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<h1><font size=4><b>The Colonial Frontier at Home: Extrajudicial
executions, surveillance drones and indefinite military
detention</b></font></h1><font size=3>by
<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/author/jimmy-johnson">Jimmy Johnson</a> on
December 20, 2011
<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/the-colonial-frontier-at-home-extrajudicial-executions-surveillance-drones-and-indefinite-military-detention.html#comments">
41</a><br>
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<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/the-colonial-frontier-at-home-extrajudicial-executions-surveillance-drones-and-indefinite-military-detention.html" eudora="autourl">
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/the-colonial-frontier-at-home-extrajudicial-executions-surveillance-drones-and-indefinite-military-detention.html<br>
<br>
</a></font><font size=3>Senate and House negotiators have drafted a final
version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
<a href="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. </a>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.<br><br>
The U.S. has used indefinite detention throughout the last decade against
foreign nationals
<a href="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.</a> 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'
<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2011/10/the-boomerang-comes-home-obamas-death-panel-and-the-war-on-terror.html">
about which I wrote recently.</a><br><br>
<a href="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</a> 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
<a href="http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones#2011chart">
(between 1,424 and 2,209 executed in Pakistan alone)</a>, 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.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/12/12/the_growing_menace_of_domestic_drones/">
Surveillance drones are another import</a> 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.<br><br>
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
<a href="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</a> 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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211,0,324348.story">
at least two dozen surveillance flights since June.</a> 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.<br><br>
How indefinite military detentions for U.S. citizens will be carried out
is still in question. But the law is coming,
the<a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/obama_to_sign_indefinite_detention_bill_into_law/singleton/">
Obama Administration on Wednesday withdrew its threatened veto</a> of
the NDAA removing the only remaining obstacle outside the court system.
Indefinite military detention is an escalation of the vast
<a href="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</a> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.'<br>
Posted in
<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/us-politics/neocons">Neocons</a>,
<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/us-politics/us-policy-in-the-middle-east">
US Policy in the Middle East</a>,
<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/us-politics">US Politics</a> <br><br>
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