The Gestapo, KGB, Stasi, SAVAK and NCTC

Dear Mr. President,

“As the Founders all recognized, nothing vests elites with power—and profit—more than a state of war.” (“Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent,” Greg Miller, The Washington Post, October 24, 2012). The Founding Fathers spent a lot of time putting up barriers to starting and continuing wars but you dismantled them in 4 short years. You have lulled Congress into accepting your drone wars, targeted assassinations and massive surveillance activities as legal even though they can’t know those legal justifications because of national security. And now we learn in Miller’s article that the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) headed by none other than your personal Rasputin, John O. Brennan, has spent the past 2 years codifying and institutionalizing the Kill List process to prepare for the next administration’s continuation of the process and unending war. Targeted assassinations have been, until relatively recently, rejected as barbaric and illegal when used by our enemies, but once again, working behind closed doors you have bureaucratized and made permanent the process for summary executions. Also in typical bureaucratic fashion, to obfuscate reality, Kill Lists are now the Orwellian “disposition matrix” and Kill List Tuesdays are “terror Tuesdays.” The lists and terrorist suspects never end, the terrorist organizations have become “franchises” like McDonald’s or Wendy’s and one is easily substituted for another. The assassination of Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, is dismissed with, “he should have a far more responsible father.” We have passed a major psychological watershed in America when extrajudicial killings and permanent war is accepted as policy. But “continuous war does not end violence,… rather, it guarantees its permanent expansion,” Miller writes. “[W]ar is when power is least constrained and profit most abundant.” Foreboding too, is that the NCTC not only keeps the secret criteria and chooses who will die, but is also the keeper of all data collected not just on suspected targets but on every U.S. citizen. The NCTC is accountable to no one but you and the safeguard on data collection (a time limit of 180 days) was quietly abolished by you in July. Welcome to Obamaworld, a frightening universe of summary executions, indefinite detentions and constant all-encompassing surveillance. This is the wet dream of the Gestapo, the KGB, the Stasi, the SAVAK and every other brutal secret police state in history.

The National Counterterrorism Center, site of a new bureaucracy to institutionalize the 'kill list'. Photograph: FBI