Ayoon Wa Azan (The hit list…of Muslim targets)

Every Arab who thought that the leader of his country is bad or a failure, lived to see the day when the United States, the so-called leader of the free world, got a worse leader. First, President George W. Bush reigned for eight years in the White House as a puppet controlled by the neoconservative supporters of Israel and the advocates of permanent war who want American hegemony over the world. The U.S. thus went on to fight foreign wars whose premises had been fabricated, and in which many of America’s prime perished along with a million Arabs and Muslims. After that, it also unleashed a global financial crisis, which persists to our day. If Bush ever stands trial, he would be able to plead ignorance or stupidity, and perhaps the court would acquit him, as all laws of the heaven and the earth say that the insane are not liable for their sins. No U.S. president in this day and age could behave worse than Bush. The latter was succeeded by Barack Obama, and high hopes were pinned on his first term. However, he never delivered on his promises, and we shall see whether his second term will be any better. In the meantime, I believe in the truthfulness of the adage that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Indeed, the Senate hearings to confirm John Brennan, Obama’s nominee for the post of CIA director, has unmasked details about the practices of the intelligent African-American president which I believe run against the U.S. constitution, in both its text and spirit. This is while bearing in mind that Obama was a professor of the U.S. constitution and a graduate of Harvard University. For years, President Obama has been overstepping his executive powers, claiming that the Congress’s mandate given to his predecessor in 2001 to use military force against al-Qaeda grants him the power to assassinate individuals outside the battlefield, including Americans, without judicial oversight or accountability. President Obama, under pressure from the Senate hearings for Brennan’s confirmation, handed the members of the intelligence committees in the House and Senate a “white paper” issued by the Department of Justice, granting him a right that I see impossible in a country that is supposed to be a leader in human rights. To be sure, the administration has put together a “hit list”, where the president decides who should be killed, before his orders are carried out by drones in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and perhaps other countries. I pause here to note some background information. John Brennan was the chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama. He was nominated to head the CIA during Obama’s first term, but he declined and retracted his nomination after news spread of his role in so-called rendition, where the U.S. shipped out suspects to be tortured in their own countries in order to extract their confessions. According to reports by human rights groups, 54 countries were involved in the U.S. rendition program, and some suspects were even sent to countries that the Bush administration had classed as part of the “axis of evil,” such as Iran and Syria. Brennan was the mastermind behind the “hit list” after that, and other reports by human rights groups and think tanks estimate that the number of victims killed by drones is around 3,000. Personally, I insist that the majority of those are civilians, and include women and children. The “hit list” returned to the forefront at Brennan’s confirmation hearing, during which he was questioned about it. The “white paper” which allows the president to order extrajudicial killings was issued in 2011. Accordingly, the president ordered operations that killed Americans such as Anwar al-Awlaki, who carries the American nationality, in Yemen during September 2011 with another American, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, U.S. drones killed Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, Anwar's son, who was 16-year-old. However, the Congress’s objection to the president, the “hit list” and the “white paper” is political and not legal or humanitarian in nature. All I heard from the members of both houses of Congress were protests against killing Americans, so it seems that the killing of three Americans is more important than killing 3,000 Muslims along with them. Barack Obama chose drones as his weapon of choice to safeguard the lives of American soldiers, even at the expense of other people's lives. But perhaps the controversy can stop with the elimination of the “hit list”, or the killing of Muslim targets to be more precise, by an administration whose opponents like to remind us every day that its president is called Barack Hussein Obama. --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.