A Memorial Day Letter to the President

Dear Mr. President,

After more than ten years of War on Terror, we are still mired in an ugly, brutal, immoral, unwinnable war. We have spent well over a trillion dollars, killed thousands of America’s young men and women and perhaps as many as a million people living in the path of our military juggernaut. We have wreaked death and destruction and engendered the enduring hatred of those we have attempted to bend to our will. On this Memorial Day, it seems appropriate to share my thoughts on this.

On 31 December 2000, President Clinton signed the Rome Statute which defines war crimes and created the International Criminal Court (ICC). On 6 May 2002, however, shortly before it was to go into effect, President Bush “nullified” Clinton’s signature and declared that the U.S. would no longer be a party to, nor accept jurisdiction of, the ICC. It is now clear why – Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” extraordinary rendition to torture, and enforced disappearance in secret prisons without trial or legal recourse. These are all war crimes in spite of the Bush administration’s twisted logic that legalized practices we have condemned since World War II. Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Rumsfeld, all are unindicted war criminals.

Barack Obama the Candidate, pledged to end all this; however, none of your predecessor’s policies have been clearly or effectively reversed, including your quiet refusal to re-sign the Rome Statute or come under the jurisdiction of the ICC. Instead, you continue to hold prisoners indefinitely without trial in Guantanamo Bay, ignore both domestic and international law, and pursue wars of aggression in ever more insidious and immoral ways – through extra-judicial assassinations using unmanned drones, CIA operatives and small teams of Special Forces in countries with which we are not at war – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, et. al. Extra-judicial assassinations are a category of willful killing, a war crime. Indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay without a trial is a war crime. You, Sir, are as guilty of war crimes as Bush, as Cheney, as Rumsfeld, as Tenet.

Your love of drones, Mr. President, is well known. They have become your weapon of choice. You make jokes about them, brag about their success and use them to lethal effect, but consider the following:

“Distance is of essential importance. It renders responsibility invisible and retaliation impossible.” (Master of the Eclipse, Etel Adnan)

Bug Splat: military jargon for someone killed in a drone strike.

“For a new generation of young guns, the experience of piloting a drone is not unlike the video games they grew up on. …drone operators kill at the touch of a button, without ever leaving their base – a remove that only serves to further desensitize the taking of human life.” (“The Drone Wars,” Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone, April 26, 2012)

President George W. Bush, in his eight years as the self-proclaimed War President, authorized 78 drone strikes. On your third day in office, Mr. President, you authorized a drone strike that killed 20 people in Pakistan, three of them children. In your first three years as president, there were 253 known covert drone strikes in Pakistan alone, plus an unknown number in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and, most recently, the Philippines.

There is a category of drone strikes called a “signature strike” in which the identities of individuals are unknown but they are acting in a “suspicious manner” and there is another category, a secondary strike, that attacks rescuers who come to the aid of victims from a first strike (at least 50 confirmed cases) or an attack on a funeral procession (more than 20 times). These are defined in the Rome Statute as war crimes.

The sound of a drone, described as the buzzing of an aerial lawnmower, circling high above a targeted village for hours, strikes fear in the heart of every inhabitant, for they know that, at any time and without warning, they or their loved ones could be incinerated. This, Mr. President, is a form of terrorism.

The Pentagon’s 7,000 drones can take off and land by themselves, track vehicles, individuals, even footprints in the dirt from a mile up, and those which are armed, like the Predator and Reaper drones, can unleash Hellfire missiles with deadly accuracy. The unknown, however, is whether the target is actually a terrorist.

An estimated 3,000 people have been killed in drone strikes and in spite of denials by the Pentagon, the NSC and yourself, Mr. President, a large number of those killed, perhaps as many as thirty percent, were not terrorists or insurgents or affiliated with al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization; they were innocent civilians including at least 174 children. For you to claim that the drone program is highly precise and kept on a tight leash with few civilian casualties makes you either naïve or a liar, neither of which is a good sign.

You are the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces but under the Constitution you cannot declare war; only Congress can do that and they have not done so since World War II. In the hysteria following 9/11, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, granted the President the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 … in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States…” This open-ended resolution effectively declared war against anyone deemed a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer regardless of nationality or physical location. You have used this to remold and reshape the War on Terror in ways undreamed of by your predecessor.

While George W. Bush and his neocon administration openly invaded and occupied a country that posed no threat to the United States and had no part in the 9/11 attacks, you, Mr. President, are far more subtle. Except for Afghanistan, your wars of aggression are not carried out by armies in the field but by remote-controlled drones and teams of assassins working in the dead of night. The War on Terror under your command has become a program of extra-judicial assassinations with faceless analysts using secret procedures, secret criteria and secret data to determine who lives and who dies. The claim of National Security cloaks everything in an opaque veil of secrecy that hides abuses, mistakes and the horrific reality of war. Ex-CIA Counsel John Rizzo calls extra-judicial assassinations “militarized murder.”

You have turned the CIA into a paramilitary force that operates outside all law and wages covert wars wherever America’s alleged enemies are. Without congressional discussion, debate or oversight, the War on Terror has become a shape-shifting endless war that disregards domestic and international law, basic human rights and the Constitution. We have squandered the nation’s blood and treasure, destroyed the illusion of America as a beacon of justice, and become as bankrupt morally as we are financially, a nation of barbarians and terrorists wreaking death and destruction around the globe.

You, Mr. President, promised to change this disastrous course but your promises were lies and you have changed nothing. You have betrayed us, you have betrayed the world. You should be impeached and tried as a war criminal.