Former
National Security Agency official and whistle-blower William Binney is
appalled but unsurprised by last week’s revelation that President Obama
has institutionalized a mechanism for generating targets for his
secretive assassination list.
As Greg Miller reported in The Washington Post, the "disposition matrix"
is a database that links the profiles of suspected "terrorists" to
"locations, known associates and affiliated organizations" as well as
"strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests,
capture operations and drone patrols." The process is operated by the
National Counterterrorism Center, which has access to all intelligence
and other information collected on American citizens and people abroad,
and the process is not open to scrutiny by a judge or independent
oversight committee.
In other words, Barack Obama and a small group of defense officials have
taken for themselves the right to decide who is a terrorist, who should
die and how.
In a telephone interview with Truthdig, Binney explained that the use of
information connecting other people to suspects suggests the process
will be used to create new suspects that pose no threat to the United
States.
"They’re using metadata to target people," he says. "… [A]ddresses and
phone numbers, which gets back to relationships between suspects and
others and social network building. If you use that kind of information
to target people without having substantive stuff behind it, that’s
getting down to more random killing or getting killed because you’re in
proximity to somebody who’s doing bad things. It’s an undisciplined
slaughter."
When news of the matrix was released, Glenn Greenwald pointed out that
the specifics of how suspects are generated and how targets are selected
"will undoubtedly be kept completely secret," with no checks and
balances. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that since
President Obama took office, at least 70 civilians have died in strikes
in which they were not targeted. Without oversight of the targeting
process, it is reasonable to expect people will continue to die in this
way.
"What is the criteria for being on the kill list?" Binney asked. "A lot
of innocent people are being killed. It’s all being done in secret by
saying 'Trust me, we’ll make the proper decisions.’ Well, do you really
trust the government?"
Binney, who became a target of the Obama administration’s
anti-whistle-blower campaign when he spoke out about the NSA’s
data-mining project, doesn’t trust the government. Instead he questions
whether terrorists worldwide pose as much of a threat to the security of
American citizens as does the United States government.
"They’re moving more and more to a surveillance state and being out in
the open and justifying it by laws after the fact. It’s just like the
frogs slowly heating up in water and they don’t jump out and they get
boiled. … We’re destroying a whole way of life here. The terrorists
could never do this to us."
