Glenn Greenwald: The Drone-Happy President: Obama Escalates in Yemen – Again

[Karmadillo]

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/26/obama_escalates_in_yemen/singleton/

Published on Thursday, April 26, 2012 by Salon.com
The Drone-Happy President: Obama Escalates in Yemen – Again
The drone-happy President authorizes attacks on people in Yemen even when their names are not known
by Glenn Greenwald

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At the time, I wrote that “it’s unclear whether Obama will approve Petraeus’ request for the use of ‘signature strikes’ in Yemen,” though that was true only in the most technical sense. It was virtually impossible to imagine that a request from David Petraeus, of all people, to Barack Obama, of all people, for authority to target even more people in Yemen for death, now without even knowing who they are, would be anything but quickly and eagerly approved. And that is exactly what has now happened, as the Post‘s Greg Miller reports today:

The United States has begun launching drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen under new authority approved by President Obama that allows the CIA and the military to fire even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known, U.S. officials said. . . .

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So here’s yet another war that Obama is escalating, now ordering people’s death with greater degrees of recklessness, now without even bothering to know who is being targeted. Although Miller doesn’t bother to mention the likelihood of more deaths of innocent Yemenis, this is the same policy that has caused large numbers of civilian deaths in Pakistan (just read this heart-wrenching and amazing account of a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Aziz, oh-so-coincidentally killed by an American drone, along with his 12-year-old cousin, just days after he attended a meeting to protest civilian deaths by drones). Anonymous officials claim that greater caution will be exercised in Yemen than in Pakistan, a claim Miller uncritically prints, but these types of nameless strikes are certain to kill far more civilians. Indeed, the oh-so-coincidental killing of Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son in Yemen a mere two weeks after his father was killed proves how easily civilians were already being killed. The problem will only worsen now. As Johnsen pointed out, “in Yemen, just because it has a beard, carries a gun, and talks about Islamic law doesn’t mean its al-Qaeda,” but no matter: that’s who will now be extinguished by Obama’s drone campaign.

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Then there’s the question of what legal authority exists for Obama to order the targeting of Yemenis who very well may have nothing to do even with the “Al Qaeda” group in Yemen: one which itself did not even exist as of the time the 2001 AUMF was enacted. As Yale Professor Bruce Ackerman argued this weekend in The Washington Post, Obama, by approving of these strikes, is “breaking the legal barrier that Congress erected to prevent the White House from waging an endless war on terrorism.” That’s because Congress, even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, refused to write the President a blank check to attack Terrorists of any kind. Instead, they authorized force only against those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and “require[d] the president to return to Congress, and the American people, for another round of express support for military campaigns against other terrorist threats.” But as Obama demonstrated conclusively when he continued to wage the war in Libya even once Congress voted against its authorization, legal and Constitutional constraints are no more important to him than moral and strategic ones when it comes to waging more war.

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