November 9, 2012 EIR National 55
Nov. 1—The British imperial control over the U.S.
Presidency, which gained a significant foothold after
the British/Saudi-spawned 9/11 attack under the Bush-
Cheney Administration, has taken a huge step forward
under British puppet-President Barack Obama. And
now Obama, whether or not he wins re-election, is
moving to make his dictatorial practices permanent, including
his infamous killer-drone program. To regain
their country, Americans have to not only get rid of
Obama, but the entrenched apparatus determined to
police the U.S. and the world in support of the British
Empire.
Obama has set up a targeted killing machine, which
he runs from the White House, and which is intended to
be permanent, secret, and unaccountable. Every Tuesday,
he is presented with a list of potential targets by
John Brennan, his counter-terrorism advisor, and designates
who, on that list, will be the next to die, most
likely from a missile fired by a Predator or Reaper
drone, operated by either the CIA or the military’s
Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC).
Officially, the Obama Administration has
never acknowledged the targeted killing program,
although everybody knows it exists, but,
in the past year, has sent out three of its top officials
to makes speeches justifying the program,
without even the fig leaf of due process. According
to various estimates, Obama’s killing spree
has killed more than 3,000 people, a significant
portion of them civilians, including three American
citizens, yet there hasn’t even been a pretense
of oversight by Congress. Lawsuits filed
by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
seeking information about the program have
been rebuffed by government lawyers who
refuse to even acknowledge that it exists. The
killing program was only superficially mentioned
in the Presidential debates, with Mitt
Romney avowing that he completely supports the program,
and would continue it.
However, there is a growing demand across the
world for accountability for the Administration’s targeted
killing campaign. This was noted by Ben Emmerson
QC (Queen’s Council), the UN Human Rights
Council’s Special Rapporteur for Counter-Terrorism
and Human Rights, in remarks delivered at Harvard
University’s School of Law on Oct. 25. Indeed, the
Human Rights Council has been looking into the U.S.
campaign for quite some time. Emmerson’s colleague,
South African lawyer Christof Heyns, the Special
Rapporteur for Extrajudicial Killings, Summary and
Arbitrary Executions, issued a report last June, calling
on the U.S. to “specify bases for decisions to kill
rather than capture ‘human targets,’ and whether the
state in which the killing takes place has given consent.”
Heyns had noted at the time that there were a number
Human Rights Council To Investigate
Obama’s Killer-Drone Program
by Carl Osgood
UN/Eskinder Debebe
Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and
Human Rights, has charged that the Obama Administration is “holding
its finger in the dam of public accountability” on its killer-drone strikes.
56 National EIR November 9, 2012
of cases in which initial drone attacks
were followed by attacks on
groups of people who had responded
as rescuers to the initial
attack. If those reports are true,
Heyns said, then “those further attacks
are a war crime,” a view with
which Emmerson expressed sympathy.
Obama Is Blocking
Accountability
“Now the Obama Administration
continues formally to adopt
the position that it will neither
confirm nor deny the existence of
the drone program while allowing
its senior officials to give public
justifications of its supposed legality
in personal lectures and interviews,”
Emmerson said. “In reality, as the administration
must no doubt be aware, it is holding its finger in
the dam of public accountability.”
Emmerson cited three judicial cases, one in London
and two in Pakistan, where the legality and lack of accountability
of Obama’s program are being challenged.
In the London case, a Pakistani man whose father was
killed in a drone strike in March 2011 has brought suit
against the British government for aiding the U.S.
drone campaign. His goal is a declaration from the
High Court in London that the sharing of intelligence
data by Britain’s signals intelligence agency (GCHQ),
is unlawful.
In Pakistan, there is a case moving through the
courts against two former CIA officials who are alleged
to have been responsible for a drone strike that caused a
disproportionate number of casualties. In the second
case, the plaintiffs are seeking a declaration that drone
strikes inside Pakistan by U.S. forces amount to acts of
war. Should such a declaration be issued, this would put
pressure on Pakistan’s air force, to shoot down U.S.
drones flying inside Pakistan’s airspace without specific
permission.
In the U.S., the ACLU has two ongoing Freedom of
Information Act lawsuits on the drone program, and a
third, filed together with the Center for Constitutional
Rights, charging that the targeted killings of Anwar al-
Awlaki and two other American citizens in Yemen in
2011 “violated the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee
against the deprivation of life without due process
of law.”
Emmerson reported that the process began with
calls by several members of the Human Rights Council,
notably Russia and China, but also Pakistan, where the
majority of drone strikes have taken place, for an investigation.
“It is an issue which is moving rapidly up the
international agenda,” Emmerson said. He noted that
there has been a great deal of debate over how these
operations should be judged, but “the first step is to establish
the facts reliably,” and that requires investigative
bodies that are truly independent from those countries
whose actions are in question. He said that
mechanisms can be established to protect the confidentiality
of intelligence and technical data, “but if the relevant
states are not willing to establish effective, independent
monitoring mechanisms that meet those
standards then, in the last resort it may be necessary for
the United Nations to act and to establish such mechanisms,
itself.”
‘Global War Paradigm’ Asserted
Emmerson also scored the “global war paradigm”
which was put in place following 9/11 attacks in 2001,
a paradigm that claims that the U.S., with its allies, is
engaged in a war against a stateless enemy in which the
entire globe is the battlefield, and that therefore actions
by the U.S. and its allies globally are to be judged solely
by the law of war, rather than the law applicable in
Lawsuits filed by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights state that the
targeted killings of three American citizens in Yemen in 2011 “violated the Constitution’s
fundamental guarantee against the deprivation of life without due process of law.”
Shown: a Predator drone firing a missile.
November 9, 2012 EIR National 57
peacetime, including international humanitarian and
human rights law.
Emmerson noted that the last 11 years have demonstrated
that terrorism is a phenomenon that can’t be defeated
by military force. “It is a reality with which nations
and the international community must continue to
contend and it calls, therefore, for a sustainable approach
that not only tackles the manifestations but also
the causes and does so within a rule of law framework,”
Emmerson said.
“But in the meantime, since 2001, the global war
paradigm has done immense damage to a previously
shared international consensus on the legal framework
underlying both international humanitarian law and international
human rights law, and it has also, at the same
time, and intentionally, given a spurious justification to
a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations.”
Indeed, he could have added, the use of military
force, both against terrorist groups and to promote
regime change in the Arab world, has actually increased
the chaos and lawlessness in these regions, and led to
the further spread of the very terrorist groups that we
have declared ourselves to be at war with.
Emmerson also issued a challenge to Republican
President candidate Mitt Romney, as it has been reported
that Romney has said in the past that he doesn’t
believe that water boarding is torture. While Emmerson
thoroughly demolished that argument, he expressed the
belief that Obama is against torture. What he failed to
acknowledge is that no one who was involved in the
decisions that led to the use of torture, or so-called “enhanced
interrogation techniques” against detainees
during the George W. Bush Administration, has been
prosecuted for those crimes, a decision that was made
by Obama himself, at the outset of his administration,
leaving those crimes as precedents for a future administration
that might like to employ such techniques, again.
Obama Plans To Make Drone War Permanent
Emmerson delivered his speech two days after the
Washington Post revealed that Obama and his national
security staff were putting in place the structures to
make the drone war a self-perpetuating, permanent institution
within the national security apparatus. The
“disposition matrix,” as the kill list is known within the
government, is now the centerpiece of Obama’s counter-
insurgency policy, and the targeted killing campaign
is likely to last another decade, the Post reported, citing
unnamed officials.
Indeed, the campaign is reaching a milestone of
sorts. The estimated death toll of 3,000 people exceeds
the number of people who died in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The drone campaign has expanded from Pakistan
and Afghanistan to North Africa. Centered on Camp
Lemonnier, the U.S. commando base in Djibouti, it extends
into Yemen, Somalia, the Seychelles, and elsewhere
in Africa. The Central Intelligence Agency,
under Director David Petraeus, has asked for White
House approval of its plan to expand its own drone
fleet, indicating how much of a paramilitary organization
the CIA has become.
The intention, from the White House to the CIA to
the JSOC, is to institutionalize this apparatus so that it
perpetuates indefinitely, in a war that will never end.
There will always be “terrorists” to add to the kill list. It
will generate short-term results, but those results will
obscure the long-term costs. “The problem with the
drone is, it’s like your lawn mower,” Bruce Riedel, a
former CIA analyst and Obama counter-terrorism adviser,
told the Post. “You’ve got to mow the lawn all the
time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to
grow back.”
Planetary Defense
Leading circles in Russia have
made clear their intent to judo the
current British-Obama insane
drive towards war, by invoking the
principle of Lyndon LaRouche’s
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
Termed the Strategic Defense of
Earth, the SDE would focus on
cooperation between the U.S.A.
and Russia for missile defense, as
well as defense of the planet
against the threat of asteroid or
comet impacts.
The destiny of mankind now is to
meet the challenge of our
“extraterrestrial imperative”! Available from LaRouchePAC
Nov. 1—The British imperial control over the U.S.
Presidency, which gained a significant foothold after
the British/Saudi-spawned 9/11 attack under the Bush-
Cheney Administration, has taken a huge step forward
under British puppet-President Barack Obama. And
now Obama, whether or not he wins re-election, is
moving to make his dictatorial practices permanent, including
his infamous killer-drone program. To regain
their country, Americans have to not only get rid of
Obama, but the entrenched apparatus determined to
police the U.S. and the world in support of the British
Empire.
Obama has set up a targeted killing machine, which
he runs from the White House, and which is intended to
be permanent, secret, and unaccountable. Every Tuesday,
he is presented with a list of potential targets by
John Brennan, his counter-terrorism advisor, and designates
who, on that list, will be the next to die, most
likely from a missile fired by a Predator or Reaper
drone, operated by either the CIA or the military’s
Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC).
Officially, the Obama Administration has
never acknowledged the targeted killing program,
although everybody knows it exists, but,
in the past year, has sent out three of its top officials
to makes speeches justifying the program,
without even the fig leaf of due process. According
to various estimates, Obama’s killing spree
has killed more than 3,000 people, a significant
portion of them civilians, including three American
citizens, yet there hasn’t even been a pretense
of oversight by Congress. Lawsuits filed
by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
seeking information about the program have
been rebuffed by government lawyers who
refuse to even acknowledge that it exists. The
killing program was only superficially mentioned
in the Presidential debates, with Mitt
Romney avowing that he completely supports the program,
and would continue it.
However, there is a growing demand across the
world for accountability for the Administration’s targeted
killing campaign. This was noted by Ben Emmerson
QC (Queen’s Council), the UN Human Rights
Council’s Special Rapporteur for Counter-Terrorism
and Human Rights, in remarks delivered at Harvard
University’s School of Law on Oct. 25. Indeed, the
Human Rights Council has been looking into the U.S.
campaign for quite some time. Emmerson’s colleague,
South African lawyer Christof Heyns, the Special
Rapporteur for Extrajudicial Killings, Summary and
Arbitrary Executions, issued a report last June, calling
on the U.S. to “specify bases for decisions to kill
rather than capture ‘human targets,’ and whether the
state in which the killing takes place has given consent.”
Heyns had noted at the time that there were a number
Human Rights Council To Investigate
Obama’s Killer-Drone Program
by Carl Osgood
UN/Eskinder Debebe
Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and
Human Rights, has charged that the Obama Administration is “holding
its finger in the dam of public accountability” on its killer-drone strikes.
56 National EIR November 9, 2012
of cases in which initial drone attacks
were followed by attacks on
groups of people who had responded
as rescuers to the initial
attack. If those reports are true,
Heyns said, then “those further attacks
are a war crime,” a view with
which Emmerson expressed sympathy.
Obama Is Blocking
Accountability
“Now the Obama Administration
continues formally to adopt
the position that it will neither
confirm nor deny the existence of
the drone program while allowing
its senior officials to give public
justifications of its supposed legality
in personal lectures and interviews,”
Emmerson said. “In reality, as the administration
must no doubt be aware, it is holding its finger in
the dam of public accountability.”
Emmerson cited three judicial cases, one in London
and two in Pakistan, where the legality and lack of accountability
of Obama’s program are being challenged.
In the London case, a Pakistani man whose father was
killed in a drone strike in March 2011 has brought suit
against the British government for aiding the U.S.
drone campaign. His goal is a declaration from the
High Court in London that the sharing of intelligence
data by Britain’s signals intelligence agency (GCHQ),
is unlawful.
In Pakistan, there is a case moving through the
courts against two former CIA officials who are alleged
to have been responsible for a drone strike that caused a
disproportionate number of casualties. In the second
case, the plaintiffs are seeking a declaration that drone
strikes inside Pakistan by U.S. forces amount to acts of
war. Should such a declaration be issued, this would put
pressure on Pakistan’s air force, to shoot down U.S.
drones flying inside Pakistan’s airspace without specific
permission.
In the U.S., the ACLU has two ongoing Freedom of
Information Act lawsuits on the drone program, and a
third, filed together with the Center for Constitutional
Rights, charging that the targeted killings of Anwar al-
Awlaki and two other American citizens in Yemen in
2011 “violated the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee
against the deprivation of life without due process
of law.”
Emmerson reported that the process began with
calls by several members of the Human Rights Council,
notably Russia and China, but also Pakistan, where the
majority of drone strikes have taken place, for an investigation.
“It is an issue which is moving rapidly up the
international agenda,” Emmerson said. He noted that
there has been a great deal of debate over how these
operations should be judged, but “the first step is to establish
the facts reliably,” and that requires investigative
bodies that are truly independent from those countries
whose actions are in question. He said that
mechanisms can be established to protect the confidentiality
of intelligence and technical data, “but if the relevant
states are not willing to establish effective, independent
monitoring mechanisms that meet those
standards then, in the last resort it may be necessary for
the United Nations to act and to establish such mechanisms,
itself.”
‘Global War Paradigm’ Asserted
Emmerson also scored the “global war paradigm”
which was put in place following 9/11 attacks in 2001,
a paradigm that claims that the U.S., with its allies, is
engaged in a war against a stateless enemy in which the
entire globe is the battlefield, and that therefore actions
by the U.S. and its allies globally are to be judged solely
by the law of war, rather than the law applicable in
Lawsuits filed by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights state that the
targeted killings of three American citizens in Yemen in 2011 “violated the Constitution’s
fundamental guarantee against the deprivation of life without due process of law.”
Shown: a Predator drone firing a missile.
November 9, 2012 EIR National 57
peacetime, including international humanitarian and
human rights law.
Emmerson noted that the last 11 years have demonstrated
that terrorism is a phenomenon that can’t be defeated
by military force. “It is a reality with which nations
and the international community must continue to
contend and it calls, therefore, for a sustainable approach
that not only tackles the manifestations but also
the causes and does so within a rule of law framework,”
Emmerson said.
“But in the meantime, since 2001, the global war
paradigm has done immense damage to a previously
shared international consensus on the legal framework
underlying both international humanitarian law and international
human rights law, and it has also, at the same
time, and intentionally, given a spurious justification to
a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations.”
Indeed, he could have added, the use of military
force, both against terrorist groups and to promote
regime change in the Arab world, has actually increased
the chaos and lawlessness in these regions, and led to
the further spread of the very terrorist groups that we
have declared ourselves to be at war with.
Emmerson also issued a challenge to Republican
President candidate Mitt Romney, as it has been reported
that Romney has said in the past that he doesn’t
believe that water boarding is torture. While Emmerson
thoroughly demolished that argument, he expressed the
belief that Obama is against torture. What he failed to
acknowledge is that no one who was involved in the
decisions that led to the use of torture, or so-called “enhanced
interrogation techniques” against detainees
during the George W. Bush Administration, has been
prosecuted for those crimes, a decision that was made
by Obama himself, at the outset of his administration,
leaving those crimes as precedents for a future administration
that might like to employ such techniques, again.
Obama Plans To Make Drone War Permanent
Emmerson delivered his speech two days after the
Washington Post revealed that Obama and his national
security staff were putting in place the structures to
make the drone war a self-perpetuating, permanent institution
within the national security apparatus. The
“disposition matrix,” as the kill list is known within the
government, is now the centerpiece of Obama’s counter-
insurgency policy, and the targeted killing campaign
is likely to last another decade, the Post reported, citing
unnamed officials.
Indeed, the campaign is reaching a milestone of
sorts. The estimated death toll of 3,000 people exceeds
the number of people who died in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The drone campaign has expanded from Pakistan
and Afghanistan to North Africa. Centered on Camp
Lemonnier, the U.S. commando base in Djibouti, it extends
into Yemen, Somalia, the Seychelles, and elsewhere
in Africa. The Central Intelligence Agency,
under Director David Petraeus, has asked for White
House approval of its plan to expand its own drone
fleet, indicating how much of a paramilitary organization
the CIA has become.
The intention, from the White House to the CIA to
the JSOC, is to institutionalize this apparatus so that it
perpetuates indefinitely, in a war that will never end.
There will always be “terrorists” to add to the kill list. It
will generate short-term results, but those results will
obscure the long-term costs. “The problem with the
drone is, it’s like your lawn mower,” Bruce Riedel, a
former CIA analyst and Obama counter-terrorism adviser,
told the Post. “You’ve got to mow the lawn all the
time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to
grow back.”
Planetary Defense
Leading circles in Russia have
made clear their intent to judo the
current British-Obama insane
drive towards war, by invoking the
principle of Lyndon LaRouche’s
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
Termed the Strategic Defense of
Earth, the SDE would focus on
cooperation between the U.S.A.
and Russia for missile defense, as
well as defense of the planet
against the threat of asteroid or
comet impacts.
The destiny of mankind now is to
meet the challenge of our
“extraterrestrial imperative”! Available from LaRouchePAC
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