by Ateqah Khaki, ACLU at 2:59pm

Today, the New York Times ran an ACLU op-ed about the CIA’s misuse of secrecy to withhold information from the public about the agency’s targeted killing program, which has so far killed thousands of people, including several Americans.

The piece, penned by ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer and National Security Project Legal Fellow Nathan Wessler, explains that in ACLU lawsuitsabout the drone strike program the CIA has consistently taken the position that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the program or any records related to it, despite the fact that numerous other government officials have spoken about the program to the public and the press. The op-ed states,

In one of the American Civil Liberties Union’s cases relating to the targeted killing program (a case in which The New York Times is also involved), the government recently told the court that officials “at the highest level” are re-evaluating the government’s stance on the secrecy of the targeted killing program. This is a noncommittal statement, but perhaps a promising one. The administration should direct the C.I.A. to abandon its pretense that the very existence of the targeted killing program is a secret. It should also direct the C.I.A. to release the legal memos that authorized the program and the evidence it relied on to carry out the drone strikes that killed three Americans in Yemen last year.

Only hours after the op-ed was posted, the administration released its clearest acknowledgement yet of the targeted killing program. John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism advisor, delivered remarks at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in which he publicly confirmed that the United States conducts targeted killings of suspected terrorists using drones. In his speech, Brennan insisted the targeted strikes are a “wise choice” and “legal” and within the boundaries of international law.

In a statement that we issued after the remarks, Jaffer stated,

This is an important statement — first because it includes an unambiguous acknowledgement of the targeted killing program and second because it includes the administration’s clearest explanation thus far of the program’s purported legal basis… But Mr. Brennan supplies legal conclusions, not legal analysis. We continue to believe that the administration should release the Justice Department memos underlying the program — particularly the memo that authorizes the extrajudicial killing of American terrorism suspects.

Hina Shamsi, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, added in the statement:

We continue to believe, based on the information available, that the program itself is not just unlawful but dangerous…It is dangerous to give the President the authority to order the extrajudicial killing of any person – including any American – he believes to be a terrorist. The administration insists that the program is closely supervised, but to propose that a secret deliberation that takes place entirely within the executive branch constitutes ‘due process’ is to strip the Fifth Amendment of its essential meaning.

After filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Richmond Police Department for police training documents, Mo Karn received much more than expected in return: homeland security and crowd control guides that show how the police target protests.

The police filed for an emergency court order yesterday to prohibit Karn from publicizing any of the documents, which should never have been released. The cops’ reasoning? “Defendant Mo Karn is a known and admitted anarchist.”

The documents, however, have already been published online. And buried in the training guides are insights into three trends in law enforcement that have been occurring not just in Virginia, but nationally: the demonization of protest, the militarization of police, and turning local cops into “terrorism” officials.

The Demonization of Protest
The Richmond Police Department’s Emergency Operations Plan
includes a section on “civil disturbances.” While this sounds innocuous, “civil disturbances” are defined so broadly as to include what the police call “dissident gatherings.”

“The City of Richmond is a target rich environment” for antiwar protesters, the document says. And it warns that police and homeland security have reason to be increasingly concerned:

“Current training and intelligence reveals that protestors are becoming more proficient in the methods of assembly.”

Militarization of Local Police
Such a depiction of “assembly” (a First Amendment right) as a “disturbance” and a threat is all the more troubling when put in the context of the other police department guides. Richmond’s Crowd Management Operating Manual is for the police unit assigned to large protests (no experience required). Among the tools that the crowd management team are issued include riot shields, chemical agents, cut tools, helmets, body armor, cameras, video cameras, batons, gas masks, and a “mass arrest kit.”

Deputizing Local Cops as Counter-terrorism Officials
This militarization of local police is accompanied by another trend in law enforcement since September 11th: deputizing local cops to becoming “homeland security” and counter-terrorism officials. According to the Homeland Security Criminal Intelligence Unit Operating Manual, “The Richmond Police Department is under contract with the FBI to provide assistance through staffing, intelligence and equipment.” And one member of the homeland security unit is assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The result? Documents like the Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment. The 2009 document was created by the Virginia Fusion Center, of which the Richmond Police Department is part. Fusion centers are ostensibly designed to gather terrorism intelligence from multiple police agencies, and make us safer. In practice, they routinely label activists as “terrorists.” Among the “terrorist threats” identified in Virginia were animal rights activists, environmental activists, and anarchists.

According to the threat assessment, “The Virginia Federation of Anarchists has held two conferences in Richmond in November 2007 and January 2008″ and “Anarchist protesters at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. spilled over into Prince William County.”

Karn, meanwhile, wears her scarlet circle ‘A’ with pride, and has no problem being labeled an anarchist. The FOIA was submitted by the Wingnut Collective, a Richmond anarchist group, as part of their police accountability project.

In his court motion warning that Karn is an “anarchist,” Richmond’s Deputy Assistant Attorney Brian Telfair doesn’t allege the possibility of any violence or property destruction. Instead, he cites a blog post by Karn about acquiring government information through legal requests. The title? “FOIA Rocks!”

The usual suspects are at it again — doing their damnedest to escalate a war they have no intention of either fighting in or paying for themselves, and to involve you in it.

US Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (of the “Connecticut for Lieberman” Party, in which the ordering of names conveys his boundless sense of personal entitlement) visited Turkey this week for a photo opp with officers of the “Free Syrian Army” and to grandstand for further US intervention in Syria’s year-long “civil” war.

I put the “civil” in scare quotes, because normally civil wars are mostly internal affairs. The Syrian “uprising” appears to have been both instigated and funded by Washington from the git-go, through front “non-governmental organizations” funded by the American neoconservative (and very governmental) “National Endowment for Democracy.”

While Bashar al-Assad’s “National Popular Front” regime — centered around the fascist Ba’ath Party, with some lapdog “opposition” parties permitted to participate as long as they don’t actually, um, oppose — is certainly a poster child for bad government (but I repeat myself!), there’s little reason to believe that the “uprising” enjoys strong popular support or that, if successful, it will eventuate in anything significantly better for the Syrian people.

McCain/Lieberman’s busking for US intervention isn’t about freedom, democracy or human rights. It’s about the external turf and internal stature spats over which the overgrown street gangs we call “governments” perpetually obsess.

Quoth Lieberman: “How many world leaders have to be deceived by Assad for us to realize that we cannot rely on his word, that he will only respond to power — the same kind of power that he is brutally using against his own people.”

In what significant respect is Assad different from Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Bahrain’s Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the Abdullahs of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Yemen’s Saleh, the Shah of Iran, or any other regional ruler whom the US supports (or supported until they fell)? Is power not the language they also speak?

For that matter, one might ask, how many people have to be deceived by Lieberman and his ilk to arrive at the same realization? Lieberman and McCain never met a war they didn’t like, at least so long as it was fought with other people’s money, with other people’s blood, and for the benefit of themselves and their cronies in government and among the corporati.

And don’t get me started on “the brutal use of power” against one’s own people. The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its populace than any country on earth. Its cities are occupied by sizable, growing and increasingly militarized police forces. Its airports are living caricatures of the old Soviet bloc’s security bureaucracy as portrayed in Cold War era American cinema.

McCain and Lieberman have been both prominent architects of the existing US police state and staunch advocates of its endless extension. Who the hell are they to criticize Assad’s Syria?

But this, of course, is what governments and politicians do. Their primary function is to loot the productive for the benefit of their own class — the political class — and the creation of, and escalation to conflict with, external enemies is indispensable to that project.

This week it’s Syria and Iran. Next week? Uganda or Cuba or the Korean Peninsula or Djibouti. Don’t worry, they’ll find someone, somewhere for you to fight. They always do. Of course, they’d rather not talk about how last week went in Somalia and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq (quite well for them, not so well for you), thank you very much.

Does Bashar al-Assad deserve to be overthrown? Certainly. But let’s let the Syrians worry about that for themselves instead of getting ourselves roped into doing it for them. Our job here in America is figuring out how to rid ourselves of his spiritual siblings, including McCain and Lieberman.

Citations to this article:

• Thomas L. Knapp, Syria: Let’s You and Him Fight, Antiwar.com, 04/13/12
• Thomas L. Knapp, Other People’s Blood, Sri Lanka Guardian, 04/12/12)
• Thomas L. Knapp, Syria and the Usual Suspects, Counterpunch, 04/12/12

Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society(c4ss.org).