Sometime before he withdrew from the presidential race, President Joe Biden secretly reaffirmed his own self-willed and self-created authority to kill persons in other countries, so long as the CIA and its military counterparts have “near certainty” that the target of the homicide is a member of a terrorist organization. That standard was concocted by the George W. Bush administration in 2002.
There is no “near certainty” standard in the law, as the phrase is oxymoronic and defies a rational definition – like “nearly pregnant.”
Just as one is either pregnant or not, one is either certain or not. There is no “near” there.
Yet, the creation of this standard underscores the lamentable absence of the rule of law in government today. The Biden administration and its three immediate predecessors have all deployed drones to kill persons who were not engaged in acts of violence at the time of their killing, irrespective of the near certainty of their membership in any organizations.
“Terrorist” cannot be a standard for extrajudicial murder because it is subjective. To King George III, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were terrorists. To the poor folks in Libya and Syria, to the popularly elected governments toppled by CIA-inspired violence in Iran in 1953 and in Ukraine in 2014, to the innocents tortured by the CIA at black sites around the world, the CIA is a terrorist organization.
The presidential use of drones to kill persons overseas began in 2002 with Bush-ordered targeted killings. It continued under President Barack Obama – who even killed Americans overseas. The rules for killing were made up by each president. They were relaxed under President Donald Trump, who gave CIA senior personnel and military commanders the authority to kill without his express approval for each killing. Trump’s folks infamously murdered an Iranian general and his companions on their way to lunch with Iraqi generals to negotiate peace between the two countries.
The Biden administration quietly took back the Trump grants of authority so that today only the president can authorize targeted killing. Yet, there is no moral, constitutional or legal authority for these killings. But presidents of both political parties do it anyway.
Hellbound and Down 