When pressed on why an innocent American teenager had been killed, a senior Obama adviser said the boy should have "had a more responsible father."
"Turns out I'm really good at killing people," Obama once boasted, according to the 2013 Mark Halperin and John Heilemann book Double Down. "Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."
President Donald Trump has his own assassination list, as the January 2020 drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani reminded the world. In the first major atrocity of his administration, U.S. and UAE special forces raided the village of Yakla in Yemen in January 2017-- killing 23 civilians including 10 children, among them Anwar al-Awlaki's daughter (and Abdulrahman's little sister), 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki, who died slowly and painfully after being shot through the neck.
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Droning the World: The Assassination Complex From Bush to Obama to Trump
How the U.S. presidency became a killing machine.
Jan 12, 2020
We're only a few days into the new decade and it's somehow already a bigger dumpster fire than the last. On January 2nd, President Trump decided to order what one expert called "the most important decapitation strike America has ever launched." This one took out not some nameless terrorist in a distant land or a group of civilians who happened to get in the way, but Major General Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran's elite Quds Force and the mastermind of its military operations across the Middle East.
Among the thousands of ignored American drone strikes since the 9/11 attacks, this was not one of them. In the wake of the assassination, we've seen: the Iraqi parliament vote to expel American forces from their country; all the Democratic presidential candidates make statements condemning the strike; thousands of protestors around the world take to the streets; and both chambers of Congress introduce resolutions aimed at curbing the president's expanding war powers. Even though there is still so much we don't know, one thing is for sure. Everything we thought we knew about drone warfare -- and America's wars more broadly -- is about to be thrown out the window.
When I first started writing this piece, I was simply reflecting on a decade of U.S. drone warfare and the problems it had spawned. But when this world-altering news broke, I immediately started thinking about how I got here, as well as how my country could continue to recklessly breed chaos and destruction throughout the Greater Middle East.
"In its recklessness and brutality, Trump's escalating drone war should remind us all of just how dangerous it is when a president claims the legal authority to kill in secret and no one can stop him."
New decades afford us a chance to take a good, hard look at what transpired in the years past. Until that strike in Iraq occurred, it seemed like every time I opened Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram in the new year, I was inundated with sentimental reflections about how far we've come in the last 10 years and where we're going next. And I get it. I really do. It's the beginning of a new decade and nostalgia is in the air.
In fact, over the holiday season, I found myself with time on my hands and that same sort of sentimentality creeping up on me. So I decided to indulge myself by looking through old journals of mine. One entry in particular caught my attention. In 2010, when I was still an idealistic high school student in Tennessee, I wrote about the democracy movement I saw rising in the Middle East (what we came to know as "the Arab Spring") and how hopeful it made me that global peace might be achieved in my lifetime. I wrote about my desire not only to see the world but to help make it a better place.
Rereading that entry 10 years later, a few thoughts came to mind. First, I was amused by my unwavering optimism and how sure I was that everything would work out okay. Although I'd like to think that I still see glasses as at least half-full, the never-endingly destructive feedback loop of American foreign policy has certainly left me a more jaded twenty-something.
Then I was suddenly impressed by how close I'd actually come to living the life that the 16-year-old me once imagined. Of course, I haven't yet seen the entire world (though it's on my bucket list) or managed to bring about world peace (a girl's gotta sleep, ya know). Still, working to bring attention to undercovered issues like drone warfare seems like a reasonable first step to have taken.
With the world veering into unprecedented territory, I realized that it was time for me to take off those rose-colored glasses, reflect on what our world really looked like 10 years ago and how oblivious I was to so many of the darker parts of it.
If you remember, as 2009 ended, President Barack Obama went to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. While accepting the award, he made a moving speech about war and peace. Noting the absurdity of receiving the prize while still "the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars," he laid out his ideas on how to build a just and lasting world of peace. At the same time, he defended his continued use of military force in the Middle East, arguing that "the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace," even if we "must also think clearly about how we fight" war.
Looking back, there's no doubt about the eloquence of his words, which fit well with my 16-year-old dreams. Unfortunately -- for him, for me, and for the world -- he didn't take his own advice. Instead of preserving the peace, he quickly embraced the latest instruments of war, like drones, and so helped usher in a new era of warfare that, as the latest drone strike in Baghdad makes clear, is likely to haunt us for decades to come.
Obama's Legacy
A large part of Obama's speech was dedicated to America's adherence to the laws of war and the importance of protecting civilians when using force. As he put it,
"Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct... And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard."
For those not familiar with those "laws," the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols specifically protect people in areas of armed conflict who are not taking part in the hostilities (civilians, health workers, and aid workers in particular) and those who are no longer participating in the hostilities, including the wounded, the sick, and prisoners of war.
Unsurprisingly, nowhere in Obama's 36-minute speech did he mention that he had already authorized more drone strikes than his predecessor, George W. Bush, approved during his entire presidency. Nor did he mention that those strikes had already killed dozens, if not hundreds, of civilians in countries ranging from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia.
On January 23, 2009, for instance, just three days after Obama's inauguration, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan ripped through a house filled with friends and family sitting down to dinner. Nine civilians were killed. As Faheem Qureshi, a teenager who barely survived the attack, told the Guardian, "I am the living example of what drones are... They have affected Waziristan [the district of Pakistan where he lived] as they have affected my personal life. I had all the hopes and potential and now I am doing nothing." More than a decade later, Faheem has still not been given an explanation for what happened to his family, even though the president was told almost immediately that a mistake had been made and innocent civilians had been killed.
Six months later, a U.S. drone strike took out a mid-ranking Taliban commander in Pakistan. At his funeral, attended by 5,000 people, another drone fired missiles into the crowd in an attempt to kill Baitullah Mehsud, the founder of the Pakistani wing of the Taliban. Forty-five civilians would die, but not Mehsud who was targeted seven times before eventually being killed on August 5, 2009. The drone pursuit of him would leave at least 164 dead, including eight-year-old Noor Syed who was playing in a house near one of Mehsud's suspected hideouts when a piece of shrapnel hit him.
Throughout Obama's presidency events like these occurred with alarming frequency. A pregnant woman in Yemen died while driving with her children. A 4-year-old girl was left without an eye, nose, or lower lip in a rural province of Afghanistan. Rescue workers in Pakistan were killed while trying to retrieve bodies after an airstrike. Even American military personnel weren't spared. In 2011, for instance, Marine Staff Sergeant Jeremy Smith and Navy corpsman Benjamin Rast were unintentionally killed near Sangin, Afghanistan, by a drone strike while on their way to rescue Marines pinned down by Taliban gunfire. According to outside monitoring groups, by the end of his second term, President Obama had authorized 528 strikes with a death toll reaching somewhere between 380 and 801 civilians in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen alone. And that's believed to be a conservative estimate.
The "Precision" of Drone Warfare
In 2013, when discussing the high number of civilian casualties from drone strikes, the president defended them by claiming that "conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones and are likely to cause more civilian casualties and more local outrage." That same year, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared, "You can far more easily limit collateral damage with a drone than you can with a bomb, even a precision-guided munition, off an airplane." Or, as former CIA Director Leon Panetta put it, "I think this is one of the most precise weapons that we have in our arsenal."
If it sounded too good to be true, that's because it was and still is.
When political scientists Micah Zenko and Amelia Wolf did a careful analysis of this claim for the Council on Foreign Relations, they found that "the White House is deeply misleading about the precision of drone strikes. They are, in fact, roughly thirty times more likely to result in a civilian fatality than an airstrike by a manned aircraft." A deeper dive into the technology used for military drones showed that it's prone to significant error. After analyzing documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act related to drones, previously unpublished court documents, dozens of engineering and technical studies, and contract data, CorpWatch's Pratap Chatterjee and Christian Stork came to a similar conclusion: "Planning for drone operations was handicapped by a fog of numbers and raw data derived from flawed technology marketed by contractors, the military, and the intelligence agencies."
The false notion that drones are more precise and effective -- and so less dangerous -- to civilians gained special, if grim, traction in the Obama era. During the Trump presidency, it would only become more of a given. In the years since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, in fact, the U.S. military has only expanded its use of artificial intelligence, or AI, in warfare in order, as the Pentagon's chief information officer Dana Deasy puts it, to maintain America's "strategic position and prevail on future battlefields."
Unfortunately, as my colleague Emily Manna and I have pointed out, this is a development that's anything but relegated to those "future battlefields." The military is already hard at work making its existing weapons systems, including drones, ever more autonomous. This process is sure to accelerate, even if the American public will hear little about it, thanks to the secrecy surrounding the application of AI and the fact that private companies with no commitment to public accountability are deeply involved in creating the technology.
Under the circumstances, one thing is predictable: ever more civilians are going to die in America's wars.
Drone War Escalates Under Trump
Almost as alarming as the rate of civilian casualties from drone and other air strikes in the Obama years was the lack of information provided about them. The American public couldn't find out how many civilians had actually been killed, whether their government compensated those who were harmed or not, or even the legal rationale for such strikes. Sometimes, it was impossible to tell whether drones were even behind them. Most of what could be known about the U.S. drone program, in fact, including the CIA's role in it, how its "targets" were tracked, or even what those in targeted countries thought about such strikes, came from leaked information and independent reporting. On rare occasions when the drone program was officially acknowledged, statements made about it usually turned out to be lies.
Through executive orders just before he left office, President Obama finally put in place modest reforms to make the drone program more transparent and accountable. His key order outlined a process of review and investigation that had to be set in motion anytime reports of civilian casualties from drone strikes came in. Information from all available sources, including non-military or government organizations, was to be taken into account and the government was required to acknowledge responsibility for civilian deaths and injuries while providing redress to the victims and their families. Finally, the director of national intelligence was to release estimates of the number of combatants and civilians killed by military drone strikes since 2009. Another executive order required future presidents to release similar information annually. Although the numbers still proved dubious and many questions remained about, among other things, the CIA civilian casualty count, at least the pendulum finally seemed to be swinging in the right direction.
No such luck. Soon after President Trump took office, his administration began to quietly dismantle the safeguards Obama had just created. His administration would subsequently expand the battlefields on which drones would be used, ease combat rules in Somalia intended to protect civilians, rescind most aspects of Obama's executive orders, and stop publishing civilian casualty data entirely, while telling the public even less about the program. Not surprisingly, drone strikes across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa would rise and a lot more civilians would start dying from them. None of this was exactly shocking from a commander-in-chief who had once asked a CIA official why he didn't kill a terrorist target's family during a drone strike.
In his Nobel Prize speech, Obama claimed that the reason the United States adhered to certain rules of conduct in war like protecting civilians was because "that's what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is the source of our strength." In the first half of last year, U.S. and Afghan air and drone strikes killed more civilians than the Taliban for the first time ever. Those strikes hit wedding parties, farmers, pregnant women, and small children. In Somalia, drone strikes decimated entire communities, destroying not only lives, but crops, homes, and livelihoods. And as the new decade began, President Trump not only carried out a drone strike so drastic and rare that many experts believed it was a straightforward act of (and declaration of) war, but also threatened to bomb non-military targets ("cultural" sites), a move which is generally considered a war crime under international law.
In its recklessness and brutality, Trump's escalating drone war should remind us all of just how dangerous it is when a president claims the legal authority to kill in secret and no one can stop him. Maybe this decade we'll learn our lesson.
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The Assassin's Creed in the Age of Endless War and Trump
This is the world in which we now live, one of endless war, where victory is not only impossible but undesirable, and where a mad king can run amok, and we the people just nod and go about our day. It will remain so until the American public decides that we have had enough
Jan 09, 2020
Let's start by dispensing with the patently obvious.
Donald Trump's decision to kill Iranian major general and Quds Force commander Qasem Suleimani was driven by a number of factors, but none of them involved prudent forethought and counsel with foreign policy advisors, Middle East experts, and military officers.
We can debate the merits and demerits of such a radically destabilizing move all day. (Spoiler alert: the demerits have the upper hand.) But what we can't do is pretend that the decision was made in any kind of rational, well-considered way that bespeaks a thoughtful commander-in-chief with an awareness of the implications--or even any curiosity about them--or acting with the best interests of the United States at heart.
"The claim that the strike was twelve dimensional chess, or bold leadership, or anything but classic Trumpian impulsivity and egotism, is hogwash."
It was more like the act of a severely maladjusted seventh grader who got first into his parents' liquor cabinet, and then their gun rack.
Unquestionably Suleimani was a bad hombre, as the saying goes, but the wisdom of taking him out right now is highly debatable. It was an order that reportedly shocked even Trump's top military advisors, who by some accounts only mentioned the possibility as a hypothetical, never thinking he'd go for it. (Have them met him?)
Here in the reality-based world, there can be no plausibly denying that Trump's chief motivations were as follows, in no particular order:
1) A wag-the-dog attempt to defend against impeachment, which--Mitch McConnell's machinations notwithstanding--is closing on Trump like a vise. Of course, distracting us from impeachment is merely a sub-task of his broader effort to get re-elected, which not coincidentally also motivated his unconstitutional skullduggery in Ukraine, which is why he is being impeached in the first place. So in one sense we can look at Suleimani's killing as little more than an aspect of Trump's re-election campaign, like kissing babies or offering coal subsidies.
2) His instinctive belligerence and knee-jerk tendency to opt for the most extreme, hamhanded, and clumsily faux macho option in any given scenario, regardless of whether he is being impeached or not.
3) Wanton indulgence of Trump's massive ego--perhaps the defining principle of his entire presidency. The Washington Post reports: "Trump was also motivated to act by what he felt was negative coverage after his 2019 decision to call off the airstrike after Iran downed the US surveillance drone, officials said. Trump was also frustrated that the details of his internal deliberations had leaked out and felt he looked weak, the officials said."
This is how we make decisions now.
Needless to say, a huge part of this megalomaniacal insecurity is Trump's raging, unquenchable jealousy toward Barack Obama, manifested in a desire to undo all of his predecessor's accomplishments, from the ACA to the JCPOA, and to impulsively take any action that Obama--often wisely--declined to, especially when it comes to the use of force. Earlier I compared Trump to a twelve-year-old. But this is the mentality of a toddler. And one who never gets hugged.
In short, the claim that the strike was twelve dimensional chess, or bold leadership, or anything but classic Trumpian impulsivity and egotism, is hogwash. So please don't pester me with the fairy tale that Donald Trump is some military genius.
Ladies and Gentleman, The Credibility Gap
The odious Mike Pompeo claimed with a straight face that the White House ordered the strike to preempt an "imminent attack" on US lives. But this is Lucy-holding-the-football territory, recalling previous lies that led us into other disastrous foreign wars, from the sinking of the Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin to Iraq's mythical WMD.
Numerous experts have attested that Suleimani was always in the process of planning such attacks, giving the lie to the notion that there was some urgency to killing him now when we could have done so at numerous points in the past. And we know that Pompeo and his lieutenants had actually been lobbying Trump to order this killing for months, not because of any new emergency.
Thus we are brought to a moment of bittersweet irony. Like many administrations before it, this White House is asking us to take its word when it comes to the most violent and consequential actions a government can undertake. But the Trump administration has less than zero credibility when it comes to saying, "Trust us, it was the right thing to do. We can't tell you exactly why, but it was." So in this hour when Trump really needs the faith and confidence of American people, there is some grim satisfaction in seeing his record of world-beating mendacity now come back to haunt him.
Ginning up an international crisis to deflect domestic troubles is a time-tested presidential strategy, of course, and one that private citizen Trump repeatedly--but incorrectly--predicted Obama would use. (In general, Trump's past attacks on Obama are a master class in projection, providing a reliable roadmap for what he himself will do in any given scenario, as he cannot imagine a leader taking anything other than the most cynical and self-serving path.)
But the Extremely Stable Genius's net gain is likely to be even less than previous wartime presidents, given his aforementioned credibility problem. Whether that is sufficient to make an electoral difference will be yet another test of the intelligence, gullibility, and moral courage of us as a nation. Regardless, we can count on more of Trump's demonstrated willingness to do what is technically known in foreign policy circles as "crazy shit," especially if he perceives that he obtains a domestic political benefit that will help protect him from Nancy Pelosi pulling up in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue behind the wheel of an empty moving truck.
No one can say with confidence what all the long term effects of this reckless action will be, but it is all but impossible that any good will outweigh the inevitable bad. That bad has already begun with the humiliating--and debilitating--expulsion of US forces from Iraq, and Iran's full-bore resumption of its nuclear weapons program. Going forward it promises to bring on a raft of unpredictable and potentially nightmarish problems, including the further alienation of the US in the international community; a more dangerous operational climate for US military forces in the region and arguably worldwide; and of course, violent reprisals of one kind or another that might yet engulf us in a deeper military quagmire. Most grim of all now is the near-certainty that Iran will now get the Bomb within the next decade.
Gee, who'd have thought that giving this kind of power to a maliciously ignorant D-list game show host would have those kind of repercussions?
Assassin's Creed
Moving beyond the details of this specific international incident and its impact on the ongoing domestic US political crisis, we must ask ourselves what Trump's order to kill Qasem Suleimani says about the state of our democracy and how we conduct war in the 21st century.
On CNN, Pete Buttigieg-- lest we forget, a former Navy intelligence officer and Afghanistan vet as well as a Rhodes Scholar--was asked by Jake Tapper if he thought the Suleimani strike qualified as an "assassination." Wisely refusing to engage in gotcha semantics, Mayor Pete replied:
I am not interested in the terminology. I'm interested in the consequences and I'm interested in the process. Did the president have legal authority to do this? Why wasn't Congress consulted? It seems like more people at Mar-a-Lago heard about this than people in the United States Congress who are a coequal branch of government with a responsibility to consult. Which of our allies were consulted? The real-world effects of this are going to go far beyond the things that we're debating today and we need answers quickly.
Not a horrible answer. Maybe that kid should run for president.
But let's dig into the topic, because the exploration is instructive.
Whether carried out by a non-state actor or a sovereign government, assassination is a specific form of killing distinguished by the political nature of the act, its victim, and/or the intended reaction. As a political tool, it is a technique as old as geopolitics itself--if you want to kill a snake, cut off its head. Notwithstanding our pearl-clutching rhetoric when others employ it, the US has certainly not shied away from killing foreign leaders in the past, not only despots but popular elected democratic figures as well, as evidenced by the corpses of Patrice Lumumba and Salvador Allende, and sometimes even our own surrogates, like Ngo Dinh Diem.
Usually the questions swirling about assassination as tool of state power involve the ethics of taking out a civilian representative of a foreign power, even for convincing reasons that advance national objectives. But that is not the question here. Suleimani was a major general in the Iranian army and a uniformed combatant commander. Therefore the issue is not his legitimacy as a target but whether we were plausibly in a true state of war with Iran where we are actively shooting at the bad guys, or if this was an aggressive provocation that risked ratcheting a low intensity conflict into that more dangerous realm without good reason.
Yet even that is a tricky question.
Since 1945 the demise of formal declarations of war has badly blurred the line between peace and war, which is already pretty blurry if one subscribes to Clausewitz's definition of warfare as the extension of politics by other means, which I do. In the wake of Vietnam, the 1973 War Powers Act was meant to curb an American president's ability to deploy US forces into harm's way for an extended period without Congressional approval. But Mohammad Atta and friends definitively rang down the curtain on that era. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress three days after 9/11 amounted to a blank check for the president to order military action as he or she sees fit, without appreciable oversight, and with no expiration date. In the almost two decades since then, the American people have come to accept those parameters without much pushback, but with dire consequences.
Fighting a "terrorist" enemy in a kind of shadow war that lacks the usual metrics for determining not only victory but even concrete benchmarks of success, we as a nation have grown accustomed to a permanent state of war. Some would say that is precisely the Orwellian state of affairs that, in their Adam Curtis-style symbiosis, both the powers-that-be and their terrorist foes would like.
In such a world, the term "assassination" has become almost useless, since it is pejorative by nature, and since 1976, technically illegal as a tool of US policy under Executive Order 11905, not that it has mattered. (Hence the euphemism "targeted killing.") If we set aside semantics--and also morality, as it is so malleable--the real question, to which Mayor Pete alludes, is whether a specific military action makes sense strategically and pragmatically. In the case of targeting a specific foreign individual, whether a member of an opposition government or a non-state actor, there can be good utilitarian arguments, even in "peacetime." But in the case of Suleimani, there is reason to fear exactly the opposite.
"Pragmatism aside, the fact that few Americans object to Suleimani's killing on moral grounds, and only a few on legal grounds, is itself if a measure of how comfortable we as a people have become with the murky waters of endless war."
Pragmatism aside, the fact that few Americans object to Suleimani's killing on moral grounds, and only a few on legal grounds, is itself if a measure of how comfortable we as a people have become with the murky waters of endless war. When utilitarianism is the only guide, it is quite easy for that kind of self-styled flinty-eyed fortitude to slip into the indiscriminate application of force--a policy of murder first and rationalization later--with "pragmatism" as an all too convenient cover. Many an act of international aggression has been cloaked in the righteous rhetoric of "self-defense." Few but the Quakers would argue that the world would not have been well-served and spared terrible horrors if a certain failed painter had met with a suspicious traffic accident in 1935. But it is disturbing how easily that same logic can be turned to Vladimir Putin serving up a cup of poison tea over, say, irritation at the mouthiness of a former KGB man turned defector to the West. The slope is as slippery as they come, circling us back to why assassination is reflexively proscribed in the first place.
War Without End--Amen
Trump clearly conceives of his commander-in-chief role much like his role in domestic affairs: absolute, not subject to questioning by mere mortals, and definitely unfettered by the Constitution or the requirement to consult with--much less obtain permission--from Congress. The unitary executive approach to waging war suits him terrifyingly well: we could hardly have drawn up a more perfectly awful POTUS to inherit the expanded warmaking powers of the post-9/11 era.
"We now have a criminally unqualified, proudly ignorant cretin and serial grifter with the near-absolute power of life and death, and the authority to order the killing of any single individual he deems a threat, at the mere press of a remote control button, from oceans away, or even the obliteration of the entire planet."
Numerous sages predicted this state of affairs. Drone strikes, clandestine special operations missions, and targeted killings were among the distinguishing aspects of the so-called "Global War on Terror" that began under Bush 43, much of it hidden from public view and carried out with little to no oversight from Capitol Hill. As those shadowy operations grew under his Democratic successor, many on the center-left were comfortable giving Obama such expansive powers, trusting that he would use them judiciously and wisely. But many on the far left were not so sanguine, making them strange bedfellows with Obama-haters on the right, who were fine with the aggressive exercise of US military might, but just didn't like a black guy in charge. Now, as the Cassandras foretold, those right-wingers have been delighted to take the vast presidential latitude established in the years 2001-2016 and hand it over to the host of "Celebrity Apprentice."
The result is that we now have a criminally unqualified, proudly ignorant cretin and serial grifter with the near-absolute power of life and death, and the authority to order the killing of any single individual he deems a threat, at the mere press of a remote control button, from oceans away, or even the obliteration of the entire planet.
This is the world in which we now live, one of endless war, where victory is not only impossible but undesirable, and where a mad king can run amok, and we the people just nod and go about our day. It will remain so until the American public decides that we have had enough, or until the integrity and decency of the United States has been so thoroughly debased that it no longer matters.
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Soleimani Strike Marks a Novel Shift in Targeted Killing, Dangerous to the Global Order
This new development shows how the influence of the open-ended military campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State is washing back into the inter-state realm, imperiling the line between war and peace.
Jan 06, 2020
The drone strike against Qasem Soleimani marks a significant escalation in the United States' use of force against external security threats as it has evolved in the years since September 11, 2001. President Donald Trump's decision to target Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, brings the signature technique of the so-called "war on terror"--the targeted killing of individuals outside any wider conventional military engagement--into the context of inter-state relations. After a period when the United States used the analogy of inter-state war to expand its use of force against terrorist groups, this new development shows how the influence of the open-ended military campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State is washing back into the inter-state realm, imperiling the line between war and peace.
Following al-Qaeda's attack on the United States, President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama embraced the use of targeted killing against terrorist fighters overseas, striking alleged members of al-Qaeda and other groups in remote locations in countries like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. In doing so, they imported a "war paradigm" into counter-terrorism operations, claiming the right to target terrorists because of their status as members of an enemy force, as in an armed conflict with another state. The barriers to the use of lethal force were reduced, as individual terrorists could be killed outside battlefield conditions and without showing they posed an imminent threat to life (though President Obama added a policy restriction in 2013 limiting strikes outside zones of hostilities to cases where targets posed a "continuing, imminent threat.") The powers of a country at war were transposed into a context of individualized surveillance and targeting, expanding the notion of the battlefield in an unprecedented way.
The killing of Soleimani represents a converse and symmetrical development. With this action, President Trump has imported the kind of individualized targeting that has become associated with counter-terrorism operations into the United States' confrontation with another state. Of course, there would be nothing new or remarkable in a state carrying out the targeted killing of a military commander of another state in wartime. The example that is routinely cited in this context is the United States' operation in 1943 to bring down the plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese naval commander who was responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor. But a comparison of the strikes against Yamamoto and Soleimani brings out what is different and novel about President Trump's move.
The attack against Yamamoto took place at a time when the United States and Japan were engaged in an all-out war that ended with the complete surrender of Japan. By contrast, the United States targeted Maj. Gen. Soleimani, Iran's most influential military commander, at a time when there were no direct conventional hostilities underway between the United States and Iran. Indeed, President Trump said that the strike against Soleimani was taken "to stop a war" (meaning, apparently to prevent a war from starting) rather than forming part of a war that was already taking place. What's more, it has been reported that the United States carried out the strike knowing that the Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who had a formal position within the Iraqi military, was also likely to be killed in the attack.
President Donald Trump's decision to target Soleimani ... brings the signature technique of the so-called "war on terror" - the targeted killing of individuals outside any wider conventional military engagement - into the context of inter-state relations.
The strike against Soleimani therefore looks less like a wartime military operation, and more like the kind of targeted killing that the United States (and Israel, among other countries) has carried out to remove individual members of non-state groups involved in planning or conducting terrorist attacks. Indeed, it was precisely Soleimani's role in sponsoring and orchestrating the activities of non-state groups that made him a target of the United States--especially his role in supporting the Iraqi militia group Kataib Hezbollah, which the US government held responsible for an attack on an Iraqi military base in late December that killed an American contractor. According to press reports, administration officials have compared Soleimani to the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in discussing the decision to kill him.
Nevertheless, by targeting a most senior official of another state outside wartime, Trump has taken a step that recent US administrations had shied away from. It has been widely reported that the administrations of both President George W. Bush and President Obama considered targeting Soleimani, but ultimately decided against such a provocative step. The nearest equivalent in recent history may be President Ronald Reagan's bombing raid on Libya in 1986, after the bombing of a West German disco for which the Libyan regime was considered responsible. The US raid attacked the military barracks where Libya's leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi was based, and it has been claimed that killing Gaddafi was a principal goal of the strikes. Even if this was an attempt at targeted killing, however, it was framed as an attack on a military facility. And even then, the U.S. operation was repudiated by the U.N. General Assembly, which stated in a resolution that it "condemns the military attack perpetrated against the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya on 15 April 1986, which constitutes a violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law." A different context and the development of armed drones have allowed Trump to conduct and openly acknowledge the targeted killing of Soleimani.
The administration has described the killing of Soleimani as a "defensive action" against an individual who was "actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region." This is the language that US officials have used to justify attacks against terrorist targets in recent years. But in killing an Iranian government official, the United States has used force against Iran, and under the UN Charter that is only permitted to the degree that is necessary and proportionate to defend against an armed attack. Whether or not the United States has met that threshold, its action--and public acknowledgement and justifications of that action--sets a significant precedent in loosening restraints on military action in a way that could prove highly escalatory, at a time when links between states and proxy militias have multiplied across the Middle East and North Africa, and beyond.
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US Government's Refusal to Confirm or Deny It Put American Journalist on Drone Kill List Called 'Chilling'
"The government seeks to shield itself from all inquiry into the process by which it acts as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner."
Apr 02, 2019
Lawyers for an American journalist who believes he was placed on the government's infamous "kill list" warned Tuesday that the rights of all U.S. citizens are at stake if the country's drone assassination program is allowed to continue.
The organization's comments came as part of a response to the U.S. government's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit regarding its use of the list. Reprieve is representing Bilal Abdul Kareem, a journalist and U.S. citizen who claims he was repeatedly targeted --and nearly killed on five separate occasions--by drone and missile attacks in 2016 when he was reporting on the ongoing conflict in Syria.
Kareem joined an Al Jazeera journalist in 2017 in a lawsuit against the government, demanding that the Trump administration remove their names from the "kill list" of potential targets for the U.S. drone program.
If the government manages to have the lawsuit dismissed, legal experts warn it would allow the Trump administration and future presidents to secretly place any American on a kill list without telling them why, therefore stripping them of their constitutional right to due process.
"The government's assertion that it has the right to mark its own citizens for death, based on secret information, without affording them the legal protections offered by the Constitution, is chilling." --Jennifer Gibson, Reprieve"The right to due process has been a bedrock of the judicial system, and one of the pillars that support a free society going back eight centuries to the Magna Carta," wrote Tom Emswiler and Will Isenberg in the Boston Globe last summer. "It is the birthright of every American. Gaining a tactical advantage is not worth losing that heritage."
As Common Dreams reported at the time of the filing, Kareem believes the Obama administration placed him on the kill list and wants President Donald Trump to remove his name, asserting that his inclusion "is the result of arbitrary and capricious agency action, accomplished without due process, and in violation of the United States Constitution and U.S. and international law."
The government responded that if those included on the U.S. kill list were to be informed and given a trial, national security could be jeopardized during the court case.
Such a claim suggests that the right of the U.S. to operate its drone program trumps Kareem's--and all Americans'--Fifth and 14th Amendment rights, Reprieve said.
"By invoking the state secrets privilege in the context of designating a U.S. citizen for lethal action, the government seeks to shield itself from all inquiry into the process by which it acts as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner of plaintiff Bilal Abdul Kareem," said Reprieve and the law firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, which is also representing Kareem, in a statement Tuesday.
The government, in its motion to dismiss, said that Kareem's due process rights would be satisfied simply by allowing him to present evidence that he has been wrongly placed on the kill list, and that the government was under no obligation to repond.
Reprieve rejected that argument, saying it was akin to "limiting the accused to unilaterally contending that he is innocent of unknown charges in the hopes of persuading a silent, opaque coterie of government officials not to kill him."
"The government's assertion that it has the right to mark its own citizens for death, based on secret information, without affording them the legal protections offered by the Constitution, is chilling," said Jennifer Gibson, co-counsel for Kareem.
"The consequences of this action are too severe," Reprieve added, "and the right [to due process] too foundational to a constitutional democracy, to allow the government to secretly condemn an American citizen to death."
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Can US Government 'Secretly Plot to Assassinate' Americans Without Due Process? Judge Says No, Allowing Case Against 'Kill List' to Proceed
"For too long, the U.S. Government has sentenced people to death in secret, including American citizens, denying them their constitutionally-guaranteed right to walk through the courthouse doors and defend themselves."
Jun 14, 2018
In a major victory for all who believe the U.S. government should not have the power to sentence people to death in secret, a federal judge on Wednesday greenlighted a lawsuit brought by an American freelance journalist who claims he was placed on a classified "kill list" by the Obama administration and targeted by five separate drone strikes.
"Can Donald Trump secretly plot to assassinate American journalists? Judge Collyer says no."
--Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve
"Due process is not merely an old and dusty procedural obligation," U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer said in her ruling allowing the case to proceed. "Instead, it is a living, breathing concept that protects U.S. persons from overreaching government action."
The "kill list" lawsuit was initially filed last year by the human rights group Reprieve on behalf of American journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem, who says he was erroneously deemed a "militant" by the Obama administration while reporting from Syria.
Celebrating the judge's ruling on Thursday as a leap over the "first hurdle," Reprieve's Clive Stafford Smith wrote on Twitter: "Can Donald Trump secretly plot to assassinate American journalists? Judge Collyer says no."
"Today was a huge win, not just for Bilal Abdul Kareem, but for all those who believe we must protect that most cherished of American values--due process," Jennifer Gibson, the head of Reprieve's assassinations project, added in a statement following Wednesday's ruling. "We cannot just ignore the Constitution in the name of national security."
While Kareem maintains that he was placed on the secretive kill list by the Obama White House, his suit initially named President Donald Trump as the lead defendant in the case, arguing that Trump has kept him on the list.
In her ruling on Wednesday, however, Collyer dismissed Trump as the lead defendant for "technical reasons." The case will instead proceed against a number of government agencies, including the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
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