Has the U.S. killed a future Mandela?

I addressed this question in a Letter to the Editor published by The Washington Post online on December 11, 2013. Here is the letter, with the Post’s headline and links that the Post nicely provided for more information. (A slightly different version of this letter, revised by the Post and approved by me, was published in the print edition of December 12^th, Page A18.)

Letter to the Editor [The Washington Post online, Dec. 11, 2013]

Mandela ‘terrorist’ label calls into question U.S. drone policy

Beginning in 1988, the U.S. officially considered Nelson Mandela’s political party, the African National Congress, to be a terrorist organization. Mr. Mandela himself was placed on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008.

In his speech at Northwestern University, on March 5, 2012, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. defended the killing of terrorists, designated as such by the executive branch, as legal and as requiring no judicial review. Mr. Holder was responding in particular to the prior Sept. 30 drone killings of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son. Prior to and since then, numerous such “terrorists” have been killed.

If the U.S. government can err so completely as to view Mr. Mandela as a terrorist threat until 2008, then it can err today in deciding who is and who is not a terrorist. If the United States had had the drone capability and “legal” rationale in 1988 that it has today, it might have killed Mr. Mandela. There may be someone who would have been a Mandela of the future had not he or she been killed, quite “legally,” by the U.S. government in a drone attack.

John L. Hodge, Jamaica Plain, Mass.

Another article, an op-ed in The Boston Globe by Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silvergate and his assistant, Juliana DeVries, points out the threat to freedom of speech contained in the U.S. government’s concept of a “terrorist”: “Terrorism ruling assaults civil liberties.” 

The creeping expansion of the “terrorist” label is similar to what happened in the 1950s, which led to the frequent labeling of anyone who advocated for social change from the left, including Martin Luther King, a “communist.” Many people so labeled lost their jobs and some went to jail. Similarly, as the Silvergate/DeVries article indicates, “terrorists” are being targeted and sent to jail, and perhaps killed, based not on what they do but on what they think and say and their associations.

In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually put an end to the prosecution and jailing of “communists” based on their beliefs, expressions, and associations. (See its opinions, particularly the concurring views of Justices Black and Douglas, in Yates v.United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957).) That Court was probably more liberal than the Court today: In Yates the conservative side of the bench produced only one dissent that favored the prosecution.

The only thing that separates us from a repeat of the oppressive anti-communist crusades of the 1950s, renamed the “war on terror,” is the time between now and the potential future. What that future will be, and when it might arrive, will depend on what we do today.

Also see my prior blogs on this subject:

Why Aren't Drone Killings Human Rights Violations? (3/9/12)

 The President’s Authority to Kill (3/27/12) 

The President’s Authority to Kill

It is a rare occurrence when the New York Times and John E. Sununu agree. (Mr. Sununu is a Republican and former U.S. Senator from New Hampshire.) But they did agree on one thing—the lameness of Attorney General Eric Holder’s untenable defense of exclusive executive authority to determine when American citizens can be targeted for killing. (See NYT Editorial, “The Power to Kill,” Mar. 11th,  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/the-power-to-kill.html?scp=1&sq=the%20power%20to%20kill&st=cse  and Sununu’s column, “Death, by order of your president,” Mar. 19th, http://articles.boston.com/2012-03-19/opinion/31205637_1_habeas-corpus-judicial-review-eric-holder .) As Mr. Sununu correctly points out, “The gist of [Holder’s] message was this: If you are a US citizen, the president of the United States can issue an order to have you killed without review or approval from any other branch of government. No president has ever asserted such authority. This administration has already acted upon it.”

Both articles point out that Mr. Holder’s position places the exclusive authority to determine who should be killed in the hands of the executive branch—headed by the President of the United States. Accordingly, the killing by a drone strike on Sept. 30, 2011, of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born member of al Qaeda, and the subsequent and little publicized killing of his 16-year-old son two weeks later, were justifiable, according to Mr. Holder, on the grounds that the President has the authority to decide. The concept of due process, that necessarily would involve some form of judicial proceeding before anyone is executed, has been discarded.

It is one thing to kill on the battlefield, where the conflicting sides are shooting at each other, and no one really knows the personal identities of those shooting from the other side. It is another thing to declare that an organization is the enemy, to identify its members, and to kill them, whether they are armed or not, from a drone flying high in the sky. Ever since the former President, George W. Bush, declared that al Qaeda was the enemy, that they were terrorists, and that we are in a war against terrorism, the distinction between these two scenarios has been blurred. First, President Bush declares that there is such a war on terrorism, and second, both Mr. Bush and President Obama act as though such a war is the same as fighting on the battlefield, so that the President’s authority is the same in both instances. Congress has essentially supported this view. We are now at the point where the President can determine who is a terrorist, whether or not the terrorist should be killed, and order the killing. The only restrictions on this power are restrictions determined by the executive branch—i.e., the President.

The authority that Mr. Holder claims is not in the United States Constitution, and Mr. Holder did not even assert that it is. Article II of the Constitution sets forth the powers of the executive branch, powers that “shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” (Art. II, Section 1, 1). It states, “The President shall be commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States . . . and he shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States. . . (Art. II, Section 2,1).  The Constitution does not provide for executive authority to execute and assassinate whomever the executive branch determines should be killed. (Also see my previous post, “Why Aren’t Drone Killings Human Rights Violations?”)

There is little to distinguish the authority claimed by Mr. Holder from that exercised by the world’s worst dictators. We may be looking, frankly, at the approaching death of democracy and human rights in the United States.  Human rights provide the legal backbone of democracy. Protection of human rights requires an independent judiciary. Mr. Holder’s position dispenses with the judiciary. That this flaunting of democratic principles is coming from a Democratic administration bodes ill for the nation. A Republican administration would make matters worse. (See my post of Jan. 23, 2012, “What is the Opposite Direction From Republicanism?”)

To discourage such national departures from established principles of human rights, there need to be international protectors of human rights that are strong enough to challenge national prerogatives. (A good source for international documents is the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, http://www.mcli.org .) In the meantime, only an active and concerned public can change the unfortunate direction this country is taking in the name of defense.

Although the New York Times and Mr. Sununu agree on this issue, both limit their criticism of Mr. Holder’s views to the killing of U.S. citizens. Neither seek to explain why it matters whether the target is a U.S. citizen or not. Can human rights apply only to U.S. citizens and not to others? The distinction makes no sense. Either we, as human beings, have equal rights or we do not. The very distinction between rights belonging to citizens and rights belonging to others undermines the ethical foundation of democracy—the fundamental equality of all people.

Why Aren’t Drone Killings Human Rights Violations?

A widely published Associated Press article by Sebastian Abbot attempts to make the case that few civilians have been killed by U.S. drones (e.g., “Most killed by US drones are militants, study finds,” Boston Globe, Feb. 26, 2012, p. A3). (Click here to see the article printed elsewhere.) The same article establishes that many civilians have been killed by drones in Pakistan. Since about 70% of those killed were “militants,” according to the article, that means about 30% were civilians. According to the article’s numbers, about 56 civilians or other non-militants have been killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan.

Imagine the international outcry if these killings had occurred in England, or Germany, or the U.S. Pakistan is not a war zone. Are Pakistani civilian lives considered to be of less importance that the lives of Europeans or Americans? Why is there no international outcry, or outcry within the U.S., that 56 innocent Pakistanis have been killed by U.S. drones?

The other 138 people killed were “militants.” And who are the “militants”? What is a “militant”? Is a “militant” the same as a “terrorist.” What is the difference between a “militant” and a “terrorist” or a “dissident”? When terms like “militant” and “terrorist” are vaguely defined, if defined at all, they become subject to creeping expansion to include more and more people. When an attack kills many, it is in the interest of the attacker to define “militant” and “terrorist” as broadly as possible to minimize the number of “civilian” deaths. No one has conclusively determined that all of the “militants” who died were proper targets.

These killings reflect complete disregard of the role of the judiciary. The purpose of judicial procedures is to determine guilt or innocence. It is the judiciary that is charged with enforcing the rights of the accused. Without an independent judiciary, human rights is an empty concept that cannot be implemented. When the policing body and the prosecutor can freely kill those suspected of criminal acts, the judiciary becomes irrelevant. These drone killings did not take place in the heat of battle or on a battlefield. They were premeditated. The non-civilian victims may or may not have been armed, but even if armed, they were defenseless against a drone high in the sky. These killings were not shootouts between the police and suspected criminals. No attempt was made to capture the targets alive and bring them to trial.

In these government-sponsored killings, there was no “due process of law” as envisioned by the Fifth Amendment, or a right to trial as a required by the Sixth Amendment. These provisions in the U.S. Constitution—in the Bill of Rights—state very fundamental principles of human rights. As a technical legal matter, they were not applicable. But from an ethical standpoint, these rights apply to all people everywhere in the world. They are recognized internationally as fundamental human rights.

What kind of example is the U.S. providing to the world? Just as nuclear technology spread beyond the U.S. to other nations, so will drone technology spread to other nations, including tyrannical ones. Under the regimes of these tyrannical nations, there is no difference between a terrorist and a militant, between a militant and a dissident, or between a dissident and the opposition. These regimes will use drone technology to kill the opposition. The model for this approach is being provided now by the U.S. It is the wrong model.

The Enduring Emotional Impetus to the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

Now that the Iraq war has officially ended, it would be wise to reflect on why the invasion occurred in the first place. Will the conditions that led to that invasion again be ripe for another invasion of someplace else? A key ingredient of those conditions, one not publicly questioned, is still quite present today. This ingredient provides the emotional impetus for attacking others.

We must not forget that the invasion occurred with the overwhelming support of the public. Former president George W. Bush successfully portrayed the invasion as a strike, not just against “the terrorists,” but against evil itself. Through a thought process that made emotional connections but ignored evidence and was entirely illogical, he linked into one bundle the “axis of evil” (Iraq, Iran and North Korea), those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, terrorists everywhere, and anyone opposed to “freedom.” If these connections made sense to the public then, what is to prevent similar connections from making sense again to support attacking or invading another target?

These illogical and non-factual connections were emotionally unified by an underlying premise: that we must fight against evil. It is this very fight that we must question. While evil by definition is always bad and should be fought, it is not necessarily true that evil can be identified as contained in identifiable evil people who should be killed. Yet, that identification is the unquestioned emotional premise behind the invasion of Iraq, and, perhaps too, behind the currently escalating drone killings and the military threats to Iran.

The problem with the premise, that you fight evil by killing evil people, is that it contradicts the primary principle underlying democracy, the principle of human equality. This principle was, for example, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, restated by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address, and reaffirmed by President Obama in his inaugural address in 2009. But it was abandoned when Iraq was invaded. We cannot consistently say, “All people are created equal,” and, “But some people are evil and must be killed.” The contradiction was not apparent to the nation when it invaded Iraq. It still isn’t.

It is not a coincidence that former president Bush defined the goal as “freedom,” not as human equality. By giving little or no weight to the idea of equality, it was relatively easy to discuss the invasion with little consideration of its potential cost to the Iraqi people. While the potential for casualties among American soldiers was discussed prior to the invasion, there was little or no public thought given to the potential casualties of the citizens of Iraq. Did we care that tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s would die, either directly, or indirectly from destroyed infrastructure, as a result of this regime change? Is so, did it matter? Even today we usually do not discuss Iraqi deaths in numbers as we do for American troops. In the fight against the rulers who were deemed to be evil, it seemed not to matter how many Iraqis would get killed in the process. They were considered to be just “collateral damage.” As a result of this way of thinking, the Iraqi people themselves were not regarded as equals but as weak, perhaps child-like, people who had to have their government overthrown for them by superior freedom-loving people. This deprived the Iraqi people of the dignity and the pride they would have obtained by overthrowing their own dictator, as is occurring elsewhere in the Middle East.

In Iraq, our nation cannot be proud of what it has accomplished, not only for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost for false reasons, but also by leaving behind a shaky, sectarian quasi-democracy that has only a possibility of maturing into the real thing. Apparently what was left behind does not really matter once the targeted evil has been eliminated. That the government left behind can hardly be called democratic shows that real democracy, one that includes respect for human rights, cannot be imposed by military force.

Thus, the invasion was based on a false idea about the meaning of democracy. The Founders themselves could not see the conflict between the principle of equality and the reality around them, for they made exceptions to human equality: for women, slaves and Native Americans, for example. But the principle of human equality allows for no exceptions. The exceptions are created by an anti-democratic way of thinking that apparently is a persistent carry-over from the pre-democratic past of humankind. Over time, our nation has recognized some of these inconsistent exceptions and addressed many of them. But the inconsistency remains whenever, as a matter of national policy, the nation acts on the anti-democratic premise that it knows who is evil and should be killed. The invasion of Iraq, regardless of the outcome, was a blow not for democracy but against the very principle of equality that underlies democracy. If we do not question the anti-democratic premise of that invasion, it will happen again somewhere else. Who will be the next victims?