LONG DISTANCE MURDERS
By Manuel E. Yepe

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

The murder last September 30, in Yemen, of the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of terrorism by President Barack Obama and executed without previous indictment or trial was a flagrant violation of the basic principles and universal laws on human rights.

But the worst thing is that it confirmed the beginning of an imperial era of targeted killings as part of the official war policy of the White House.

A special UN report on the subject defines targeted killings as premeditated acts of lethal force employed by states in times of peace or during armed conflict to eliminate specific individuals outside their territory. These acts, commonly undertaken by armed or intelligence services can vary from the use of car bombs to computer-piloted unmanned planes called “drones”.  

The first recorded targeted killings were carried out in 2000 by Israel. They executed alleged terrorists located in Palestinian territories.

Later, this terrorist practice was defined by the Pentagon and the CIA as essential to punishing those responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the New York Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, DC; but afterwards it has been used in US wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in their “counterterrorism” operations in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Since assuming office, Barack Obama's administration has escalated targeted killings and made them everyday affairs in capture/kill missions, sharing leading roles with Special Forces operations by Navy SEALs such as the murder of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the “drone” raids resulting in the murder of Libyan President Muammar el Kadafi.

The White House and the international media they control characterize these actions as successful, and silence the global censure to their immoral and illegal nature. Nevertheless, everything seems to indicate the US will continue, and even increase, the use of these methods as military technology improves and the rejection to conventional military intervention grows in world opinion.

In his work Targeted Killings, published last November 7, at the Council on Foreign Relations website, expert author Jonathan Masters refers to a study by the New America Foundation which reports that in his first two years of office, President Obama authorized nearly four times the number of targeted killings as President Bush did in his eight years in the White House. The same source claims that some 225 repressive long distance strikes with US drones have been launched since 2009, killing, as of August 2011, somewhere between 1,100 and 1,800 civilians as collateral damage.

The US administration lacks the moral authority to claim self-defense in justifying the use of drone attacks and Navy SEAL raids for such killings while it holds in prison, for 13 years now, five Cuban antiterrorist fighters. These men, in the legitimate use of the self-defense principle, infiltrated --unarmed and at risk of their lives-- the den of violent groups in Miami to monitor their criminal plans and to alert --as they did – the US authorities who were supposed to prevent the  terrorist actions of these groups. 

In a recent speech, John Brennan, President Obama’s advisor on counterterrorism, said that if the US wished to avoid losing the support (and operational and intelligence assistance) of its allies for its drone raids and counterterrorism policy, it would have to make sure they understood and approved their legal and political justification. Otherwise, the Obama Administration ran the risk of having its drone program – despite its success -- become the object of international repudiation as there was for his predecessor, George W. Bush and the Guantanamo prison for suspects of terrorism.

This explains why in Washington it is repeatedly argued that drones and targeted killings will be to Barack Obama what Guantanamo (the naval base the US keeps in Cuba against the will of the Cuban people and international legality) and the practice of torture were to George W. Bush. 


November 2011.