The media and political establishment have responded with near total silence to the Washington Post’s revelation
last week that the Obama administration has transformed extra-judicial
assassination into a permanent practice of the US government.
What
should be immediate grounds for the impeachment of the president has
been met with indifference, most notably from liberal and “left”
supporters of Obama’s re-election. If the initial Post article
has something of the character of a trial balloon—to see to what extent
the revelation of such measures would be met with official
opposition—the results are conclusive: there is no significant
commitment to democratic rights in the media and political
establishment.
By any objective account, the Post’s revelations
are extraordinary. “Targeted killing”—a euphemism for assassination—“is
now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past
year codifying and streamlining the processes to sustain it.” The
administration has transformed “ad hoc elements into a counterterrorism
infrastructure capable of sustaining permanent war.”
Kill lists
“that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus.” At
the same time, it is “a policy so secret that it impossible for
outsiders to judge whether it complies with the laws of war or US
values—or even determine the total number of people killed.”
In
other words, the administration has systematized a process by which the
executive branch, with no judicial oversight, kills people—including US
citizens—routinely all over the world.
-- Joseph Kishore, "American democracy and the 'disposition matrix'" (WSWS).