This week the US government publicly admitted that it is building a case against an American citizen that it claims is a member of Al-Qaeda who is planning terrorist attacks against America. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be shocking news – the various branches of justice in the US build cases against people for illegal activities all the time, and terrorism is certainly an illegal activity. However, this case is remarkable because the end result of the folder of evidence being put together will not be a trial before a judge and jury in a court of law. Instead, if the justice department puts together a convincing enough case, the CIA will be authorized to immediately kill the man with a drone strike from the skies above whichever country he is currently hiding in.
No trial is needed, it seems; and the man will not be given the chance to defend himself, as is usually the right of every American citizen who is accused of a crime. Instead, a combination of bureaucrats and politicians, with President Obama ultimately at its head, will become judge, jury, and executioner of this man, and quite possibly of many of the people around him at the time the CIA strikes, who will no doubt find their own lives being taken as ‘collateral damage’.
This isn’t the first time such an attack will have happened, of course, although it does seem to set a precedent for the US government openly admitting that it is considering assassinating one of its own people. A US citizen and Muslim cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, with similar justifications from the government. Equally, if we put aside the issue of American citizenship, countless others have been murdered by US drone strikes over the past few years on the basis of confidential information that we are not allowed to see – but the justice department, the military, and the US government all assure us that anyone killed was definitely an ‘enemy combatant’.
We are now in the middle of what geographer Derek Gregory calls ‘the everywhere war’ – an unannounced worldwide conflict in which every nation is a potential battlefield and every person a potential target. Gregory points to the militarization of the US-Mexico border and the use of computer viruses against Iranian nuclear reactors as examples of the worldwide spread of this war. Sticking with the Middle East, the US has essentially extended its war against Afghanistan into Pakistan, where it constantly conducts air and even ground raids in its attempt to find members of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That war has extended again across the gulf to Yemen, where regular drone strikes have stirred up such resentment that the country is constantly on the brink of revolutionary collapse. Such a collapse would, of course, give the US even more reason to continue with the strikes to defeat a new ‘radical’ government. The normal rules of war do not seem to apply – the US feels it can attack whoever it wants whenever it wants with complete impunity, all in the name of ‘national security’.
Some of the blame for this ‘everywhere war’ must lay with Al-Qaeda and Islamic militants themselves, of course, who have attacked indiscriminately. But the US needs to be held to higher standards than the people it calls terrorists. It needs to approach things in a manner that respects the law, precisely to show that it is different from Al-Qaeda. And randomly exterminating people without trial simply because they happen to be in the poor, underdeveloped nations that these extremists are targeting, is not going to demonstrate to the world that the US is morally superior. The US government is becoming bolder about its belief that it can target anyone it wants with this week’s announcement – but it needs to reverse that policy, and quickly.
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