Why Does the U.S. Assassinate Americans?

Should the American government be allowed to assassinate American citizens whenever and wherever it likes? That’s now a hot topic of debate.

There’s no evidence yet that the debate has reached inside the Obama administration. Like its predecessor, it simply assumes the right to assassinate. To be fair, “military and intelligence officials” told the Washington Post that there has to be “strong evidence” that the American corpse-to-be is “involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests.” And “the evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold.”

But what is the threshold? That’s a state secret. Who gets to define it? Another state secret. Who gets to decide whether it has been met? Yet another state secret. Nobody outside the executive branch ever gets to see the “strong evidence,” much less decide how strong it really is. In effect, then, the government can order an assassination whenever it wants.

Columnist Glenn Greenwald is understandably unhappy with this policy.  “The Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the ‘battlefield’ as the entire world,” he writes. “So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so.”

How do we know that the president actually orders the assassins into action? The Washington Post story claimed that Obama ordered the recent assassination of Anwar al-Aulaqi in Yemen. But does that mean he must, or will, personally order every hit?

When the House Intelligence Committee asked Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair about the policy, he answered only that each proposed snuff job on a U.S. citizen has to “high-level government approval.” But since “he would rather not discuss the details of this criteria in open session,” no one knows just how high the level has to be. Since it’s all done in secret, we will probably never know.

That’s hardly the most critical issue here, though. I’m more troubled by Blair’s assurance that the administration is never “careless about endangering … lives at all. We especially are not careless about endangering American lives.”  Why “especially”? Is it really worse when the U.S. government endangers American lives than when it endangers other lives?

Greenwald is the only commentator I’ve seen who has addressed this question directly, and his answer is a bit logically twisted.  “Killing innocent foreigners is obviously no better than killing one’s own innocent citizens,” he rightly says. But in the next breath he asserts that there is a clear difference:  “There’s a much greater danger from allowing a government to target its own citizens for extra-judicial killings” because it’s “a hallmark of tyranny,” while killing innocent foreigners is “at least a fairly common act of war.”

Really? When I was a philosophy major in college, my ethics professors taught me to think up hypothetical question that would probe the logic of such arguments. So I’d ask Glenn this one:  Was it worse for the Nazis to exterminate Jews who were German citizens than Jews who were Polish or Hungarians or Dutch?  Did the Nazis become less tyrannical once they crossed Germany’s borders and started shipping non-Germans to the gas chambers?

I do agree with another distinction that Glenn makes. This policy is morally worse than simply killing enemies in the heat of combat, because it can easily end up killing people who have taken no action, and never intended to take any action, that would harm the United States.  Glenn cites the example of a journalist’s probe two years ago, which found that nearly a quarter of the prisoners held at Guatanamo had been formally cleared by the government of any wrongdoing (though they were still held there). If the innocent can be imprisoned, they can just as easily be assassinated.

Apparently the Obama administration sees it differently. Apparently they agree with the George W. Bush administration, whose revised National Security Strategy of the United States (2006) said publicly that the government should “anticipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction — and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”

The Bush NSS document called this “an enduring American principle” and justified it with seemingly unassailable logic: “The first duty of the United States Government remains what it always has been: to protect the American people and American interests.” The current administration seems to agree that this is an enduring principle. Or at least it’s helping to make it an enduring principle by continuing not merely the Bush policy but the Bush rationale.  As the Washington Post story that started the current debate sums it up, the government can target anyone that it claims is acting “against the United States or U.S. interests.”

That brings us to the most critical question of all in this controversy. It’s not about who gets assassinated. It’s about why. What, exactly, are “U.S. interests”? If our tax dollars are being used to kill people who threaten those interests, we ought at least to know what they are.

Yet no one on the House Intelligence Committee seems to have asked Dennis Blair that question. I imagine that you don’t make it to the Intelligence Committee unless you go in circles where it simply isn’t asked. It’s taken for granted that everyone knows what that combination of words, “U.S.” and “interests” means. It’s like knowing a secret code that qualifies you for membership in a secret society.

The two versions of the National Security Strategy published by the Bush administration offered some valuable clues for cracking that code.  The first version (2002) called for “a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.”  It defined our values and interests in terms of “a balance of power that favors human freedom … These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society.”  It included among the universal values “respect for private property.… policies that further strengthen market incentives and market institutions … [and] international flows of investment capital.” Those, presumably, would be our “national interests” too.

The revised version — the one that openly warned of “preemptive” killing even when we don’t know where or when (or whether!) the enemy will attack — still defined our “interests” in terms of American principles of liberty and justice, which “are right and true for all people everywhere.” “The liberty … to buy, sell, and own property is fundamental to human nature,” this version affirmed, and it too treated free markets and free trade as crucial to preserving freedom and the “national interest.”

We cannot know for sure that the Obama administration views “national interests” in the same way as its predecessor. But everyone in Obama’s foreign and national security policy inner circle comes from the same secret club as Bush’s. In the policy elite, as in any secret club, members can use the same secret code to send different messages. Still, the basic terms of their coded language remain the same.

Nothing in this administration’s record gives much reason to think it defines “national interests” very differently — except, perhaps, in one respect. The revised Bush NSS went out of its way to warn, in elegant code, that the U.S. would “encourage” governments of other nations “to make wise choices.” Since “economic development, responsible governance, and individual liberty are intimately connected,” responsible governments will “limit the reach of government, [and] protect the institutions of civil society, including … a market economy.”

In this case the coded message was easy enough to read: Since states that are not “responsible” and limit the free market pose a threat to “U.S. interests,” they would be just as open to preemptive attack by the U.S. as the “terrorists” themselves.

Is the Obama administration following the Bush approach on this score? In the current prime examples of “irresponsible” nations, Iran and North Korea, leaders are not targeted for U.S. assassination — as far as we know. But of course our government assumes the right to do its killing in secret, so we might never know.

We do know that Taliban leaders, who express no intention to attack the U.S., are being targeted for assassination. Is their crime a purported alliance with Al-Qaeda? Or is that they threaten to bring “irresponsible” government to Afghanistan and Pakistan; i.e., government that might not serve “U.S. interests,” including free markets and free trade?

Proponents of the “assassinate at will” policy assume that it’s used only against “terrorists.” And they may be right. Who knows? Since we are dealing with state secrets and secret code, no one can know for sure.

All we know is that the term “U.S. interests” is a huge, undefined umbrella. The executive branch can put under it anything they want. Which means that, in principle, the executive branch can assassinate anyone, American or not, for anything, any time they want — even for interfering with free markets, free trade, and free flows of capital.

And all the administration will offer in response is Dennis Blair’s vague, evasive “trust us.” Forgive me if I don’t find that very reassuring.