{"id":182448,"date":"2015-09-18T20:24:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-19T01:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/09\/18\/if-ahmed-mohamed-had-lived-in-yemen-barack-obama-would-have-assassinated-him\/"},"modified":"2015-09-18T20:24:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-19T01:24:00","slug":"if-ahmed-mohamed-had-lived-in-yemen-barack-obama-would-have-assassinated-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/09\/18\/if-ahmed-mohamed-had-lived-in-yemen-barack-obama-would-have-assassinated-him\/","title":{"rendered":"If Ahmed Mohamed Had Lived in Yemen, Barack Obama Would Have Assassinated Him"},"content":{"rendered":"

Critics of Obama’s drone based assassination program note that under the criteria used by his signature strike program, the clock kid would have been killed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Yesterday Barack Obama joined the groundswell of social media support for Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old high school student detained by the police for being seen with an electronic device and being a Muslim named Ahmed Mohamed. Good for Obama. And good for Ahmed that he wasn\u2019t building a clock in Yemen.<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> Since his inauguration, Barack Obama has drastically expanded the use of so-called \u201csignature\u201d drone strikes\u2014killings that aren\u2019t targeted against any person in particular, but against someone who looks or acts a certain way. Precisely which behavioral patterns or appearances are sufficient to sign an aerial death sentence remain an absolute state secret\u2014all we know about the so-called \u201cpattern of life activity\u201d sufficient to justify the killing of an unidentified stranger is based on media reports quoting anonymous U.S. officials. In 2008<\/a>, the New York Times reported that a \u201csignature\u201d can be as vague as \u201cthe characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run.\u201d A later Times report<\/a> said targets could include anyone near \u201ctraining camps and suspicious compounds\u201d\u2014dicey given the Pentagon\u2019s lackluster record when it comes to assessing compounds. The body of anonymously provided evidence suggests that loose suspicion is about all it takes to condemn someone on the ground, and based on the resultant craters, it\u2019s easy to see that standards are lax.<\/span>

<\/span>
<\/span> In 2011, a 16-year-old American citizen named Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone-fired missile while eating outside in Yemen just two weeks after his father, an Islamist cleric on the CIA kill list, was drone-assassinated. Abdulrahman\u2019s signature appears to have consisted of little more than traveling with his father and looking like the people around his father. When Attorney General Eric Holder was questioned about Abdulrahman\u2019s assassination, he said only that he was \u201cnot specifically targeted by the United States.\u201d Although he\u2019s been the most visible (and controversial) drone victim due to his citizenship, al-Awlaki is far from the only child killed on Obama\u2019s orders\u2014the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates<\/a> that upwards of 204 kids have been killed by drones in Pakistan alone since 2004. Some of them might\u2019ve simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but only the CIA knows how many were killed because they matched some classified \u201csignature.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> According to a blockbuster New York Times<\/i><\/a> report on the CIA\u2019s signature strikes, the drone program\u2019s hair trigger has quite literally become a joke:<\/span><\/p>\n

But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist \u201csignature\u201d were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees \u201cthree guys doing jumping jacks,\u201d the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official<\/span><\/b>. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers \u2014 but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Imagine then, that a CIA analyst in Virginia or drone pilot in Nevada sees 14-year-old Ahmed from 10,000 in the air, working with a bundle of wires and metallic pieces.<\/p>\n

The same Times report said that the Obama administration\u2019s drone killing program is so loose that it \u201cin effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.\u201d What if Ahmed Mohamed, of Sudanese descent, had been located in war zone Syria\u2014where 14-year-olds are most certainly military age\u2014carrying this device?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n

This kid would be dead in Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Sudan, or Syria, or Iraq.<\/p>\n

Obama has repeatedly pulled the trigger*<\/sup> on kids with far less due process and far less evidence all over the Muslim world.<\/p>\n

The Nobel committee really f$#@ed up when they gave Obama the Peace Prize.<\/p>\n

*<\/sup>He is commander-in-chief, and therefore fully culpable under the command responsibility (Yamashita) doctrine<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Critics of Obama’s drone based assassination program note that under the criteria used by his signature strike program, the clock kid would have been killed: Yesterday Barack Obama joined the groundswell of social media support for Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old high school student detained by the police for being seen with an electronic device and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182448"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}