Black Contents of a White Memo

Image Courtesy www.boilingfrogspost.com

This is in response to the recent blog on The Express Tribune by the name of, Can the US Government kill American Citizens?

Although I agree with the author on the point that any person found guilty of treason should be punished, I would like to add a few points of my own, and clarify some confusion caused over the White memo.

A brief summary of the White memo is provided below:

1) The White memo lays down the legal justification for targeting persons through drones. US Citizens, who are al Qaeda operational leaders, members and sympathisers, are the intended targets.

2) USA assumes that al Qaeda is continually planning terrorist activities and thus US drones can strike al Qaeda suspects anywhere, any time. Even if the attack was never planned in actuality, nor had any threat appeared, but just on the off chance, US Administration can authorise a drone strike so that any ‘supposed’ threat might be neutralised.

3) If you can’t capture a “suspected” terrorist for questioning and interrogation because you “think” that, your troops might encounter mortal risk, then just carry out a drone strike and save the trouble of interrogation and tedious judicial process.

4) According to the memo, even if there is no evidence that the suspects are an imminent threat, but only believes and suspects that they “might” be an imminent threat, the USA has the authority to strike them whenever and wherever.

5) Without even confirmation from interrogation and just on the suspicion that the suspect has not renounced the terrorist activities, the USA can assassinate him.

6) USA assumes that killing of suspected al Qaeda members before they even become imminent threats is justified because the US Administration thinks so. So, please repose your faith in it and don’t question it.

7) The memo doesn’t define the word ‘imminent’. It doesn’t tell how imminent a threat has to be in order for a drone strike to be called. From the document, one gets an impression that if US officials think that such and such persons will come together to plan something sinister, they become qualified targets.

Dear readers, this is an extraordinary document, the implications of whose contents are horrific.

USA is fighting violence with more extreme violence. The issue is not about killing known terrorists who are US citizens. The issue is about killing “suspected terrorists” about whom the government will not share any information, nor the decisions will be available for judicial review, so that the government is not answerable to judiciary and cannot be held responsible even if the drone strike missed the intended target and killed innocent civilians.

There is a huge difference between killing a suspect and killing a known terrorist.

Yes, those US citizens who are promulgating extremism and threatening the US president must be brought to book, but killing and assassinating before the crime was even committed?

Before they are even brought under trial?

That is just plain barbaric and puts US administration at par with al Qaeda.

Through this memo, one gets the impression that the US government is advocating a ‘shoot first ask questions later’ policy and one has to ask, whom will it benefit?

image courtesy  blogdogcicle.blogspot.com

The first benefactor of this drone war would be al Qaeda itself. Remember, al Qaeda and its allies are fighting not just on the military front but on the ideological front as well. It is a hateful and detestable ideology that won’t be just eliminated by drone strikes but only gain followers due to unjustified American violence.

The second benefactor would be the neo-cons and defence contractors. The neo-cons, thanks to Obama, have just continued George W Bush’s policies without any hindrances and the appointment of Bush era CIA torturer John Brennan proves that.

The defence contractors would benefit because of increased orders for more drones and associated technologies, which would mean more cash rolling in.

Even if we assume that drone attacks have achieved intended military results (corroborated by the near wipe out of top al Qaeda cadre), then do they guarantee that the hateful ideology of al Qaeda would just disappear with it leaders?

Thanks to continuous military adventures and arrogant outreach efforts by USA, al Qaeda’s offshoots have spread far and wide, who act quite independent from the mother organisation and are even more eager to spread destruction.

If the American drone policy remains the same as evident from the White memo, then the issue of Islamic radicalism might never be resolved.

Frankly, I found the White memo as repugnant as Mein Kampf.

Read more by Jamaluddin here or follow him on Twitter @einsjam

Book Review::Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base

Area 51 is probably one of those conspiracy theory target places that always manages to maintain this aura of malevolence around it, and the US government does nothing to stop it, in fact the many silly attempts by conspiracy theorists and ufologists to reveal the inner workings of this highly guarded place, actually helps the US government to safeguard its secrets rather than worry about them being exposed.

The review that I am writing today is about one of the plethora of books that have dealt with the subject of Area 51.

Well, if like its counterparts, you are looking for a book that’s riddled with conspiracy theories of alien visitors, captured alien space craft ( sigh, Independence Day ) or some plans to establish a Illuminati new world order than you will be highly disappointed.

Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, is a forceful account of the highly secretive workings inside Area 51, a highly guarded military base in Nevada, USA.

This book brings to light the story of the extraordinary genius, vision, hard work and patriotism of the American men and women that worked at Area 51 and churned out marvels of human ingenuity and intelligence.

From Roswell Crash to the ultra secret but gigantic (to the point of being biblical) nuclear tests, from NASA astronaut training to drone aircraft technology, Annie Jacobsen builds on a huge number of declassified never before seen government files, and most importantly, interviews from people  who worked at Area 51.

Great read if you are not a conspiracy theory junkie, this book packs in truckloads of information but somehow conveys it smoothly with the very human stories of the people who worked at Area 51.

I spent two days reading this book and at no point, I was bored.  Worth the time and money spent.

Kamra Airbase Attack.Time to End the Double Game

Within hours of the operation to secure the Kamra Minhas Airbase, the elite military commandos had killed all the militants and readily identified them as foreigners. The identification procedure has not been provided. But looking at the pictures it is my proposition that it looks like they belong to the Punjab and southern KPK regions. But that is just a conjecture and nothing else. So let’s leave it.

dead body of the militant at Kamra Airbase. Courtesy Saach.tv

However, one thing about the attackers that caught my eye was their apparent physique. All of them seem well built and their beards wouldn’t have looked out of place in a professional SSG unit. I am not implying that they were rogue SSG commandos but they seem to have this ‘military man’ look about them.

Factor in their brazen but well coordinated attack on the base, their target intentions and you might suspect that it was an inside job. I am just theorizing, nothing else.

Kamra Airbase is an alleged nuclear installation or at least the base where aircraft can be fitted with nuclear devices before such a strike. Also, it is the home to the prized JF-17s and AWACS airplanes and is supposed to be under the maximum security that the military can offer. Yet, the militants attacked the base even after issuing a threat.

Now here one must observe that although the military’s efforts have been lauded and much has been made about their preparedness and the level of security employed, the real intent of the militant strike has been left untouched.

How determined can one’s enemy be when it openly issues a threat that it’s coming at you and then attacks your premier military installation.  The level of determination and the sophistication of the attack needs to be considered by our analysts, because this attack was doomed to fail once the threat to attack a PAF base was made public . But then maybe it was originally planned as a secret operation but after the intelligence report, it was re designed to be that way.  May be it was used to send a message that they know our military installations and they can attack it and breach the security parameter at any time and which is precisely what they did.

The attack also raises some questions about the level of preparedness and the counter intelligence efforts of ISI and the Army. Why wasn’t this group of attackers intercepted and traced before the attack? How did the attackers breach the security parameters, so much, so that they managed to damage one airplane, which the military has not elaborated much on.

Mehran Airbase Attack

Certainly, the military needs to come out open and clean in its explanation but of course, it never will. The Mehran Airbase attack should have opened the military eyes and one might have been led to believe that the military might have learnt lessons from that debacle but it didn’t.

As is now widely held to be extremely plausible by many experts, the Mehran Airbase was an inside job, led by TTP with coordination from disgruntled naval officers. When a journalist ‘Saleem Shehzad’ published an investigative report on the Army Al-Qaida link and the involvement of its own officers with Al-Qaida , he was promptly abducted and tortured to death ‘allegedly’ by ISI.

Even before the Mehran Airbase, the army had convicted five officers for their links with banned Hizb-ut-Tehreer (HT).  This conviction came after the attack on GHQ where a similar breach of security parameters was carried out.

Our military and intelligence agencies should worry about terrorist infiltration within its ranks because quite frankly the Zia era has left our armed forces quite changed with fundamentalist tendencies and terrorist organizations like HT, Al-Qaida, and TTP find eager supporters inside the army camps. The assassination attempt by army officers, with terrorist links, on Musharraf was one of the early signs of internal strife within the army. This strife is directly linked to the Army and Intelligence’s double game in matters of crackdown against terrorist network and their back channel support. They get confused when they are ordered to attack those same people that they were told sometime back were mujahedeen and defenders of Islam.

The army has to come clear and define once and for all, who its enemies are and who its supporters are. Taking Allied Support Funds, propping up the Haqqani Network and now back stabbing them with an operation in North Waziristan would leave many people, including its own soldiers, asking questions. And as an Army Officer, you do not want your soldiers questioning your orders.