The shooting of Ibragim Todashev: is the lawlessness of Obama's drone
policy coming home?
Once a state gets used to abusing the rights of foreigners in distant
lands, it's almost inevitable it will import the habit
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 3 June 2013 15.50 EDT
Did the FBI execute Ibragim Todashev? He appears to have been shot
seven times while being interviewed at home in Orlando, Florida, about
his connection to one of the Boston bombing suspects. Among the shots
was the assassin's hallmark: a bullet to the back of the head. What
kind of an interview was it?
An irregular one. There was no lawyer present. It was not recorded. By
the time Todashev was shot, he had apparently been interrogated by
three agents for five hours. And then? Who knows? First, we were told,
he lunged at them with a knife. How he acquired it, five hours into a
police interview, was not explained. How he posed such a threat while
recovering from a knee operation also remains perplexing.
At first he drew the knife while being interviewed. Then he acquired
it during a break from the interview. Then it ceased to be a knife and
became a sword, then a pipe, then a metal pole, then a broomstick,
then a table, then a chair. In one account all the agents were in the
room at the time of the attack; in another, all but one had
mysteriously departed, leaving the remaining officer to face his
assailant alone.
If – and it remains a big if – this was an extrajudicial execution, it
was one of hundreds commissioned by US agencies since Barack Obama
first took office. The difference in this case is that it took place
on American soil. Elsewhere, suspects are bumped off without even the
right to the lawyerless interview Ibragim Todashev was given.
In his speech two days after Todashev was killed, President Obama
maintained that "our commitment to constitutional principles has
weathered every war". But he failed to explain which constitutional
principles permit him to authorise the killing of people in nations
with which the US is not at war. When his attorney general, Eric
Holder, tried to do so last year, he got himself into a terrible mess,
ending with the extraordinary claim that "'due process' and 'judicial
process' are not one and the same … the constitution guarantees due
process, not judicial process". So what is due process if it doesn't
involve the courts? Whatever the president says it is?
Er, yes. In the same speech Obama admitted for the first time that
four American citizens have been killed by US drone strikes in other
countries. In the next sentence, he said: "I do not believe it would
be constitutional for the government to target and kill any US citizen
– with a drone, or a shotgun – without due process." This suggests he
believes that the legal rights of those four people had been respected
before they were killed.
Given that they might not even have known that they were accused of
the alleged crimes for which they were executed, that they had no
opportunities to contest the charges, let alone be granted judge or
jury, this suggests that the former law professor's interpretation of
constitutional rights is somewhat elastic. If Obama and his nameless
advisers say someone is a terrorist, he stands convicted and can be
put to death.
Left hanging in his speech is the implication that non-US citizens may
be killed without even the pretence of due process. The many hundreds
killed by drone strikes (who, civilian or combatant, retrospectively
become terrorists by virtue of having been killed in a US
anti-terrorism operation) are afforded no rights even in principle.
As the process of decision-making remains secret, as the US government
refuses even to acknowledge – let alone to document or investigate –
the killing by its drones of people who patently had nothing to do
with terrorism or any other known crime, miscarriages of justice are
not just a risk emerging from the deployment of the president's kill
list. They are an inevitable outcome. Under the Obama doctrine,
innocent until proved guilty has mutated to innocent until proved
dead.
The president made his rejection of habeas corpus and his assumption
of a godlike capacity for judgment explicit later in the speech, while
discussing another matter. How, he wondered, should the US deal with
detainees in Guantánamo Bay "who we know have participated in
dangerous plots or attacks, but who cannot be prosecuted – for example
because the evidence against them has been compromised or is
inadmissible in a court of law"? If the evidence has been compromised
or is inadmissible, how can he know that they have participated? He
can suspect, he can allege, but he cannot know until his suspicion has
been tested in a court of law.
Global powers have an antisocial habit of bringing their work back
home. The British government imported some of the methods it used
against its colonial subjects to suppress domestic protests and
strikes. Once an administrative class becomes accustomed to treating
foreigners as if they have no rights, and once the domestic population
broadly accepts their justifications, it is almost inevitable that the
habit migrates from one arena into another. If hundreds of people
living abroad can be executed by American agents on no more than
suspicion, should we be surprised if residents of the United States
began to be treated the same way?
• A fully referenced version of this article can be found at
monbiot.comTwitter: @GeorgeMonbiot
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your
own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
