Bush’s Sacred Terror
The much-belated, poll-prompted outcry of a few U.S. elected officials against the widespread use of torture by the Bush administration — following years of silent acquiescence in the face of incontrovertible evidence of deliberate atrocity — is a welcome development, of course. But it has left an even more sinister aspect of Bushist policy untouched, one that likewise has been hidden in plain sight for years.
On Sept. 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of “lethal measures” against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an “enemy combatant.” This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate “enemies” on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.
The existence of this universal death squad — and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents — has not provoked so much as a crumb of controversy in the American establishment, although it’s no secret. The executive order was first bruited in The Washington Post in October 2001. We first wrote of it here in November 2001. The New York Times added further details in December 2002. That same month, Bush officials made clear that the edict also applied to U.S. citizens, as The Associated Press reported.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of a U.S. citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on Nov. 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred in Pakistan this month, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaida figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner’s son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.
But most of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. As a Pentagon document unearthed by The New Yorker in December 2002 put it, the death squads must be “small and agile” and “able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to … enter countries surreptitiously.”
The dangers of this policy are obvious, as a UN report on “extrajudicial killings” noted in December 2004: “Empowering governments to identify and kill ‘known terrorists’ places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists. … While it is portrayed as a limited ‘exception’ to international norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits, political opponents, or others.”
It’s hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an “enemy.” It’s hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is what the great and good in America have done. Like the boyars of old, they not only countenance but celebrate their enslavement to the ruler.
This was vividly demonstrated in one of the most revolting scenes in recent U.S. history: Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2003, delivered to Congress and televised nationwide during the final frenzy of war-drum beating before the assault on Iraq. Trumpeting his successes in the war on terror, Bush claimed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists” had been arrested worldwide — “and many others have met a different fate.” His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: “Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem.”
In other words, the suspects — and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects — had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds — or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called “the meaning of American justice.” And the assembled legislators applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man’s bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his contempt for law — our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.
Not even now, when the U.S. people’s growing revulsion at Bush’s bloody handiwork has emboldened a few long-time enablers of atrocity to criticize the “excesses” of his gulag and his “mishandling” of the war in Iraq. A few nips at the flank of the beast have been permitted. But the corroded heart of Bush’s system of state terror — officially sanctioned murder by presidential fiat — remains curiously sacrosanct.
Annotations
U.S. Missile Kills Two Children in Pakistan: Report
Reuters, Dec. 5, 2005
Guantanamo and beyond: The continuing pursuit of unchecked executive power
Amnesty International, May 13, 2005
Wrongful Imprisonment:Anatomy of a CIA Mistake
Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2005
War Crimes Made Easy
TomDispatch, Dec. 7, 2005
CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2005
Seized, held, tortured: six tell same tale
The Guardian, Dec. 6, 2005
A Weak Defense
Washington Post, Dec. 6, 2005
Bush’s State of the Union Speech
CNN, January 29, 2003
Manhunt
The New Yorker, Dec. 16, 2002
Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill Terrorists
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2002
Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003
Coward’s War in Yemen
Spiked, Nov. 11, 2002
Drones of Death
The Guardian, Nov. 6, 2002
Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005
