[News] Extrajudicial executions, surveillance drones and indefinite military detention

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Colonial Frontier at Home: Extrajudicial 
executions, surveillance drones and indefinite military detention

by 
<http://mondoweiss.net/author/jimmy-johnson>Jimmy 
Johnson on December 20, 2011 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/the-colonial-frontier-at-home-extrajudicial-executions-surveillance-drones-and-indefinite-military-detention.html#comments>41
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/the-colonial-frontier-at-home-extrajudicial-executions-surveillance-drones-and-indefinite-military-detention.html

Senate and House negotiators have drafted a final 
version of the National Defense Authorization Act 
(NDAA) 
<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2162/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9005>“that 
includes specific authorization for the use of 
long-term indefinite detention without trial.” 
The hullabaloo surrounding the NDAA relates 
entirely around the fact that U.S. citizens can 
too be targeted for military detention without 
trial. This distress that we might do unto 
ourselves what we do to 'others' privileges 
Americans as sole possessors of certain rights, 
such as the right to not be held in indefinite 
military detention. Perhaps this will shine some 
further light on what we do 'There' now that we'll be doing it 'Here' as well.

The U.S. has used indefinite detention throughout 
the last decade against foreign nationals 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8343123.stm>kidnapped 
from the streets of Europe, captured in Iraq, and 
sold into prison bondage in rural Afghanistan and 
Pakistan. The NDAA adds a slightly new dimension 
to this by authorizing such actions against U.S. 
citizens. This should be seen in the same light 
as the extrajudicial executions in Yemen of U.S. 
citizens Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan and Abdul 
Rahman Anwar Awlaki, and the increasing domestic 
deployment of surveillance drones. These all 
share an important element: they are practices of 
the U.S. Empire in its frontier regions that are 
being brought home, what Michel Foucault called 
the 'boomerang effect' 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2011/10/the-boomerang-comes-home-obamas-death-panel-and-the-war-on-terror.html>about 
which I wrote recently.

<http://mondoweiss.net/2011/10/the-boomerang-comes-home-obamas-death-panel-and-the-war-on-terror.html>U.S. 
capital punishment policy too has shifted during 
the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Adding the 
minimum estimate of those purposefully killed 
just in Pakistan by drone strike to the judicial 
executions carried out in the U.S., over 78% of 
executions carried out since the campaign of 
drone strikes began have been done so 
extra-judicially. The extrajudicial has become 
normal while the judicial has become the anomaly. 
When al-Awlaki, Khan, and Awlaki were 
extra-judicially executed in September and 
October this removed the last distinction between 
who gets executed judicially, and who gets 
executed extra-judicially. Since 2004, the U.S. 
now executes foreign nationals judicially (9, 131 
others on death row, plus five more facing 
capital charges in military tribunals), foreign 
nationals extra-judicially 
<http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones#2011chart>(between 
1,424 and 2,209 executed in Pakistan alone), U.S. 
citizens judicially (383), and U.S. citizens 
extra-judicially (the three mentioned above). 
U.S. citizens still tend to be executed 
judicially. But when judicial executions are a 
small minority of the total (and those numbers do 
not count executions in Afghanistan, Iraq, 
Somalia and count only three in Yemen) and U.S. 
citizens can also be executed the newly normal 
way, extra-judicially, this tendency is less significant than it used to be.

<http://www.salon.com/2011/12/12/the_growing_menace_of_domestic_drones/>Surveillance 
drones are another import from the colonial 
frontier. The U.S. first integrated drones into 
the battlefield in the 1990 invasion of Iraq. But 
the U.S. drone arsenal has come into its own in 
the interim period. Drones are deployed in 
increasingly large numbers as part of a 
surveillance regime intended to allow near 
instantaneous target identification and 
engagement, no matter the military's distance to 
the battlefield. Or better put, the use of drones 
as persistent surveillance and targeting 
mechanisms – an ever increasing number of which 
are also armed themselves – takes the battlefield 
to wherever the drones are at any given moment. 
As drones, operating personnel, and data 
processing software increase their coverage, 
everywhere becomes part of the battlefield.

These drones are now working inside the United 
States too. Drone deployments started in 2004 
with border surveillance in Arizona and have 
slowly been migrating into the interior (this 
would likely have happened faster but for the 
Federal Aviation Administration moving slowly to 
address how drones should move through the busy 
U.S. airspace). Houston, Miami, and other police 
departments have all investigated acquiring 
drones. The 
<http://www.click2houston.com/news/New-Police-Drone-Near-Houston-Could-Carry-Weapons/-/1735978/4717922/-/59xnnez/-/index.html>Montgomery 
County Sheriff's department in Texas recently 
bought a ShadowHawk drone for police use. Sheriff 
Tommy Gage, attempting to address privacy 
concerns, said, “We're not going to use it to be 
invading somebody's privacy. It'll be used for 
situations we have with criminals.” Sherrif Gage 
explicitly mentioned intercepting drugs shipments 
as one use for the ShadowHawk. The GWOT morphs 
into the War on Drugs, with all the implications 
for race, class and incarceration that come with it.

North Dakota offers a more disturbing 
development. The Nelson County Sheriff's 
Department has used two Predator drones from 
Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211,0,324348.story>“at 
least two dozen surveillance flights since June.” 
The Posse Comitatus Act bars the military from 
police actions on U.S. soil but it apparently 
does not prevent the use of military technology 
housed on military bases from participating in police actions.

How indefinite military detentions for U.S. 
citizens will be carried out is still in 
question. But the law is coming, 
the<http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/obama_to_sign_indefinite_detention_bill_into_law/singleton/> 
Obama Administration on Wednesday withdrew its 
threatened veto of the NDAA removing the only 
remaining obstacle outside the court system. 
Indefinite military detention is an escalation of 
the vast 
<http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/muslim,-arab,-south-asian-men-rounded-post-9/11-based-racial,-religious-prof>round 
ups of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians throughout 
the U.S. after 9/11. We should make no mistake as 
to against whom these practices will be used. 
Protestors and dissidents – and even 'normal' 
citizens on the rare occasion – might feel some 
of the weight of the drone surveillance, 
extrajudicial executions, and indefinite military 
detention. But we can expect that these will be 
mostly deployed against groups that are already 
targeted, the Arab and Muslim communities, 
undocumented migrants (or those profiled as 
such), and poor communities of color. It is those 
groups who are already on tenuous footing against 
whom 'controversial' forms of social control are used.

It is precisely their unpopularity and perceived 
threat – the systemic discriminations by which we 
make 'others' – that allows this. It's easy to 
speak out against extrajudicial executions. It's 
hard to speak out in defense al-Awlaki's. It's 
easy to say you don't like the drone 
surveillance. It's hard to argue for the rights 
of 'illegal' border crossers who will be watched 
by drones. It's easy to argue for basic legal 
rights like habeus corpus. It's hard to demand 
the release of detainees linked to 'terrorism'. 
But those supposedly linked to terrorism are most 
often simply guilty of being Arab, South Asian or 
Muslim, sometimes holding unpopular political 
opinions.. Those watched by the Border Patrol 
here in Detroit, mostly with cars rather than 
drones to date, are most often citizens and legal 
residents who are Brown. These structures of 
racism and are those which will guide the 
deployment of Empire's practices at home.

And it is precisely because we did not argue 
forcefully when the U.S. first deployed these 
practices on the distant frontiers of Empire that 
we will now encounter them at home. It's quite 
likely that White supremacy and class privilege 
will shield a large segment of the U.S. 
population from this. Police brutality is, by and 
large, seen as abnormal by privileged groups and 
as structural by those on the end of the 
nightstick. This boomerang effect will probably 
be similar The excluded, the unpopular, the 
disenfranchised, the 'other' will bear the brunt 
of the burden. From the frontiers of Empire to 
the domestic frontiers of capitalism and White supremacy.

The Weather Underground carried out high-profile 
bombings in the 1970s to 'bring the war home' as 
an act of protest against U.S. imperial policies 
in Southeast Asia. No such militant resistance 
does the same today. Instead it is the Empire itself 'bringing the war home.'
Posted in 
<http://mondoweiss.net/us-politics/neocons>Neocons, 
<http://mondoweiss.net/us-politics/us-policy-in-the-middle-east>US 
Policy in the Middle East, <http://mondoweiss.net/us-politics>US Politics




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